Week 4: Ahoy Matey!

Friday, C and I went out to NIST, where I will be doing the other half of my internship. We met with Mary, my new mentor and talked about how we were going to incorporate the SOCK with the rest of the program. We decided that we would do a demo show for the teachers and then have them build an optical Theremin. I also met Brian, who one of the teachers from a previous summer institute and he has returned to NIST this summer to work with a scientist for a few weeks. We left NIST at about 1:30 to head back to ACP so we could finalize our supply list and send it to Mary. That evening I went to the DC temple to do sealings. It was really nice. There is a free shuttle that runs from the metro station to the temple.

Saturday, I got up early to go to Eastern Market for their Farmer's Market. They had beautiful produce. I got a carton of tomatoes, squash, peas, strawberries, blueberries, and 5 peaches for a little over $20, which I thought was great. I went home and Jamie cut my hair before I headed off to a Nats (Nationals) baseball game with Julie. The game started at noon, so it was hotter than anything. It was fun though. I'll be honest; I mostly go to baseball games for the food and company, especially since nothing usually happens. The rest of the afternoon and evening was pretty uneventful. I mostly hung out around the house, and by that I mean I read a lot more of the Hunger Games. F, R, D, Dy, J and I decided to go out that night to a French Music concert. After walking into Georgetown for it, we realized that it wasn't outside, and we were too hot to go into a building especially with the number of people outside, trying to get in. We went home and I went to bed.

Sunday, I went to church like usual and then I went out to Julie’s to have a picnic with her sister and roommates and friends. Because it had been raining earlier that day, we ended up just having a dinner at Julie’s place.  We had barbecue chicken, fruit, quinoa salad, and brownies and cake. It was great and I ate so much!

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday worked on finalizing the order list for the SOCK and work on writing up instructions. We ordered the materials, but decided we had to scrap the laser harp because it was going to cost too much and we aren't sure we could build it in time. We do have more types of sensors like pressure sensors and bend sensors.

Tuesday, R, J, D, C and I grabbed a bite to eat before heading on the Boomerang Pirate Cruise of the Potomac River. It was two hours of fun, although it is surprising how warm the city is even after sunset, so it was a little sticky and hot. We had a lot of fun and got to see some of the beautiful monuments.

Wednesday after work I went straight to the National Museum of Natural History. It was really neat. I saw dinosaurs, a giant squid, a whale, a giant sloth and the hope diamond, to name a few. It became more fun once I started texting my friends and sister about some of the fun facts I learned. Here are some of my fun facts.

• North Atlantic Right Whales reach about 140,000 lbs which is equal to 12 African elephants or 10,000 kitty cats.
• Snarge is the name of bird remains scraped from aircraft
• It took researchers over a decade to sequence the DNA of Neanderthals because they were contaminated by bacteria and the researcher's DNA
• If you could type 360 letters in a minute for eight hours a day, it would take you nearly 100 years to type all the letters in a human genome.
• The world's larges flawless quartz sphere is 106.75 lbs and 12.9 inches in diameter
• The Portuguese diamond glows bright blue in UV light.
• One of the owners of the Hope Diamond, Evalyn Walsh McLean, used to keep the diamond beneath the sofa cushions.
• In the early 18th century, an ivory woolly mammoth tusk trade began. In the 250 years since, it is estimated that 46,750 mammoth tusks have been removed and sold. That is an insignificant fraction of those still buried.
• If you could connect the microscopic strands of DNA in all your cells, they would reach to the sun and back nearly 600 times.

I had been craving Wendy’s for a few days, so I got Wendy’s for dinner afterword.

Thursday was my first day at NIST. The first order of business was getting my badge and my computer account set up. It wasn't until almost the end of the day that I realized that I had the wrong name on my badge. They spelled my last name as Quiet, sounds like a subtle message to me. I had to leave work early to go to the reception with the development board for SPS. It was really fun to meet with the members of the development board.

Friday was a busy day. I worked on ordering parts and Mary and I went through the schedule for the Summer Institute. I also left early because we had a dinner with the SPS executive committee. After dinner we all headed downtown to see Capital Steps. It is a musical comedy show about politics. They make fun of both democrats and republicans, so it is completely offensive to everyone. It was really funny and a very fun night.

Week 3: Laser Light Show in the Cafeteria

So, last Friday, after work, all the interns, except F, who hadn’t arrived yet, went to the Symphony. We decided to eat dinner before because Dy’s friend suggested a Chinese restaurant in the basement of the Watergate hotel. The Watergate is across the street from the Kennedy Center where the symphony was. Sadly, we got to the restaurant and discovered that it had closed down the week before, so we grabbed some pizza before heading over to the concert.

The concert was the National Symphony Orchestra with David Hardy on the cello. I got to sit on the side with the harp. I couldn’t see super well, but the harpist is amazing. Her name is Dotian Levalier and she studied with Carlos Salzedo and Marilyn Costello. That’s amazing! She has played for the National symphony for 44 years and she is retiring this year. It reminded me of how much I love playing harp. I hope I can find a harp shop in DC where I can go play a harp sometime.

I went to bed early Friday night so that I could meet up with my friend, Julie, in the morning.  She came in from the West Falls Church Metro Station and I hopped on her same car at Foggy Bottom at about 8:30 so we could go to Easter Market. We got BlueBucks, or blueberry buckwheat pancakes, which are apparently famous. They were really good. We then walked around the market. There was so much fresh produce; I wanted to buy it all! We were heading to a museum after, so I couldn't buy anything.

We decided to walk from Eastern Market to the Newseum. We walked past the Capitol Building and the Library of Congress. We also walked past a soap car derby down Capitol Hill. It was super cool to watch. We got to the Newseum a little before the other interns. It was a really cool experience, but it is quite pricey. I don’t know that it is worth going to again. They do have a really cool hall of the front page of newspapers on important days around the world. They also had a really cool exhibit on the FBI and another one on 9/11.

We were getting hungry, so Julie, A, R and I went to the Museum of the Native American Indian and had lunch. They have a cafeteria with traditional Native American foods. I had salmon, with a corn and cherry sauce. It was delicious. We grabbed ice cream at the ice cream truck outside before walking down the national mall. A little way down, we found a metro station and headed home, where we chilled for the rest of the evening.

Sunday, I went to church, like usual. The air conditioning was still broken, so it was sweltering the whole time, but I felt more included this week. R met me after church and he played some piano on the church pianos. It was beautiful! He is an amazing pianist, he could be professional. After he played for a while, I went home and skyped my family. Oh, and our final intern arrived, F. It will be fun to get to know her in the next few weeks.

Monday started my third week of work. What? How did that happen? We had our first outreach on Tuesday at Tuckahoe Elementary, so Monday was our day to prepare. It was midafternoon when we were starting to feel ready for the three, one hour classes of 40 third graders the next morning. Then Toni got a message from our Tuckahoe Elementary contact. Because it was the last week of school, they only had time for one hour with all 120 third graders. Eeeek! Some of the activities we were planning on doing would be chaos with that large of a group.

We had to decide if we still wanted to do the outreach. We decided we wanted to and we modified our activity, so that instead of measuring the length of the room with different sized sticks, they would measure the lengths of equally long ropes. We kept the LED vs. Laser demonstration we had used before and the laser-sound demonstration. It was a little thrown together, but we felt like we could pull it off when we left on Monday.

Tuesday, we arrived early to set up the cafeteria. R, J, CA, C, Toni and I did the outreach. It went really well. I was surprised at how excited the kids were about measuring rope. They were really smart kids and I saw multiple methods for measuring. It was great. They were very involved and I think they had a good time and learned a lot. It could have been better organized on our part, but I was really happy with how well it went.

Toni took us out to eat at Busboys and Poets, which was really good. It is very hip and quite delicious. Our server, Noel, was super awesome and we shared quite a few laughs with her over the course of the meal. The rest of the afternoon and week was spent working on pricing and models for the rest of our kits.

On Monday evening, we decided to get some Mexican food. Clearly, I can’t read a map, because it told me that the food was only a mile away from us, but it was more like two. Oops! It was pretty good though, and it was fun to bond with J, F, D, and R. It was weird because we were the only patrons in the restaurant, which was a little unnerving.

Tuesday evening, I went to institute. The BYU Barlow Center is really close to my dorms, so I walked there and had a nice lesson. I think it is really good for me to involve myself in more church activities. The rest of the week has been pretty chill.

I went to work early on Wednesday because I wanted to stop at the bank before it closed. It was really nice to have the office to myself to get a few things done. I think I will come in earlier a few more times in the next few days. On the way home from the bank, I was stopped by a man from England named Gionne (I think?) who was talking to me about donating to a charity to help children go to school and to have better food and water. He was really nice and it seems like a really good charity, but I am a little uncomfortable with signing up for something so spontaneously. It was a pleasure to talk to him.

I went home from work early on Thursday because I wasn’t feeling well, which is a bummer. Hopefully, I am not catching something and just need a little more sleep. Anyway, it has been a fun week. I am really excited for the adventures to come. Pretty soon it will be July and I will be working at NIST. Crazy!

Week 1: How do you make scrambled eggs?

This week has been quite a whirlwind. I flew out to DC on Sunday and took a taxi to GWU dorms. In celebration of my arrival, the heavens opened and it started to pour. In the sixty feet it took to get from the cab to the Amsterdam hall, where I checked-in to my room, my jacket and suit cases were soaked through. Luckily, in the time that it took to check-in, the rains stopped and I walked the four blocks to my new dorm room. I spent the rest of the evening unpacking, before my roommate N came home and we started to get to know each other.

Monday was our first day of work. Orientation was quite a wealth of knowledge. We had the privilege of eating lunch with Dr. John Mather, a Nobel Laureate.  It was really interesting to talk to him about science policy, education and his work at NASA.  After our lunch, we headed off to our different assignments. Toni took C, AA and myself out to NIST, where I met my supervisor for the other part of my internship, Mary Satterfield. We also took a tour of the NIST museum and some of the labs, which was really cool. That evening, I met up with a friend of mine who was in town for a wedding and we had dinner.

Tuesday was our first real day of work. When we arrived, Toni quickly got C, J  and me started on building a laser sound demo for the outreach on Sunday. It is so sweet! The music player modulates the intensity of the laser, which is shot at a solar cell. The solar cell turns the light back into a signal which is played by the speaker. C and I started going through the boxes of old SOCK kits later that day. After work, I went out to Virginia to meet up with an old college friend. We had dinner and then she kindly took me shopping. Now I have a pillow, yay!

Wednesday, C and I worked on a second demo for the outreach. This uses diffraction glasses to look at the spectra of LEDs vs a laser. We used poster board to create a display. After work, we all went out to dinner and told hilariously bad jokes. I really like the other interns, and we have a blast hanging out together.

Thursday, we worked on finishing up everything for Sunday. We all left early to attend the Einstein Fellows Poster Session and Reception at the Russell Senate Office Building. The Russell Building is beautiful and being by all the senator offices reminded me of the great city I am living in. It was really nice to talk to some of the educators who participated in the fellowship. It reminded me of why I am excited to go into education research.

With Einstein.
 back (l to r): R, AA, Einstein , me, N
front: C, CA

Second try.
Back: N, C, A, Einstein, R, CA, AA
front: me

Friday, we got everything else for the demo show loaded up and ready to go. We also started brainstorming for the SOCK. For the SOCK this year we are partnering with NIST and our focus is on meters, sensors and detectors. We'll see what we come up with...

This evening we have plans to attend a free concert in the park and continue exploring the city. This week has been a amazing, as evidence by the lack of sleep. There is so much to do in DC! I am excited for the work and the adventures this summer.

Week 2: Starships were made to Fly

Friday we ended up not going to the outdoor concert because it was raining so much. Instead we went to an Ethiopian Restaurant called Etete. They had these really good appetizers that were like Indian Samosas. We got them for free when we order an entrée because of our InternsROCK cards. Then we headed to the Krispy Kreme on DuPont Circle because it was National Doughnut Day! Doughnuts always taste better when they are free! N, my roommate, left before we went to dinner to spend the weekend at home, so I had the whole room to myself!

At Etete (l to r): CA, C, R, me, D, J, A

Saturday, R made us scrambled eggs for breakfast because of an ongoing discussion about what scrambled eggs are. A few interns say that any additions to scrambled eggs make it an omelet. I disagree, but whatever. After getting ready, we went to Target to pick up a few things. I decided to buy a mattress pad because our beds are a little lacking. We chilled in the afternoon before going to get dinner at a Mediterranean place. AA was in the city looking for housing, so we met up with her to eat before she went home.

We headed home to hang out and we played a few games including the three object game, and How's yours. J, D and R had bought some alcohol earlier, so they were drinking Whiskey-Cokes and taking Whiskey shots. D had never been drunk before, and so they (D and J?) decided he should get drunk. We knew he hit that point when he said, “I can’t feel my tongue.” Then he promptly started playing with his tongue. He wanted to do summersaults and started doing push-ups. He kept apologizing to me that he was drunk. I don’t know why he was feeling so guilty about it. It was making me a little uncomfortable only because he was saying things he would never normally say because he was inhibited and therefore it was a vulnerable situation. I left because it was getting late anyway and I hadn’t been getting enough sleep.

Sunday, D brought us apology doughnuts from Krispy Kremes. I got ready for church and then took the Metro up to the DC 2^nd Singles Ward. The other interns left at about the same time as me for the outreach at the STEM fair. Church was good, but SUPER packed. The ward gets huge in the summer because of all the interns. I am not sure if I am going to go to that ward or to the ward in Maryland that Amy goes to. Amy works at SPS too. She just got back from her mission to Malaysia and starts grad school on Monday, so today (Friday) is here last day.  Sad.

I headed home to change my clothes before taking the Metro out to West Falls Church to meet up with my friend, Julie who lives there. She invited me to have dinner with her and some friends. They made pizza on the Barbeque, which was super cool and delicious. We also had homemade ice cream. It was fun to hang out with Julie; her sister, Jen; Jen’s husband, Mike; her roommate, April; and two friends, Tim and Joe. I then went home and went to bed. I heard from the interns that night, that the outreach went well, which is good news. We also got a new intern that night named Dy from Idaho.

Monday started a new work week. This week we are really focused on brainstorming ideas for the SOCK. We really need to figure out what we are going to do for the kit this year. It is quite a difficult subject because it is involved in every aspect of science. We spend Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday doing a lot of research and brainstorming. Thursday we built an optical Theremin which has been our inspiration for the laser harp we hope to build. Today, we are working on putting together the demo show we will be doing next week at Tuckahoe Elementary School on Tuesday. Eeek! It’s so soon!

A, F (we take pictures
with the missing intern), J, D and myself

Monday, since we had a new intern, Amy, Elizabeth and I went out to lunch with Dy at Noodles. It was delicious and fun to get to know them. After work, we went straight to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum right after work. J and I met up with D and A there, which was really fun. D and A work at NASA, so they know much more about space than J and I do. It was fun having a little tour from them. I especially enjoyed D's fun facts.

J and D in spacesuits

Me and A in spacesuits

Later, the interns went to visit a bar using our internsROCK cards. I decided to stay home because I was wet and tired. It turns out that most of the interns didn’t go in because some of them were under 21. J and D did, and a few cheap drinks later and J was drunk. Luckily, D got J home safely. The other interns went to get Thai food.

J and A eating ice cream 

Tuesday night, we went to McFadden’s for $5 burgers. It was my first time eating at a bar and since it was fairly early, it wasn’t that different. After, we decided to walk into Georgetown since we were super close. Georgetown is really nice and it was fun to explore that part of the city. We got some Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. It was delicious! Although, sadly they didn’t have my favorite flavors (Everything but the… and Half Baked). A taught us this game that his friends play called cut and paste. Basically, if someone says something that would be funnier said out of context, they someone else can say copy and then anytime in the next 24 hours say paste, and they have to say what was copied. It is clearly going to cause much hilarity the rest of the summer.

Dy and CA with their Ice cream

D in a little chair

Me with my Ben & Jerry's Shake

Wednesday was the ACP (American Center of Physics) summer picnic. They fed us picnic food and then there was a talent show. Elizabeth sang and did a fabulous job. All the performances were really good. Two of the employees did Morris dancing, which I had never seen before. It was really interesting.

That night, we grabbed dinner at Sweet Green before finding the outdoor movie at NoMa. They were playing The Italian Job, which I had never seen. Since it had been raining, some of the grass was a little wet, but A, AA, CA, R and I decided to stay. I found Samantha Williams, so we watched the movie with her and her friends. It was so good to see her! The best thing about my friendship with Samantha is that we can pick up right where we left off even if it has been a few years.

It is crazy how fast this week has gone. I am starting to have a hard time keep track of the days. I am having so much fun though.

Reading

I have been trying to read more, and I think my commute to work on the metro will help this summer. I like lists, so I thought I would fill this out.

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong– Sebastian Faulks
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

16!!! Way to go semi-literate self. I do have a goal to read more of these. Let's see what I can do.