At this point I have lost all sense of time so this blog may be utterly unchronological. Anyways, I think I was supposed to go running with Dragos and Miranda but I slept through it and then was so tired at breakfast that I forgot to use a plate and put waffles directly on the tray. Also AP scores had been released that morning so there was definitely an aura of anticipation. Since we had a guest speaker in the afternoon, we only had the one morning lecture on rotational motion. The lecture ended with a heated class debate on the positions of sending robots versus humans to space. I think the most significant argument for the human side was that humans could become besties with the aliens. During the lecture we received packages. My mother sent me electrical gloves which was exactly what I needed. Lighting was pounding down from the sky and you never know when you’re gonna need to deflect the lighting with your handy dandy electrical gloves. Miranda and I wore them to lunch for storm protection and high fashion. We ate outside in the rain because its magic cleansing properties are good for the soul and for seasoning your food. Not to mention we had electrical gloves in case of lightning. We had until 2pm to be ready for the guest lecture, in business casual attire. We decided to spend this time playing super intense spikeball in our fancy clothes. They always give us like a 30 minute buffer window before we go to anything so we spent quite a bit of time in the planetarium lobby but I didn’t mind because it’s super cool in there–lots of glow in the dark, hands-on exhibits. We ended up playing a game of down by the banks where you slap the hand of the person next to you with increasing force. Let’s just say that by the end, several people had bruises on their hands. Our guest speaker was Fran Bagenall, whose research focuses on magnetic fields of planets, planetary plasmas and the interaction of planetary objects. Through the immersive experience of the planetarium she told us about the research done with Nasa’s Juno spacecraft that collects data while orbiting Jupiter—everything from Jupuiters structure, storm patterns, and moons. During the lecture Juno actually had its 43rd flyby of Jupiter. They are expecting to get the closest pictures of Io yet. Nasa has a forum for art made out of pictures of Jupiter. My favorite was the one with cats with laser eyes. At some point she played a montage of pretty Jupiter pictures with background lullaby music so some sleep deprived people ahem fell asleep but their nap ended abruptly with a slap. After the guest lecture we began the struggle on our Least Squares Plate Reduction(LSPR) code which was interrupted by dinner. At dinner we generated the wonderful idea of slapping each other with tortillas. So we got tortillas and smuggled them out of the dining hall and had a tortilla war. Because #nofoodwaste we fed the ducks and we attempted to skip a tortilla like a rock–successfully. We then went back to the observatory to finish grinding out LSPR code that determines the right ascension and declination of our asteroid from surrounding stars. It went ok until debugging where I was severely bullied for thinking parentheses were just ‘curvy brackets’ and my butload of syntax erors that followed. The only reason I didn’t lose my mind was because there was a squishy minion you punched to make it turn green so that was stress relief asf. We also made plans for a white tie minions movie event. Observations were canceled again because of the clouds so after our code worked we went back to the dorms to play spikeball.
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Charlotte M.–directionally challenged, token sophomore, stereotypical cali girl.