Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Imagine, Looking Forward to first Day of Class.....

First day back in class and it was GREAT! 

In Chemistry class, we kicked off the day with a titration lab. I'm extremely glad I took AP Chem because we were expected to learn titrations in one weekend, and I found it to be one of the more difficult subjects we covered in class! While we didn't have a guest speaker today, our professor surrprised us with a little something he "cooked up" so to speak. Liquid nitrogen ice cream!

After the group of hungry students quickly finished off the first batch, he allowed us students to try our hand at making the ice cream. For the most part, it turned out extremely well. There was one case where a TA overdid the liquid nitrogen and accidentally produced a snack not unlike dippin dots! As it turns out, dippin dots are made by flash freezing the cream mixture with liquid nitrogen (much like we were doing.) The cream freezes into nuclei and is much denser than regular ice cream because very little air gets mixed in. The fact that we made dippin dots by mistake just goes to show how some very unlikely scientific discoveries are accidents!

Later in the day, we met with the Columbia admissions officer for our area! It was very informative, as he went around and talked about each of the majors we were interested in. It was very generous of him to take the time to meet us.

Immediately after I met up with a group to see my first Broadway show, The Lion King. It was incredible. The music, the costumes, the stage, everything was terrific and came together as an amazing performance. About half way through, I -- without even noticing the transition -- suspended all disbelief and felt as though I was witnessing a true story unfold right before my eyes. There's really no way to describe how incredibly moved and amazed I was by the show.

Also, my sunburn has improved significantly since I got burned on Sunday. Did I ever mention that I forgot to put sunscreen on my back at the beach? Well, if I did, it's a lot better and should be healed by tomorrow.

Anyways, tomorrow is where I'm off to right now. Time to sleep. I'll get a camera so I can start posting some pictures and turn this into something that's somewhat attractive. Good night!

2 comments:

  1. "Lion King" is really a wonderful show. It's been here a long time. I think I saw it at least three years ago.

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  2. Jamie,

    Sometimes some of our more important discoveries are discovered by accident.

    Many years back a scientist was doing his things with microwaves. He happened to have a chocolate bar in his shirt pocket and when he flipped the switch to emit the microwaves the chocolate bar quickly turned to liquid in his pocket. True story, Jamie. And that's how we got microwave ovens.

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