A Pretty Long Post

By Jae-An Wang

While I'm writing this, I'm listening to some orchestral performances of Studio Ghibli music. It's super nostalgic and I really want to marathon some of the films when I have time (spring break, basically).The best thing ever, especially the violin solo (this and the opening to Nausicaa, that is): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4LrW5f4dyc

...I guess I have some explaining to do as to why it’s been so long since I’ve posted. I have excuses, except that time passes absurdly quickly when you’re in college. We’re already starting week 6 of the 2^nd quarter here, meaning that it’s precisely half way through the year for us. Isn’t that crazy? So many things have happened already that I feel bad for not documenting them. But better late than never, right…? Ahaha…

Rain is nice

Coming back from winter break was probably the smoothest transition I’ve had in years. Usually going back to school is the worst thing ever, since all I can ever think about is how nice it is to not do work. I guess this time I’d had enough of sitting around doing the rough equivalent of nothing, so starting classes it was like I never left. The transition was also eased by some greatly-welcomed rain! If you don’t know by now, I love the rain a lot. It makes most people try to head indoors, making the streets a bit quieter. The pattering of raindrops covers up the remaining noise and is really nice to listen to. It’s nice to look at. It’s pleasantly cool. I could go on. It’s supposed to rain this week, so I have that to look forward to.

Class

Hey now
College students starving
is a real issue >:(

The classes I’m taking this quarter: Physics (mechanics), Chemistry (round 2 as well as its corresponding lab), and Political Philosophy. Where do I start? Physics is…physics, I guess. It’s mostly easy to understand, and for a class that most people say is hell because of this professor, it feels like we’re going at a snail’s pace (in the five weeks we’ve had, we’ve only covered 3 topics). I like Corbin (prof), though. If you had to describe him in one word, it would probably have to be “brazen.” Next up is chem! There’s not much to talk about here; it’s basically just lots of memorization for a subject that’ll probably be mostly useless for me. The lab is kind of annoying; there’s a lot of precision involved (pipets and titrations are now two of my least favourite things in this world), and it’s hard to stay invested when the results are so predictable. Finally, philosophy…I’m not sure if I like the class or not. Sometimes it’s just excruciatingly boring, and the reading (The Republic, by Plato. Read it at least once in your life is what my professor said, and I would agree) isn’t too interesting either, but occasionally the professor will find her flow and talk about some really really interesting things. I can only sum it up like this: the class would be much better if it weren’t a class. It’s just fun to talk about these things without having to worry about mandatory stuff.

One of said “mandatory stuff” is a paper on a utopia, intentionally left quite vague. What are all of your opinions on what a utopia would look like? I’m totally not trying to fish for ideas since I have no idea what to write about or anything (cough coUgH cOuGH). In fact, I’ve already come up with something that I could potentially write about, in a devil’s advocate-y sort of way: the Matrix. I have a little thinking and tinkering to do, but the idea behind it is that a) people will always be in conflict as long as more than one person with free will exists, and b) withholding knowledge from the people isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as they can continue to be happy and content. Sounds evil and probably wrong (assuming any of this actually makes sense), but I was interested in using this paper to explore the boundaries of ethicality and how what we think is wrong can have little traditionally logical backing and possibly beneficial. Hey, Plato wasn’t against selectively breeding citizens, committing infanticide, or creating brainwashed children soldiers (read The Republic, things get kinda crazy) all for the good of the city. I’ll come out with something a little more substantial in a bit.

Rocket Things

It's so cool how if no one talks in the desert it's completely silent for miles
Also it's quite pretty out there

The Ares test fire setup.
Although they couldn't get
it to work, it looked really cool,
if not intimidating...

Anyhow, that’s enough on sociopathic society-building for now. The next thing that’s been a big part of life is rockets. Remember that rocket I spent a good chunk of last quarter building? I launched it! This was at the end of week 2, on the 20^th, I think. It was really quite an experience – we all arrived at the rocket lab at around 4 AM, so I ended up deciding not getting any sleep beforehand. Looking back, that probably wasn’t the best decision I’ve made. I managed to rest a little on the two-and-a-half hour car ride, but was tired for the rest of the day. Adding on to that, it was the desert in January, so it was cold. I know I’m being a spoiled little Californian, but there aren’t many places where you can drive for two hours and experience a 30-40 degree change in the temperature. Or maybe there are, I don’t know… I guess if you live near an active volcano and decide to drive in that would do the trick?

Sad reacts only

Anyhow, continuing the story, for some reason Caleb (our team lead) decided I would launch last since mine looked so well-made (actually what he said. I was proud). And so one by one, all the other small rockets launched, sending white plumes into the sky before gently descending on red parachutes. Finally, I went and put mine on the launch rail, before heading back to the ignition box. With the go-ahead, I muttered a quick prayer, held my breath, and pushed the button. The little rocket jumped up on the rail, but as everyone quickly looked to the skies to track it, we noticed that it was nowhere to be seen. In fact, it hadn’t left the launch rail at all, but instead stopped, as if it had hit an invisible wall, stalled, then ejected its bright red parachute perfectly in divine comedic fashion before dropping back to the bottom of the rail. I might have burst out laughing on the outside, but on the inside…my poor child…ahem. Turns out what had happened was that I had a faulty rocket motor, which had exploded and burst out a chunk of my body tube, causing to rocket to propel itself towards the rail and stay there. The rest of the day was spent mourning as the other parts of the rocket team attempted static fire testing for two of our competition motors.

Since Blogger is stupid and won't let me upload moderately large video files, you can watch my launch here (no viruses, I swear): https://youtu.be/i4DbUzjkNskv

Yes, that's a person on the side of the rocket.
No, don't ask me why.

One of the more eventful things that happened was when the rocket team from CS Long Beach did a test launch of their rocket, a ten-foot or so behemoth. It got no more than a few hundred feet of the ground before it began to tilt noticeably, at which point everyone simultaneously ducked inside their bunkers. After seeing a small explosion in the distance, we all came out to inspect the damage, chattering about the failure, when suddenly, almost out of nowhere, a large, bright red nose cone smacked into the ground just a few feet from the nearest person. It was quite sobering and somehow hilarious at the same time.

This reminds me of the Iwo Jima/Marine Corps War Memorial, in a way.

Getting back that night, I grabbed dinner before collapsing into bed, ending my 38.5 hours without sleep (me and a friend decided to keep track just for fun).

But the story doesn’t end there! There was another planned Rocket Project trip two weeks after on the 3^rd of February, so after a bit of consideration, I decided nearly on a whim to build a whole new rocket (yes, despite having taken over an entire quarter to build the first one) from scratch and launch it then! Never mind the fact that I had two midterms in the two days before the trip… Anyhow, I made it work (by that I mean basically finishing over half the new rocket the night before the launch).

Aaaaaargh.
Sorry for the bad lighting.

The second time going out was a bit better than the first. There was a lot of waiting, just like the first time, but there were also a lot of other groups launching their rockets, like Cal Poly, who had a rocket with a green exhaust flame! We’ll be competing against them in June, so that’s not the last we’ll see of them. It also wasn’t as cold, and people had brought donuts to share. You can never go wrong with donuts. My rockets on the other hand…if you didn’t guess already, my second rocket also failed! It got off the ground, after a bit of encouragement, but this time, the parachute didn’t deploy, and it ended up slamming into the desert sand at high speeds. It definitely made an impression, at least… The result was yet again quite comical; when we found the rocket, its nose cone, still miraculously intact but cracked on one side, had been shoved back into the body tube, kind of like how a turtle withdraws its head back into its shell, but 100 times more violently. After cutting off portions of carbon fiber body tube and extracting the nose, I managed to dig out the altimeter, which read 1,461 ft., just short of half a kilometer, which was my goal. I guess the funny part is that this time, in the design of the nose cone, I’d included to words “please don’t blow up” to be engraved into the inner part, to ward against a similar incident from last time. I guess it worked.

We also launched a test rocket to make sure we have a good parachute deployment system for the competition rocket! Everything went marvelously; you can see the ultra-cool footage from the camera we stuck inside (first for Rocket Project, ever!) here: https://youtu.be/0kbX0nKhqrY
Also, while we're at it, here's the static fire test footage as well: https://youtu.be/N7Eal8SVz30
Also, here's a pretty good pic of some Prometheus teammates.

we dun gudd

I’ve droned on for long enough about rocket things, I suppose. In other areas…well, there’s not a whole lot that’s new. I ended up getting sick from the 2^nd desert trip. I took my first round of midterms relatively well. The internet is a distraction, as always. I found several pure white hairs on my head. Things are the same as always. Same as always.

Random Things

I guess what’s special about this week is that it’ll be Valentine’s Day on Wednesday! I was reminded of this, when walking back to the dorm on Saturday, there was a large blackboard wall labeled with the prompt, “What’s the best way to recover from heartbreak?” Amongst all the standard answers of music, Netflix, hanging with friends, tubs of ice cream, or possibly all of the above, I noticed someone scrawling “Love is a social construct.” They noticed me; we made awkward eye contact, gave each other silent nods of approval, and moved on with our lives. It was a moment.

I know this is all the way from break but Santa atE A F***ING ELF

I’ll be going home this coming weekend for President’s Day Holiday, so you can probably expect another post. Probably. >:D