A Week and a Half in Budapest!

Sziasztok!

I've been in Budapest for about a week and a half now. Math classes don't start until September 8th, but I'm here early to take an intensive language course. About half of this semester's Budapest Semesters in Math students are already here, including both of my roommates. I live in District VII, so I'm within walking distance of most things in Pest in addition to being near a couple of metro stations and several bus and trolley lines.

St. Stephen's Day
August 20th was St. Stephen's Day, which is a national holiday. I went out for the afternoon with a group of BSMers. We ate street food (lángos and ice cream) near Deák Tér, then walked over to Parliament. We didn't go inside, but we watched the changing of the guard at the flag and the a short ceremony on the building steps. After going over to the Buda side, we walked a bit until we ended up at Matthias Church and the Fisherman's Bastion, where we watched part of another ceremony and listened to music. Then we went to Clark Adam Tér and listened to more music!

Parliament!

The Parliament decorated for St. Stephen's Day

Going back into Parliament after a ceremony.

Matthias Church by the castle in Buda.

Celebration outside Matthias Church

Concert in Clark Adam Ter

Food Adventures
I feel like I've been going to the store every other day! There are lots of small convenience-ish stores that sell fresh produce as well as markets and chain grocery stores, so I go to different places for different foods. The apartment came with an odd assortment of kitchen utensils, and using the oven takes a bit of guesswork, so cooking can be a bit of an experiment. So far I've made pesto chicken, lots of pasta, scrambled eggs, cinnamon toast, and pancakes.

The produce here is fantastic, and that also means there's good fruit juice and jam. So far I've had apricot, peach, and cherry-plum-apple juices and strawberry and apricot jams.

There are a lot of restaurants, especially bakeries and gyro stands, near the language school. My favorite lunch place so far is a sausage restaurant. The school is also next door to Fragola, one of many wonderful gelato places in Budapest.

Exploring Budapest
I've walked around Pest a lot, especially in Districts VII and V. I walk to language school most days, though there's a tram that would cut about ten minutes off the trip. I like seeing the city, and the weather has been good for walking.

The Anglican church I've attended for the past two Sundays is in District VII, so I can easily walk from my apartment.

I live near Városliget, or City Park. For the first few days that I was here, my grandsibb Marguerite was also here for Sziget Festival, so we met up a couple of times, and once we walked around the park. It's huge; we spent more than an hour making a circuit that only went around about half of the park. The zoo is also part of Városliget, and inside the zoo is Hungary's one roller coaster, Hullámvasút.

Hungary's one roller coaster is a 92-year-old woodie. It's lots of fun. I heard a little girl get off behind me and tell her parents, "Nagyon jol! Nagyon jol!" (Very good! Very good!), and I agree.

Last Sunday, I went on a free walking tour of Budapest that focused on Hungary under communism and what has and hasn't changed in the past 25 years. It was really interesting to think about the similarities and differences to Soviet and post-Soviet Azerbaijan.

Picture of everyone on the Communism Tour in front of the one remaining Soviet monument in the city center.
Photo by Free Walking Tours Budapest.

Language Class
I've only had six days of language class (about thirty hours in the classroom), but it feels like a lot more. Hungarian isn't related to any other language I've learned, but structurally it has a lot in common with Azerbaijani, which has been helpful in picking up grammar. I go back and forth between feeling like I can still barely communicate anything and being surprised at how many words I recognize when I walk around. At the zoo, I spent a lot of time looking at signs, and even though I couldn't read most of them, I could pick out a lot of words and reason out a few others, which was exciting!

Summer Research

This summer I've been in Singapore, doing chemical engineering research, and I've been enjoying it a lot!

 I'm working on clathrate hydrate research at the National University of Singapore. Clathrate or gas hydrates are crystalline solids formed from water and a gas. The water forms cages that enclose the gas molecules. Different guest gas molecules result in different hydrate structure, the most common of which are structure I (sI), structure II (sII), and structure H (sH) hydrates. For example, carbon dioxide generally forms structure I hydrates, which have six small dodecahedral cages and two large tetradodecahedral cages. Hydrate formation tends to occur at low temperatures and high pressures, the kinds of conditions that you would find in permafrost or subsea regions.

Why do we care about hydrates? The biggest reason is related to the oil and gas industry. The majority of the earth's methane is in the form of methane hydrates, and we'd like to extract it. We also need to be able to prevent the formation of natural gas hydrates in pipes.

The other main application, the one to which my work is more related, is gas separation and storage, particularly of carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide emissions make up around 60% of greenhouse gas emissions, but if we could capture and sequester carbon dioxide, then it wouldn't be released into the atmosphere. One solution is hydrate based gas separation. Industrial applications generally involve a mixture of gases including carbon dioxide. If we're clever about the temperatures and pressures we use, we can form hydrates in a way that is very selective for carbon dioxide. For example, fuel gas is 60 percent carbon dioxide and 40 percent hydrogen, but we can form hydrates from fuel gas in which 80 or 90 percent of the guest gas molecules are carbon dioxide. If we do a couple of cycles of forming and dissociating the hydrates, we end up with a gas that is almost entirely carbon dioxide. The hydrogen can then be combusted.

The carbon dioxide can also be stored in hydrate form in the earth; if it's injected into parts of the earth's crust with the right conditions, then the carbon dioxide will form hydrates and not be released to the atmosphere. In fact, researchers have been doing experiments on methane/carbon dioxide hydrate exchange, working on how we could replace the methane in methane hydrates with carbon dioxide so that we can use the methane gas and store the carbon dioxide in hydrate form.

There are basically three general areas that you can study when thinking about gas hydrates: thermodynamics, kinetics, and morphology. They're all pretty closely linked, and I've had the opportunity to do at least a little bit of work on each while I've been in the lab.

Halfway Through

Four semesters down, four semesters to go.

I'm halfway through my education at Olin. When I started this blog, I intended to document my experience in the experiment that is Olin. So far, I've mostly done this course by course, and this seemed like a good point to stop and look over the past two years as a whole.

Reflections on Semester 4: User Oriented Collaborative Design

In which I really don't know what to think of UOCD. (It is a design class, after all.)

UOCD Final Photos

I took a lot of pictures after my team's final UOCD final presentation. I thought about putting these in my UOCD reflection post (coming soon!), but there are a few too many, so here they all are! My team named itself the Mathemachickens, and our user group was recreational mathematicians. We designed Abacus, a space in which recreational mathematicians and other curious people could discover and design mathematical art and objects together.

The view walking into my studio. My team's space is in the back left corner of the picture.

We strung up some of our old material that we still needed to reference. This photo shows our personas, which we made in Phase I and modified at the beginning of Phase II.

Here's the rest of that "clothesline." The bigger poster is information from our codesigns, and the yellow poster is some mini product posters for our more developed ideas.

Reflections on Semester 4: The Entrepreneurial Initiative (FBE)

One of Olin's requirements is an entrepreneurship foundation course. Over the past decade, that course has taken a lot of forms. Last semester, the class was The Entrepreneurial Initiative, which everyone called FBE (left over from an old course title).

I went into FBE dreading it. I was taking it because it was a requirement and only because it was a requirement. That dread faded, but FBE was both frustrating and disappointing.

Thoughts on Sophomore Year Activities

I did a lot of non-academic things this year, so here's a bit about the most exciting ones!
 
Passionate Pursuit
In the spring, I did a Passionate Pursuit in Soviet ballet. I watched a lot of videos of old ballets: The Red Poppy, The Stone Flower, two versions of Romeo and Juliet, two versions of Spartacus, and short made-for-TV versions of Swan Lake, Flames of Paris, and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai. I also watched Children of Theatre Street, which is about the Vaganova school, and the ballet parts of the Sochi Olympics opening and closing ceremonies. I reread relevant parts of Apollo's Angels, a ballet history book, and read Swans of the Kremlin, which is about Soviet ballet from the beginning of the Soviet Union to about 1968. I also watched a lot of short videos and read a variety of things that my mom or I found online. All of this was a lot of fun.

I'd said when I applied for credit that I would write a paper and present at Expo. I decided to write and present about which ballet of the of the seven mentioned above is the most Soviet ballet - which one best represents Soviet ballet as a whole. I cheated a little and gave two answers, Romeo and Juliet and Spartacus. Presenting a non-technical poster at Expo was really interesting. I'd only ever presented modeling or math projects before, and I talked to an entirely different group of people than normal. Some of the people who came by my poster were a lot of parents, some middle school girls who dance, the computer networks professor, the head of the machine shop, and people from Olin's department of family and alumni relations. Like normal, I still came up with a short description of what I'd done, but I had more in-depth conversations than I have when I present my graph theory research.

Church, Disciple, and OCF
Both at Christ Church and in Olin Christian Fellowship (OCF) this year, I've been involved in a lot of discussions about the future. I was on the Strategic Team at Christ Church, talking about selling the church building vs. not and what our options would be in either case. We lead an all church service/meeting in February, and people prefer the visions of a future in which we do sell the building, so right now we're exploring options from there. As for OCF, the leadership team this year was essentially all seniors. The current leadership and the future leadership had meetings once a week starting just before spring break. The future leadership is two rising sophomores, Michel and Sonia, and me. Michel and Sonia are co-presidents for next year. The big decision that came out of all of those meetings was the choice to no longer be associated with Cru and, through that, be more welcoming to all Christians on campus.