Nature’s fury.
I went to UC Berkeley just this last weekend
Let me just start off by saying that the campus was HOLYJESUSGORGEOUS! :D I totally understood why the kids there are known for being hippies. I had such a strong urge to stop what I was doing and go sit under a tree (there was this especially pretty pink tree that stood out, not sure if it was cherry blossom or not).
Anyway, I had to go up for the AIChE Western Conference for the Chem-E Car Competition. We got 3rd place out of the 4 colleges that competed :/ But it’s better than not placing at all at 4th. Honestly, getting 3rd was not as bad as a letdown as getting 4th would be. It must suck to be Berkeley, getting last place at their own school and all.
Now, 11 colleges were supposed to compete but only 6 actually made the trip. One got disqualified beforehand (due to a sulfuric acid leak I’ve been told) and the other got disqualified (because their circuit was dysfunctional).
Regardless it was Davis, Stanford, Berkeley, and Cal Poly Pomona (us). Their vehicles looked so ghetto, it was really funny. One looked like a beach cooler, the other looked like a weird skateboard and the other looked like a Double-decker (even though it had 3-4 levels) London tour bus.
When it came around to the actual vehicle performance competition the load was 450 grams of water and a distance of 75ft. It was held in a underground parking lot just on the outskirts of the campus and let me just say that it was fracking COLD there. Our first run was with 8mL of hydrogen and 4mL of oxygen and reached 56.6ft. :< When we calibrated the amount of hydrogen needed with our competitive model just before the second run, we just barely made it to 4ft. I don’t think I need to say just how heartbroken and disappointed I was.
Anyway, we found out recently that we qualified for Nationals because we placed in 3rd (people in Berkeley had been giving us weird information about who would and wouldn’t make it to nationals), but have to decide whether or not we’ll actually go because we don’t have any money.
As a sidenote: If the college town of Berkeley is anything remotely like the city-life…I don’t want any of it. There were some crazy people there. However, I did like the local comic book store :3 $0.50 comics and $1 manga. I bought:
- Gravitation (Volume 4 & 6)
- Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor (Issue 2 & 3)
- Lucifer (No. 2 & 3)
- Necronomicon (No. 4)
- Star Wars: Dark Empire II (No. 6)
- Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi (No. 3)
- Ender’s Shadow (No. 5)
So yeah, that pretty much encompasses my weekend. Eeek, that’s really lengthy >.<;;
