More Musings

I love it when you're rushing out the door in the morning and don't have time to think about what you're wearing, so you just put together a new combination of clothes and it turns out to be an amazing outfit and you keep using that outfit combo for many months afterwards. 

Musings

• At the gym the other day, I saw a couple walking around, doing every weight machine together.  Overkill, don't you think?
• While we're on the topic of the gym, I always dread the onslaught of people that Jan 1 brings.  Last year at the Bally's in Philly, most of them were gone by March or so.  I just hope it doesn't mean all my exercise classes will be insanely full.  
• A lot of students here at Columbia (both undergrad and grad) don't have Microsoft Office on their computer.  So when I'm trying to work with them and e-mail files back and forth, they come in these weird file formats from OpenOffice or whatever.  Really?  You can't pay the extra couple hundred dollars to get Microsoft Office, which is basically a prerequisite for any type of educational/business environment?  

That's a picture of the Columbia gym.  The track goes around in a loop on the upper level, over looking the court below, and each of the 3 floors you see has cardio equipment and weights.

Done!

I just submitted my last fellowship application! 5 for 5.  NSF, EPA, SMART, NDSEG, and Hertz.  It was a lot of work.  It reminded me of two similar periods before in my life:  when I was trying to take classes, do my senior thesis, and apply for jobs during my senior year fall at Princeton; and last fall, when I was trying to work full-time at my consulting job and apply for graduate schools and study for the GRE at the same time.  It's tough, but somehow I manage it.  

End-of-Year Lists

I'm a sucker for all of these end-of-year lists that are coming out right around now.  "Top 10 Worst Cars of 2010"  "Top 10 Best Inventions of 2010"  "Top 10 Worst Ideas of 2010"  I love these simple neat little lists. They usually say a lot about what happened this year, and even more, it reminds me of stuff that happened all the way back in January or February that I've forgotten about by now. I like them even more when they're in magazines, because then you get lots of colorful graphics and charts and pictures.  : )

Somehow my professor managed to make waste management funny...

So in my Industrial Ecology class today, we were talking about sustainable waste management.  Trash.  Pretty boring.  So I don't know if you've heard of RecycleBank, but it's a start-up that basically rewards people with gift cards, etc. based on how much they recycle.  My professor started it with 2 other guys, but then he backed out to finish his PhD.  Now the company is hugely successful, in 300 cities, and he loudly regretted in class his decision to choose the PhD over the start-up.  : /     Anyway, the main point of the story is that they did a case study in Philadelphia when the start-up was just beginning.  As part of this, they literally went through the garbage of everyone in the neighborhood, picking through it and categorizing it.  And my professor showed us a picture that characterizes perfectly why America has a waste problem:  it was a picture of a skillet, with 3 burned grilled cheeses on it, that had been thrown out. When the owner burned the grilled cheese, instead of just scraping it off and cleaning it, he just threw the whole darn thing out in the trash.  !!!  hilarious. Silly silly America : p


P.S. I really want to see "Waiting for Superman", the new documentary about the public school system in America.  Anyone want to join me?

Reading and Writing

So whenever I find myself taking notes/making an outline of a scientific paper, reference article or book chapter, I always think to myself that life would be so much easier if the author just published his notes directly.  Seriously, the worst part of writing is taking your notes and putting them in paragraph form, and the worst part of reading is taking the paragraphs and boiling them down to the important bullet points.  So we really should just skip that whole middle step of pretty-looking paragraphs and just exchange the bullet-point outlines, from author to reader. 

How do I end up with so many dirty glass cups?

Seriously! I only have 3 meals a day.  The washing machine must take the mismatched socks and magically transform them into dirty glasses!