2012 Christmas Letter

I've had a busy year, so let's get started. It all started on January 1st when I resolved to buy a car. I had lived the first 24 years of my life without owning a car and I figured it was time to grow up and buy a car.

For the first 4 months of the year I worked at Colorado School of Mines doing research on plasmonics. It was a fun job, but eventually we ran out of research money, so on April 30th I said my goodbyes to the ole' Mines campus and went home to figure out what I was going to do. April 30th marked 6 years, 8 months, and 29 days since I first came to Mines -- 4 years as an undergrad, 1 year as a grad, and 1.5 years as a research associate. So it was quite the life change to leave that campus.

The plan was to search for a job like searching for a job was my full time job... That lasted one day. I quickly realized that searching for a job was the last job I would ever want to have, so I decided to just stick with the minimum requirement for unemployment benefits, which is 5 job contacts per week. I set my focus on secondary math teaching jobs, but after sending out many applications without hearing back from any of them, I decided to go for engineering/scientist/technician jobs. Turns out, I had much more response for the field I'm actually qualified for.

But unemployment was more than just job hunting. One application per day does not take a full day, so I took up other things. I taught myself to knit and successfully knit a couple hats. This gave me plenty of time to listen to an audio book of Walden by Henry David Thoreau, which is now one of my all-time favorite books. My mind was very focused on being frugal and self sufficient, so this book was perfect for me. I also started baking my own bread. That bread was so delicious, I could eat at least 5 slices with butter after it came out of the oven. It's a miracle I didn't gain any weight during my 2.5 months of unemployment. I still didn't have a car, so I got enough exercise from my rides out to Golden for church events and other things that I rode my bike to. Being unemployed at the same time as my friend Dave also meant he and I started going on long rides once a week. They were usually at least 30 miles and the longest ride we did was 70 miles.

Right when I fell in love with unemployment I was offered a job to teach math at Colorado Christian University and the next day I accepted the offer. Later that day I received a call from Aerotek, a staffing agency, saying that ITN Energy Systems wanted to hire me and wanted me to start immediately. Well since CCU was an incredibly part time job which would not cover my expenses, I accepted the job at ITN.

So, no more fun, time to work. Now I work for ITN, a research company, trying to develop a thin film battery. I came into the company at a pretty chaotic time, so the first few weeks were very stressful for me, but I eventually got the hang of it. This job has allowed me to learn a lot about batteries, materials, X-ray diffraction, and other things. It's a good job that challenges me and that I enjoy.

Luckily, new jobs come with money, and money helps you buy cars. Cars make some aspects of life simpler and others much less simple. It's nice to be able to drive places, but it's not so nice to have to make expensive repairs, pay for insurance, pay for gas, etc.

So here I am on December 13, 2012 (whew, made it past 12/12/12) and I'm considering whether my life is better than it was a year ago. I think my year was kind of like The Biggest Loser. My 2.5 months of unemployment really taught me about myself. I learned what I needed vs. what I wanted and I made a lot of progress in practicing self-control. But all of a sudden, everything got real plush, real fast, like when the now skinny contestants go back home to where they aren't forced to exercise anymore and the busy demands of life get in the way of their own personal goals. This summer, I had no choice but to practice self-control because if I didn't, my only other option was to fall into becoming a disgusting, lazy slob, without a job. I also had no money, so I had no option but to only buy what I needed. Now that I have a plush job I have a security net to fall back into and I now have the option of letting my personal goals slide. But the fact that I have options reveals my true desires, because I'll only accomplish what I truly desire. So now I am working on answering the question, "Who do I want to become?" And slowly but surely I'm seeing that I want to become the man that God wants me to be.

Songs I've Played

How Pro Road Cycling Works

With all the excitement among my friends about the Tour de France lately, I thought I would dedicate this post to Le Tour. When I say "excitement," I mean a whopping 2 friends have spoken to me about it. Every time I bring up the tour to any of my other friends I hear a soft chuckle and remember that nobody cares about pro cycling. But I think you should and here is where I explain how the sport works in hopes that you might become a bit interested in it. I do think it's a pretty interesting sport, although not as exciting as some of the more popular sports. It is still a good story to follow for the 3 weeks it lasts every summer, not to mention the other grand tours.

The Teams
Not everyone realizes that cycling is a team sport, but it is because there are some pretty big advantages to working together, due to aerodynamics and race logistics. There are several teams in the tour and each has a couple main sponsors which comprise their team name (Team BMC, Team Sky, Team Nissan Radio Shack, etc.) The first advantage to having a team is aerodynamics. Aerodynamics are not as important at speeds that you and I ride at, but when you average 25-30mph over 120 miles, aerodynamics make a world of a difference. When you have a team, you can all line up behind each other and shift off who the leader in the line is so that people get a break from the wind. The second reason for a team is to take care of the logistics of helping out the main men on the team. For instance, the top rider on the team will stay toward the front of the pack of riders while the lower riders move back and forth between the team car and the lead rider to bring them water and food throughout the stage. On a team there is usually only one or two riders who are going for any of the big prizes. Everyone else is there to help the team leaders win, and they may have the privilege to go for a stage win or two, which is a prestigious thing to win, but probably not the team's main priority.

The Jerseys
In the tour, there are 3 main prizes that are to be won. They are the yellow jersey which goes to the person with the overall best time over the tour, the green jersey which basically goes to the best sprinter in the tour, and the polka dot jersey that goes to the best climber in the tour. The yellow jersey is the most coveted prize as it will go to the rider who is the best all-around rider. They must be able to climb and ride a fast time trial (an individual race against the clock). Along many stages there are sprint points and, of course a finish line. There are points available at the sprint points and finish lines for the sprinters who want the green jersey. The man at the end of the tour with the most points wins the jersey. Along the stages there are climbs and the first few men to get to the summit get points towards the polka dot jersey (The king of the mountain).

The Stages
Each stage is unique. The first several days of the tour have flat stages which favor sprinters, but later in the tour you start to get mountain stages, which make for a much more interesting race. Some stages have flat finish lines, which means a sprinter will win the stage, and others have summit finishes, which means a climber will win the stage. During the race, the majority of the riders will all ride in a pack which is called the Peloton. The peloton is a somewhat easy location to ride because there are so many riders around to block the wind. Because of this, the peloton has the ability to ride very fast together. The downside to the peloton is that the crashes typically happen there and cause huge pile ups. To avoid the pile ups, the top riders will stay towards the front of the group with a few of their teammates to block the wind for them.

The Sprint
During flat stages, the race is all for the sprinters. They will usually stay in the peloton until the sprint points and finish line and then go for the sprint. A good sprinting team will work together to get the sprint for their best sprinter. They do this by creating a Lead-out. Last year, Mark Cavendish's team HTC Colombia was amazing at this. They always had about 3 riders plus Cavendish at the front of the pack. They would pick up the pace all riding in a line. The guy in the front would ride as hard as he could, breaking the wind for his teammates, and then drop out once he couldn't push anymore. The next guy in line would do the same thing, and it would repeat until it was just Cavendish and he would sprint to the finish after getting a head start from the great lead-out. That is how a sprint usually works. Typically at the finish line sprints, everyone who is in the group with a km (or so) to go will get the same time. This prevents and unnecessary dangerous fighting for position in the tight runway.

The Breakaway
In many races there will be a few riders that break away from the peloton to either win climb or sprint points or to go for the stage win. This is called a Breakaway. Breakaways are not always successful. If the peloton picks up the pace, they can sometimes catch up to the riders in the breakaway, spoiling all the fun. If the riders in the breakaway are not very important to the riders in the peloton, they will usually be allowed to ride out in front for a while, picking up points at the sprint points and climbs. However, if there is a contender for the yellow jersey (General Contender-GC), somebody in the peloton will probably respond as that is the most important prize. One very interesting breakaway happened the other day when the best sprinter in the tour (read, not a good climber), Peter Sagan, broke away with a group of climbers. The climbers were going for climbing points, but Sagan wanted some sprint points that were to come later in the race and for the possible stage win. He is not a great climber, but he was able to keep up with the climbers for the climb and then easily won the sprint points at the sprint point since he was by far the best sprinter in the small group. The breakaway was successful, in that it made it to the finish line without the peloton catching them, but Sagan could not win the stage as all of us watching were hoping. The climbers knew they had to wear him out before getting within 1km of the finish otherwise he would easily sprint past them for the stage win. It would have been incredibly impressive for a sprinter to be a part of a breakaway that went over a challenging climb and then get the win.

The Time Trial
And finally, there is the time trial. There is a team time trial where each team rides alone and work together to get the best overall team time. In this race, you will see the team working together, pulling each other via aerodynamics. Since this is the most efficient way to ride, this stage has a very high average speed and thus makes the time differences between teams quite small and have little impact on the leader's jersey. The individual time trial is when each individual cyclist rides on their own on a shortish course. The time differences in this stage are also pretty low, but they can still cost you the victory. Last year Cadel Evans went into the time trial on the last day with a pretty bad time deficit, but came back to beat out Andy Schleck for the yellow jersey.

That gives you a decent summary of the sport. It is one of the more interesting forms of racing and once you see that there is more going on than meets the eye and once you start to recognize the riders for their strengths and weaknesses, you can start to appreciate the sport.

Into the Wild

I've decided that my favorite book genre is adventure non-fiction. After being asked a few times recently what my favorite genre was, I realized that this was the genre that I most often read. Something draws me to the adventure and the book gains a lot of legitimacy in my mind when it is non-fiction. The problem with this genre is all kinds of non-writers tend to write these kinds of books, which makes for really dry books. John Krakauer, however, seems to know how to grab my attention and tell a good story full of emotions and personalities instead of just stating the facts.

The most recent book I've read is Into the Wild by Krakauer. Christopher McCandless, an Emory grad with grades good enough to get into Harvard Law, donates $25,000 to charity and heads west in his Datsun. Soon after, he abandons the Datsun, burns his remaining cash, and is out on his own with nothing except what he can carry on his back. He spends the next couple years hitch-hiking around the west, not spending much time anywhere. At one point he canoes down the Colorado River and gets lost in Mexico where he survives for a month on little more than a 20lb bag of rice. He spends time living in a community of rubber tramps, who spent their lives driving around the country in their RVs. For a while, he lives in Bullhead City, AZ working at a fast food restaurant. He was required to wear socks with his shoes, but every day, the second his shift ended, he would immediately take off his socks. He also spent time in North Dakota harvesting barley, saving money for his last great adventure.

Everywhere he went, people gravitated towards him and became very attached to him before he would leave after only a few weeks. In southern California, while Alex (his pseudonym) was living next to a nudist camp at a hot springs, he met an old man named Ron Franz who gave him a ride into the city to fill up his water bottle. Over no more than 2 weeks, this lonely Christian man became so attached to Alex that when he left, he asked if he could adopt him as his son. Something about Alex pushed people to examine themselves and see what they were missing in life.

In a letter to Franz, Alex writes

I'd like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If you want to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at first appear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life you will see its full meaning and its incredible beauty... My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this new kind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The only person you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in new circumstances.

This is the way that Alex lived, always searching for new experiences, following his heart for adventure. This went all the way to the point of walking off into the Alaskan bush to live off of the land. He wanted to prove to himself that he could survive on his own in the Alaskan wild and to see what it was like to be completely isolated from any outside help. He survived for 3 months while living out of an old bus, eating plants and small game. At one point he had tried walking back to civilization (only 25 miles to the east), but was blocked by the high waters of the Teklanika River. This ultimately led to his death by either starvation or food poisoning. It was pointed out by others that only 1/4 mile away from where he attempted to cross was a hand-operated tram that would have easily saved his life. This along with a few other instances show Alex's  profound lack of common sense.

Krakauer's book gives you an enormous amount of sympathy for Alex, but in the end, what he did in Alaska was not heroic as many of his fans would suggest. Even though I think he was a bit foolish, his character calls out to me and I've even considering making the trek to his "Magic Bus" through Denali National Park. I think that life is too precious to simply dedicate your entire life to the pursuit of adventure to the point of foolishly leaving no path of escape. But at the same time, I think he was very articulate about this call to adventure that many of us feel. While I don't believe in the call of adventure enough to move to the wilderness and live on my own, I always feel a longing for adventure in some capacity -- to put myself in uncomfortable situations that stretch me and test my limits both for the sake of exploring the emotions that adventure inevitably comes with and for the confidence that it produces when you have tested yourself and found that you were more capable than you previously imagined.

Anyways, the book is amazing and you should read it, even if you think that Chris McCandless was a kook. Krakauer does a great job of telling the story and explores this call to adventure through McCandless's story as well as Krakauer's own story of climbing Devil's Thumb and stories of other historic adventurers.

One Month of Unemployment

As of today, I've been unemployed for a whole month. Ironically, time flies when you're doing nothing.

This time of not having a job has been full of mixed emotions. Sometimes, I'm ecstatic to have the freedom to do almost whatever I want everyday. Other times, I feel very limited in what I am able to do thanks to my new found poorness that inevitably comes with not having a job. I'll sometimes feel guilty about not stooping down low to take whatever job I can find. But I also don't want to be stuck working some job that I will hate. I can't really decide how I feel about being unemployed, but I'm starting to be ready to have a job again.

I was encouraged by my mentor to use my time without a job to do things that I normally wouldn't have the opportunity to do. My first attempt at this was to teach myself C++ (a programming language). This lasted 2 days before I quit because it was boring and I cared very little about it. I have had the opportunity to go on some bike rides I don't normally get to go on. When I was working and going to church in Golden, my bike riding consisted of 12.5 miles to Golden, 12.5 miles back, 6 days a week. That's 25 miles a day, basically riding the same thing over and over again. Don't get me wrong, it's still better than driving an hour long commute everyday, but for riding a bike, it wasn't very fun. So now that I am not forced to ride to Golden everyday, I have the time and energy to ride to other places in the Denver metro area. With the boredom that comes from being at home for so long everyday, I've been much more eager to spend time with friends in the evenings. With friends I've played disc golf, hiked, biked, went to Rockies games, etc. I'm much more eager to do things like this when I don't feel like I'm eliminating any relaxing alone time. I get enough of that during the day. With all my free time, I've worked on my disc golf throwing skills by going to the field across from my house several times. A few weeks ago, my backhand drive had zero power--it was pathetic. But after putting a few hours into working on my form, I have over 50% better power than before for my backhand drive. And the most recent thing that I've started doing that I normally wouldn't do is to learn how to knit. It's fun enough and I'm happy to at least know how to do it so that someday I'll have the joy of making my own hat. I would have taken up woodworking, but I thought that knitting would be much cheaper...and it is, considering how slowly I knit. Another thing I should do is write more blog posts. This blog has become quite a successful one in the past 6 months or so. To give you an idea of the success of my blog, I haven't written a single post or shared a single link to my blog in the month of May, but it has had 719 page views in that one month.

The job search is annoying. I apply for one job every weekday, so I've applied for quite a few jobs after a month. I've had a few phone interviews and an in-person interview. Thankfully, I will be receiving unemployment, which means I can actually hold out for the good jobs for a while since I won't have to worry too much about making ends meet. I'm still casually applying for teaching jobs, but my focus is much more on jobs that I'm actually qualified for. Things like Thin Film Processing Engineer jobs. It feels much more natural to be applying for jobs like this that I'm actually qualified for. I think I would make a good teacher, but my resume doesn't make me look like I would be. It would also be nice to have a high paying job that I can use to pay off my student loans in less than 10 years.

So that's my first month of unemployment. It's fun, boring, annoying and relaxing all at the same time.

Throwing a Baseball

Inspired by this tweet,

I decided to do the math and make some pretty pictures to show how angle of release, speed, and air-time relate to each other.

In the first figure, the length of the orange arrows corresponds to the speed of the pitch and the other curves are possible paths that the baseball could follow. If you throw it at a low angle, you have to throw really fast. If you throw at a really high angle, you also have to throw really fast. Somewhere in between is where you would find the minimum throwing speed and it will be close to 45 degrees (not exactly since the ball leaves the pitcher's hand at a different height than it crosses the plate).

In the second figure, the length of the arrows corresponds to the amount of time the ball spends in the air. At a low angle, it spends very little time in the air, but at a high angle, the ball spends a lot of time in the air.

So simple, but so neat.

Music I Recorded on my Phone

I have a very fun app on my phone called Garageband. It cures boredom like nothing else. Here are some songs that I recorded on my phone.

Disclaimer:

• Please forgive my lack of conclusiveness for almost all these songs. Garageband automatically loops songs, so I typically don't feel the need to conclude anything.
• Also, please forgive my failure to come up with a single interesting/non-cheesy song name. 
• If you're curious, all the songs are original except for Take Heart, in which I play the guitar lick from Hillsong's song by the same name. 
• I blame all bad rhythm and wrong notes on bumpy roads as most of these were recorded while I was riding the bus.
• The really short songs will be much more enjoyable if you download them and put them on repeat on iTunes. It's too bad the free version of SoundCloud doesn't allow for that feature.
• Feel free to download the music and sell it for millions of dollars.