Wind Surfing at Stanford!

Hi Readers,

So some of you may know that I've recently started taking wind surfing classes here at Stanford. Yes, Stanford offers wind surfing classes, because it is so awesome. I was debating about taking the class, especially since I had suffered a cut to my leg the week before and it would hurt to put the wetsuit on. However, since it is only offered every spring, I finally decided to take it, and it was a fantastic idea!

So to start off, Stanford is humongous. It's so large, in fact, that it includes several lakes. There are acres and acres of land which are part of Stanford, but which are not developed in any way. This includes a lake called Felt Lake, which is located behind the campus, on the other side of 280. This is where the windsurfing classes are held.

For a course fee of $100, everything is included. Even though I wasn't sure that a wetsuit was necessary, I bought one anyways, and it was definitely a great idea. The first time I tried the water, it was freezing cold. I was nice and toasty inside the wetsuit (and blubbery as well, since the wetsuit made me look like a seal).

Wind surfing includes a board, a sail, and a boom. The board is what you stand on, the sail stands on top of the board so you can catch the wind, and the boom is what you hold onto with your hands to direct the sail. The first class taught us how to assemble all the parts, and how to balance ourselves on the board.

Once you are on the board, you have to pull on the sail until it stands up straight. This is probably the hardest part of learning how to windsurf (so far..there's only been 2 classes). Balancing is really difficult, and if the wind is strong or unsteady then it's hard to stay on the board. I fell a lot that first day. A LOT. But on the second day, it got a lot better! I was able to move around the lake using the wind, and it was really fun! It also helped that the second day had much better weather than the first day.

I found that the hardest thing to do, once you start moving, is to go upwind. It is a problem - once the wind blows you down to the end of the lake...how do you get back? I found this out early on in the 2nd class, when I found myself at the very edge of the lake and unable to go back. Fortunately, one of the TAs came by and guided me on how to zigzag across the wind, heading slowly upwind the entire time, in order to get back. Whereas I spent 10 mins getting to the end of the lake going downwind, it took well over an hour and a half to get back up the lake again.

Stanford really never ceases to amaze me with what it has to offer. I love this place!

Till next time!
-FCDH

Alpha Waves

Hi Readers,

So I'm on a blogging spree tonight. I think I'm going to try and catch up on as many blogs as I humanly can before I fall asleep midway through a blog.

So this quarter, I'm taking a class on Diagnostic Devices here at Stanford. It involves a lab section where you actually get to use a lot of medical devices to try it out. For example, for the CT scan lab, we placed several objects and took CT scans of it. You get the picture.

This past week, what we did was called EEG, or electroencephalagram (spelling might be wrong). This involves placing electrodes on your head, and recording your brain waves as your are performing different tasks. The tasks that I had to do involve watching a picture as it flashed at a predetermined frequency, grinding my teeth and blinking my eyes while looking at a white screen, and closing my eyes and relaxing.

The last exercise, where I had to close my eyes and relax, is supposed to bring out the "Alpha" waves from your brain. This indicates the 3rd most active level of brain activity (after delta and theta waves), and the waves oscillate at around 10Hz. When I did the exercise, I could hear the lab manager say, "Whoa! Look at those massive Alpha waves! Those are humongous!" I would periodically open my eyes just so that I could see what the Alpha waves look like. He's right - they are gigantic in comparison to the beta waves that were recorded with the flashing image.

He also joked that I must have an Alpha personality, to which I merely shrugged my shoulders and gave him a smile. =)

In fact, my Alpha waves were apparently so strong that the comparative phase drift was small. Normally, natural non-event induced waves tend to phase drift over 360 degrees during a measurement. However, mine was so stable that they were complete confined to a 90 degree quadrant. The lab manager said that this is extremely rare, and that I would make a good function generator. He was joking, but he had a point - when they took the Fourier transform of my brain waves, the signal-to-noise ratio and the spurious-free dynamic range was quite substantial.

Now I wasn't really sure what that meant. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? Neither?

So I did a quick Google search about Alpha waves, and it came up with loads of goodies. Tidbits which I'm not sure that I should trust, but I thought I'd post about anyways. Apparently, having large Alpha waves indicates that you are a very stress-free person, and can come up with creative ideas and solutions to problems. It means that I can go from an alert stage to a relaxed stage very easily. All of these sound like me, and best of all - I'm now proven myself (somewhat) to be relatively stress-free most of the time! I'm wondering if an EEG taken 2-3 years ago would have shown the same thing. I think I'm a lot happier and relaxed now than I was during my undergrad.

Anyways, this post was just a random musing on the Alpha waves that they measured from my brain. I'm glad that my Alpha waves were so large, since it could mean that I am very stress-free. Hopefully I'll stay that way!

Till next post!
-FCDH

Epic Roadtrip: Arizona + Utah

Hi Readers,

I have not written a blog post in a long time, because...I forgot. So here's a short post about my President's Day Weekend, when I embarked on what was probably the best trip that I've had in America. This happened almost 2 months ago (and I started a blog post about it 2 months ago..) but I'm just getting around to it now.

Starting a year ago, after seeing a New York Times travel article about it, I began planning for a trip to The Wave in Arizona. To go to the Wave, one must obtain a permit, which are given out in a monthly online lottery process. 10 permits are granted per day, and in the lottery process you can choose 3 days in a month to try your luck. For an entire year, I tried my luck every month, and failed every single month. In October, I received the prized email that I had been waiting for, which gave me 4 permits for the day of February 17th, 2012. I had applied for the date blindly, and by sheer luck it turned out to be the President Day's long weekend. So excitedly, I gathered 3 other people (GA, NO, and AZ), and began planning an epic trip. And an epic trip it was.

Because my hiking permits were for Friday the 17th, that meant that we had to arrive in the area by Thursday night. Therefore, we planned on flying to Las Vegas on Thursday night, renting a car and driving to Kanab, UT, and staying the night there. Potential problems began emerging very early on. We almost missed out flight to Las Vegas, we were delayed an hour in getting our rental car, and by the time we had arrived to Kanab it was 5am. I was worried a lot that first night. Worried that the others wouldn't be able to wake up in the morning in time for us to drive an hour to the Wave and to do the 6-mile roundtrip hike, or just worried in general that something would go wrong and we wouldn't be able to go to the Wave.

But, it turned out to be amazing! We woke up around 9am, and got to the Waves around noon (after an intense 8-mile bumpy dirt road). We hiked for 3 miles to get to the Wave, and it was very worth it! The weather was fantastic this time of year, around 80 degrees and sun-drenched. The Waves themselves were smaller than I had imagined, but it was just so awesome to see what I had dreamed about for so long. We took loads of pictures there and then headed back, in the midst of the tall shadows cast from the sun's rays on all the weird rock formations.

The next day we hit up Bryce Canyon. Bryce is quite indescribable, almost like a fairyland. There are loads of rock formations called Hoodoos, and the sheer extent of them are quite incredible. We spent the majority of the day driving around to all of the viewpoints and taking pictures. We did manage to get in a hike around the rim of the Bryce Amphitheater, and we saw the sunset. The scenery was really beautiful. If it weren't so cold and covered in snow and ice there, we might have been able to do more hiking. Oh well, save it for the next time!

The day after, we hit up both Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park and Zion National Park. The sand dunes were not bad to look at, but the snow covering them definitely made it a lot less exciting. They essentially just looked like giant snowdrifts. However, we spent 2-3 hours there just having fun in the snow. We rolled down the sand dunes, had snowball fights, and built a snowman. It was a really fun time! By the time we left the dunes, there was not much time to fully enjoy Zion (not that we could have done much with only a day there anyways), but we still got to see the amazing scenery there. It reminds me of Yosemite quite a bit. As we left Zion all exhausted, we stopped by an awesome burger place, courtesy of Yelp, before continuing our way to Las Vegas for the night. We had intended to celebrate GA's birthday that night in LV, but we were all so tired that we crashed soon after reaching LV.

On the last day of the trip, we took a detour from the "boring" way back to SF, and decided to take the highway through Death Valley National Park. It turned out to be a very nice and meandering route through the desolate wilderness, one where GA suffered from car sickness (there were a lot of windy turns) and we almost didn't make it back to SF in time to return our car.

The trip was tremendously fun! Here are some pictures. Cheers!

At the Wave!

Bryce Amphitheater in Bryce Canyon

Our awesome snowman!

Overlooking Zion Valley

Me and NO

-FCDH