The Lord of the Things

I have only one word to describe the YAGS spring show: EPIC.

Happy Bilbo!

Bilbo: Who the heck are all you people?

Gandalf: You must take these Things of Power and throw them into the fiery pits of Mount Doom!

Follow this map to Bree. I'll meet you there.

Ringwraiths.

Strider: It is best to keep a low profile, Mr. Baggins.

Welcome to the Council of Elrond! I am Elrond.

Wait, which one is the THING of POWER?!
(argument ensues)

Frodo: Well, if you guys can't decide, I'll just throw all of them in Mount Doom!

When they come, do this...ROAR!

Quick, hide!

Orc battle

Saruman: Did you bring me the Things of Power?
Orcs: Uh...no.

He has the preciousesssss

This way, hobbitsesss!

Gimli: Don't you dare insult my mother!

Legolas: Um, Gimli, you broke my nail!!!

I wonder what would happen if I juggled this...

No, Frodo!

This doesn't look good...

Phew, that was just a dream. Now, how are we going to get into Mordor?

Let's disguise ourselves as orcs!

Oh no, a Ringwraith!

Legolas = fail.

Yes, my friends, it is I, Gandalf the...black.

We need to go help Frodo and Sam!

Hello, Gandalf, my old friend, older than any of my friends of old.

Wizards' duel

Big battle at the foot of Mount Doom

Hyah!

Mount Doom.

Well, guess the fire marshal got here first.

Let's throw these all in!

Wait, nothing happened.

Sam...have you been licking that lollipop ever since we left the Shire?

Yeah, but it hasn't gotten any smaller!

Nooo, the precioussss!

Gandalf, I thought Sauron was a juggling master...
Yeah, but he had a big sweet tooth too. Good job everyone!

*Cast bows*

To learn more about YAGS, click here!

My first - and last - ski trip

One of the great things about New Haven is it's location: less than 2 hours from NYC, and only 2-3 hours from Boston. As I learned today, it's also only about 3 hours (by bus!) away from some great skiing/snowboarding at Okemo Lodge. Normally, a day of skiing would cost $100+, but thanks to Silliman subsidies, we only had to pay $25/person for the works: transportation to/from the resort, all the rental equipment, and even beginner lessons for those of us who needed them (like me).

College students are normally not morning people, but by 5:00 AM we had loaded up two coach buses with enough food to take up several seats, taken attendance, and settled back to nap as the drivers took us through CT and MA. By 9:00, we were picking out equipment from the rental shop, excited to get out on to the fresh powder (that would continue to fall all day).

Base view of Okemo

10:30 it was time for my first ski lesson...walking around with skis, gliding, turns, etc. I thought the hardest part was just walking in the ski boots - I had never realized that I usually walk on my toes, especially going up/down stairs, or that not being able to rotate my ankles would suck such much. We didn't even have poles (the guy in the equipment shop had told us that we didn't need them), although looking back, they might have been helpful when I couldn't stop turning and ended up going down a a very steep slope on the side of the lesson area.

I finally graduated to the "Magic Carpet," aka the most basic bunny slope possible. To get to the top, you didn't even take a ski lift, you took a rubber conveyor belt. I was still a pretty bad skiier, but I got progressively better:

First trip: 4 falls
Second trip: 3 falls, including one getting off the conveyor belt (to be fair, there was ice buildup at the top)
Third trip: 2 falls
Fourth trip: 1 fall
Fifth and sixth trips: no falls!

Me and Hilina, a fellow Silliman senior from Ethiopia
It was also her first time skiing =P

After a lunch break, I made it down the Magic Carpet a few more times, then asked a staff person if I could probably make it down a green circle slope, the easiest possible level. He said the fresh powder meant the slopes were slower than usual, so I would probably be ok if I felt comfortable with the Magic Carpet. After some hesitation and self-debate, I decided to go for it! As I was going up the lift, I took a couple photos for Hilina's sake (by this point she had decided to give up on skiing)

I did make it down...after 7 falls, including 1 after which I spent 20 minutes trying to get my skis back on my feet -_- By the time I finally got back to base, I was ready to call it a day, so I returned everything to the rental shop, got back to the bus, and happily collapsed into my seat with a handful of snacks and a couple boxes of Nesquik chocolate milk. It took us considerably longer to get home (thanks to all the snow clogging up Vermont's highways), but we made it back...even in time to watch the Oscars (which is what I'm doing now).

All in all, I'm glad I went, but from now on I think I'll stick to sledding =P

Senior essay crunch time!

First, I must apologize for the intermittent updates, although hopefully the remainder of this post will help explain why.

For all you incoming freshmen, a senior project is probably the last thing you want to think about, but it has been very much on my mind since September (especially since I have to do two of them!) The requirements vary by department, but you generally have to take a "senior seminar" and/or do original research to be written up and/or presented to peers and faculty. This can be done over one semester or two, with the assumption that a 2-semester essay will be much longer/more detailed.

My HSHM senior essay got its start last spring when I took "Magic Bullets and Wonder Pills" with Bruno Strasser, who is now my essay adviser. Instead of taking the final, you could opt to write a term paper, and one of the potential topics mentioned was the development of chemotherapy at Yale in the early 1940s. I didn't end up writing the paper that semester, but the idea stuck in my head, mainly because I had never heard of it before. I did some preliminary browsing in books about the history of cancer therapy, history of the Yale School of Medicine, etc., but found only vague references, barely a sentence or a paragraph long.

The only thing I found about this exhibit was that it existed.

Last fall, I decided to make this my senior essay topic for a couple reasons. (1) If this discovery was such a big deal, why do so few people know about it? (2) With few secondary sources, I could significantly contribute to the historical literature. (3) I figured there should be enough sources to make my research possible, including scientific papers, Yale archives from that time period, and government documents, since the project was being funded by a government agency known as the Office of Scientific Research and Development. Little did I know what I was letting myself in for...

To summarize the idea briefly, Albert Z. Gilman and Louis S. Goodman were two young pharmacology professors at the Yale School of Medicine in 1942-43. They had collaborated on a lot of other things, including a massive pharmacology textbook, and so they were working together on nitrogen mustards, a class of compounds similar to the mustard gas used in WWI. Incredibly, they found that the mustards helped shrink various tumors in terminally ill patients, inoperable cancers that had been resistant to x-ray therapy, the only other treatment option at the time. However, the first papers weren't published until 1946 because they were labeled confidential by the OSRD.

A page from one of the 1946 articles, published in JAMA.
The photo is of one of the first patients, before treatment.

By December, I had exhausted the immediately available resources: Sterling Memorial Library, Yale Manuscripts and Archives, even the Yale New-Haven Hospital Archives. Granted, I found some pretty cool stuff, but they were either tantalizing glimpses of what had happened (e.g. brief notes in correspondence) or write-ups from several years later.

To make things even more frustrating, Gilman and Goodman both left Yale in 1943, so they didn't leave many personal files (other professors who spend their careers here have boxes full of stuff), plus they were much more famous for their textbook (which is now in its ninth edition). Google/Google Scholar didn't work out very well, because Gilman had a son (Alfred Jr.) who won a Nobel Prize in 1994, so his work came up first in every search. Metaphorically, I had a 100-piece puzzle, but I was missing at least 30 pieces.

The solution? Field trip!

If the government documents (that I knew existed but couldn't find copies of) weren't going to come to me, I was just going to have to go to them! After a lot of poking around (including the discovery that there are such things as books without call numbers in the SML reference room), I realized I had to go to the National Archives facility in College Park, MD. Fortunately, I received a generous $500 from the Mellon Fund (which is meant to help seniors cover project costs) and had a friend in DC who graciously let me crash on her couch, so I took the Amtrak and spent 3 days combing through boxes of files, some of which had to be specially declassified since no one had looked at them in decades =P

I literally took a midnight train (well, 12:26), but not to Georgia

Archives II, the College Park facility

Some of my (too many) boxes

Back in New Haven, I'm now compiling all my notes and photographs and starting to write my essay. The finished product isn't due until April 6, which still seems a long way off, but our first drafts are due February 23, which is...uh, coming up too fast!