Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Hello Internet! Its been a while. I last blogged on EA Decision Day, 12/17/2011. But I actually wrote that post on the 16th, because on the morning of the 17th, when it went live, I was on a plane to Denver with my dad and two brothers for a few days of skiing at Breckenridge. It was kinda nice: In fact you may have seen this movie starring us. NBD brah. After returning from Colorado I went back up to New Hampshire to spend the holidays with my family. As Ive posted before, I come from a small town in the woods, a place where people generally agree that almost anything can be improved if it is shot out of a cannon and/or set on fire. Ma! Pa! Big news from the big city! This year, my uncle, who hosts our annual New Years Eve party, and is known by local fire rangers for his 512 cubic foot brush pile blaze: decided he wanted a little something extra. See, last year I had brought the potato cannon a few friends of mine and I had made back in college. It was made out of schedule 40 PVC and would shoot a potato roughly an eighth of a mile with an extremely satisfying report: This year, my uncle Ken wanted to bring back the cannon, but with a firing range. In order to do that, though, we needed a safer, more accurate cannon, which could be handled by just about anyone, and which could reliably fire with a known and controlled rate of speed. But I didnt know how to make these, as my education in engineering potato cannons never progressed beyond the wildly unsafe and generally illegal combustion variety. Enter Jack Queeney. Jack is an MIT freshman. Hes one of my academic advisees this year, and he builds potato cannons. Extremely epic potato cannons. I told Jack about our plan, and he sent some helpful tips and schematics to my uncle and I. The key tip was to build a compressed air potato cannon, so that we could precisely control the pressure to make sure it stayed within a safe range and ejected the potatoes at a safe speed. Ken worked with glee over the coming weeks to assemble the cannon, test it for safety and reliability, and scavenge the town dump (the social center of some New Hampshire towns) for stuff for the firing range And so came New Years Eve night, New Hampshire style: A snack bar, made out of wooden construction pallets, old window trim, surplus lumber, and Christmas lights A projector with the Bruins game. An enormous bonfire (those logs in there are actually trees, and Im standing a good way back).   And of course, the main event: Heres my dad taking the first shot, with a rundown of the safety features and design performed by Kens friend Chris: When the world ends and the zombies come as the Mayans foretold, Im heading straigth to Kens. Somehow I think hell be just fine. And Ill have a place to watch the (zombie) Bruins. I hope you all had a similarly excellent holiday season. Im going to head home and finish unpacking. By the end of the week Ill be reading the first round of Regular Action apps. I cant wait! Happy New Year yall Happy New Year! Happy new year everyone! Im hanging out at my sister and brother-in-laws new house, enjoying the snow and festivities. (By the way, for those who always seem surprised when they find out, Michigan is on the EASTERN time zone! :) ) Ive made my new years resolution to try and work out more this year whats your new years resolution? Best wishes for a safe and happy new year! Happy New Year! Happy New Year! It’s hard to believe that it’s already 2007. 2006 was the year of YouTube, iPods, gas for $3.50 a gallon, record-high temperature, Wiis and PS3s, the World Cup, penguins and pandas, eight planets, and changes of power on Capitol Hill. At MIT, we learned more about black holes, established the new MIT-Madrid study abroad program, learned more about the brain, designed better wheelchairs, created molecular libraries to understand cancer and disease, studied addiction, made plans for a new graduate dorm, pioneered a center for synthetic biology, designed fuel-efficient cars of the future, observed subatomic particles, won Nobel prizes, proposed changes to the undergraduate curriculum, began large scale genetic sequencing, and more! Check out http://web.mit.edu/spotlight/lookback-2006/ for a look back at the spotlights. So what’s in store for 2007? Any predictions? Any hopes? Comment away! Happy New Year! Hellooo I’ve been home for winter break for almost two weeks, basking entirely in food and sleep. A few days after I got home, the “Snowpocalypse of (dec.) 2010 hit. New Jersey was smack dab in the middle of it. Where I live, we got 2 feet of snow overnight. The blizzard crippled transportation in the Northeast for a good few days And I was pretty much snowed-in Butbutbut a few days later, sledding! Pulling that sled up the hill many times has literally been the only exercise I’ve had this break. That’s okay lot’s of physical activity planned forIAP; stay tuned. ANYWAYS, Good luck to those finishing regular decision apps! And Happy New Year! c: