Obligatory New England Trip Report: Apple Picking

My parents visited me a couple weeks ago, and Mom and I did that New England thing and went apple picking.  Here are some pictures!

This is Mom:

And I have this apple on my head for some reason:

One of the issues with apple picking is that each year, you learn the names of all the apples and then you forget them by the next time October comes around.  If I write them here, then I can check next year.  This time, I learned that "empire" apples were the tasty ones, with "mutsu" apples coming in second.  Here I am with a tasty empire tree!

Empire apples are possibly the prettiest apples:

And they grow on trees, looking like big grapes!

There were so many apples that they were just lying everywhere in the paths:

Here's an especially pretty one.  It was especially tasty, as well:

That's about it for apple pictures, but here is a cloud.

 

Cheers from New England!

A Scholarly Interlude

My life has been largely consumed with graduate school lately.  Tonight, I will post some nice images from recent work.  Part of being a grad student, perhaps, is recognizing that most people don't care about the details of what you're doing... so I will post these mostly without comment and just invite you to look and enjoy. :-)

Here are two pretty graphs that Dad made for me for a homework problem:

Here are some graphs related to something I made up called the Shatner Equation (named after the man himself, of course):

And here is an image from lab.  These are two worm embryos, one in a very early stage and one in a very late stage.  The embryo on the right is an embryo just completing it's very first cell division.  The remnants of the spindle structure are still visible.  The embryo on the left is a fully-formed larva, just about to hatch.

*yawn*

Okay, time to go get some sleep.

Trip Report: Hang Gliding Photos

Last weekend, I went hang gliding and posted about it, but there were no photos!  Consequently, the post was perhaps somewhat boring.  The reason I didn't have photos last week was for a very retro reason -- my photos were on a physical roll of film!  I had to go to the store and drop it off and come back later, and now I have a bunch of little pieces of paper with images on them!

But, since it's 2010, I also got a CD with the pictures.  Here is the first one, on the ground before lift-off:

That's me and the tandem guy who kept me from dying!  The line in front of the glider is attached to an ultralight plane.

Here's a photo taken shortly after lift-off:

You can see the hang gliding center in the background.  The big green thing behind the glider is a hill that's used for practicing.  I managed to crash a glider on that very same hill just hours before this picture was taken!  And if you look closely, at the top of the hill and over to the left is a little white house.  There's a wooden bench up there where you can sit in the semi-shade and see a beautiful view of the October leaves.  That might be my new happy place.

Anyway, this stage of the flight was the scariest for me.  I was getting used to the idea that I was just hanging in a sling.  Sure, there were leg loops in the harness, but it wasn't as snug as I would have expected.

Here's the first picture that was taken after the ultralight plane detached itself from the glider:

We're above New Hampshire here, but across the river in the background is Vermont:

Getting up to this elevation took some skill, so the tandem guy took care of it.  Once we were gliding, though, I took the helm.  Here I am, learning to fly in circles:

Here's a photo that I only post because you can see the happy bench location that I liked sitting in in the lower left corner:

So...I dunno, here is a selection of my favorite shots.  Hang gliding montage!

 I'm pretty sure the following shot was taken during the most fun part of the hang gliding trip, when we stalled the glider and let it fall, then sped it up to rise back out of the dive.  That was great. :-)

Here's a photo with a good view of the funny bag that the tandem pilot was in:

Near the end, we got a photo with the landing strip in the background:

Hang gliding was peaceful.  It's very different from sky diving.  Sky diving is crazy and surreal, because you are falling out of the sky straight towards the ground.  Hang gliding is more like being a bird, soaring over the landscape.  You can even catch thermals, like birds do, and ride the updraft.  The tandem instructor once stayed up for 6 hours by catching thermals!

Another interesting difference between hang gliding and sky diving: with sky diving, after trying a tandem, I really wanted to try it without a person attached to me.  Probably because I wanted to get the most surreal experience possible by jumping out of a perfectly functional plane of my own free will, without a tandem instructor pushing me.  With hang gliding, however, I had no such desire.  I was happy to have a tandem instructor deal with the technical difficulties of navigating the glider up to altitude and landing the glider at the end.  Both of those parts of the flight looked very difficult.  With a tandem glide, I got to skip the stress and just enjoy being a bird!

Trip Report: Hang Gliding

Yesterday, I woke up at 5am to go hang gliding for the first time.  It was early enough that I spent about a minute staring at my beeping alarm clock, not comprehending what it was or how to deal with it (in my half-awake state, I tried to take its Fourier transform to gain more information about the situation...it didn't work).  I eventually figured out how to turn it off and stumbled out of bed.  A guy named Oliver picked me up, I slept in the back seat of his car for about 2 hours, and when I woke up, I was somewhere along the New Hampshire/Vermont border at Morningside Flight Park.

Beth (of Acadia trip fame) organized the hang gliding trip, and the others who tagged along were myself and some people named Oliver, Mikka, and Yelena.  We had a hang gliding lesson on the ground in the morning, and in the afternoon, we got to go on a tandem flight up high. 

For now, I'll give some first impressions.  I will post some pictures later on, once I have them.

The Lesson

• Learning to hang glide from the ground requires wind speed, a bit of a slope to the ground, and running.  You pick up the glider, hold it in the proper way facing into the wind, and start moving.  As you pick up speed, the glider begins to lift.  At this point, you keep running as fast as you can, tugging this thing behind you in hopes that you go fast enough to lift off.  I have never felt more like a sled dog in my life!
• I got some air on one of the runs!  I saw the instructor (running beside me) lag behind as the glider picked up speed, and realized I was in this chaotic journey on my own.  I didn't keep my wings level, though, and ended up crashing the glider and skinning my knee...second time in two months.  It's like I'm 10 again.
• You can get beat up practicing this sport.  In addition to the crash, I managed to clip myself three times with an old carabiner with a nasty hinge, resulting in two matching blood blisters and an unlikely bruise on the pad of one finger.  Good job, Joy.

The Tandem

•  You know how birds catch thermals and fly on them?  I never thought I was going to feel one for myself, but while hang gliding, you can actually feel thermals of warm air lifting you up.  If you want to feel what it's like to soar like a bird, try hang gliding!
• You get towed up to soaring altitude by an ultralight plane (weighs about 520 lbs, and is made of textile stretched over an aluminum frame with a backpack-sized fuel tank mounted behind the pilot seat).  The hang glider pilot has a lot of responsibility to pay attention and keep control of the glider during towing, because a chaotic hang glider could seriously offbalance the ultralight plane.  This is one reason to do a tandem flight -- someone else can pilot through the hard stuff.
• Favorite thing about hang gliding #1: When you're soaring up high, you can look straight down and see nothing below you, nothing at all.  I love the surreal, so I love this.  It is an amazing feeling.
• Favorite thing about hang gliding #2: When you're soaring, you can stall.  This brings the hang glider to nearly a stop.  Of course, this makes the glider start to drop.  Then you can pull back on the handles of the glider to make yourself go fast again and regain control.  It's like a roller coaster, diving and bringing yourself back up.  I find the feeling of falling...interesting, so I like this!

I miiiight prefer sky diving to hang gliding because I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie, but hang gliding is also awesome.  The trip was a definite success.  A great day of learning how to soar like a bird, followed by a delicious huge pesto pizza nearby.  The weather was pure New England Fall, and being able to fly above the colorful trees is a new way to experience it.  Plus, now I know what it feels like to catch a thermal.  Never thought I'd know!