The day was supposed to start with me walking out of the observatory, just finishing taking a couple of pictures of our asteroid or maybe a cool supernova. That’s not how it started. Instead of leaving SBO at 12 am, I started the day running to SBO at 8:50.
Observations were canceled for us because of bad weather so I decided to go to bed early (if you don’t know already, SSP participants are sleep deprived and every minute of sleep counts). When I went to bed, I didn’t put my phone in the charger (typical) so my alarm didn’t sound. My roommate usually wakes up before me and heads over for breakfast too so I guess I was lucky that day that the (normally annoying) streams of light through the window actually got me up.
I know, it was a great start to the day. At least I got over 8 hours of sleep.
Luckily, it got better from there. This morning, we had my favorite lecture by far. It went into a bit about Kepler’s laws and orbits, but what made this lecture especially fun was the stories behind all of this. Unlike yesterday, where we spent most of one of our lectures deriving a formula, today, I learned some interesting facts and stories (+ some things about rockets and engineering that I especially found cool). Here’s a list if you wanna learn a little too:
- Newton was an insecure guy
- There was a horse named Hans that could supposedly add numbers (not really, but it seemed like he could)
- Tycho Brahe didn’t have a telescope and still had crazy accurate data over 30 years
- He did this with huge protractor like things, like 15 feet across
- Basically he was an engineer
- He also lost a nose in a sword fight which was apparently the norm back then
- Brahe realized that he might be able to find the orbit of a planet from his data and tries to do so
- Brahe hired mathematician Keplar to “help him out” but doesn’t let Kepler near the data since Brahe wanted the credit for solving the orbit of a planet
- Brahe dies and Kepler is happy
- Log tables and slide rules were things before calculators (as recent as the 70’s :O)
- Newton was a professor who figured out a lot about calculus and physics by age 22, but didn’t publish until 42 when his friends convinced him to do it before someone stole credit (remember, he was insecure)
- Rockets have fuel for only a short amount of time, maybe minutes… they need to get into a certain velocity by then if they want to orbit, and use other planets as slingshots if they want to go further
Anyways, I found a lot of that lecture pretty interesting. I personally didn’t feel very tired, which was very unusual. I will say though, that didn’t hold true for everyone. The sleep deprivation is finally catching up. Usually, we might see one head down on a desk. Today, there were at least 8 during our break. I’m not even kidding.
Other than the lecture, the day was pretty eventful too. During break, Youjia tried using the pens she got from Pearl Street yesterday and let me try them as well. The pens were perfect timing actually. She was working on an awesome tshirt design that had all our faces on it. The pens definitely helped with that. Actually, I was also working on my t-shirt design. Noticing that she had a really cool front and I had a cool back, we decided to combine our t-shirt ideas. I think it was a good idea and people seem to like it. Hopefully we win and we come home with the hoodies.
Since coming to SSP, I had a lot of things to finish that I just hadn’t. I will say, today was a pretty productive day. I finished the PSet, actually answered the additional questions this time, went for a run, and did laundry.
When I went to do my laundry, I went with Youjia. It was kind of funny because we went upstairs and passed by Marcus. Then, we decided that actually we wanted to go down and took the elevator to the basement before Marcus got there. When he came down the stairs to the basement, he was extremely confuzzled because we were originally going up stairs. It was funny since we did something similar with the field trip yesterday where we reached the dorms way faster than Marcus, who was at the front of the group. We told him it was teleportation. Really, we just separated from the group when we got to campus and went the shorter way through the back entrance of the dorm 😀
For the most part after that, we were at SBO finishing our work. Our observations got canceled again. I wasn’t complaining though. That meant more sleep for me 🙂 There’s always tomorrow right? One thing that was interesting though was that we got to start Word Assassins. Laura came up with the game where basically you have a target and you try getting that target to say a word. If you say the word, you’re out. For instance, if I get Ben to say Avocado, Ben’s out (This is just an example, this isn’t my real target and word… probably).
Somehow we already had quite a few assassinations, with Cass getting 2 people out on the first night. I still haven’t gotten anyone out though.
Overall, today was pretty eventful even though we didn’t go on any field trips or anything. SSP somehow always has you busy doing something and there’s always something interesting happening. Anyways, I’m going to get some sleep. Tomorrow’s another long and exciting day. And I need to be alert in case someone comes targeting me for assassins.
Signing off,
Muktha
Hi there! My name is Muktha and I’m from Connecticut. I like biking, watching Marvel movies/shows, and 3D printing in my free time. In college, I’m planning to major in engineering, and I’m so happy to be at SSP right now and meeting a bunch of cool people 😀
