A visit from Anna

The weather is warming up, and that means it must be open house season. Yes, grads are flocking from around the world to visit places like MIT and decide if it's where they'll want to spend the next year or two (three, four, five, six...).

The most welcome such visitor was Anna, a friend from the olympiad program and then our time at Berkeley as exchange students together (some may know her as the ninja from my short film). She was visiting to check out a Harvard PhD program (I don't know the exact title, but Anna's interests are in applied physics and interdisciplinary areas based on physics).

She arrived on Sunday, a little before her open house activities were due to start, so we visited Harvard's natural history museum together. The particular highlight was a collection of glass models of flowers and other plant parts, made by a father and son team in the later part of the nineteenth century. They really looked realistic: one could easily have interspersed some actual plant specimens and had them go unnoticed. Many of the models were larger than life size, but in most cases I found it difficult to tell. I guess this shows that plants are fractal (a good candidate for RG?).

Like all American natural history museums (well, I've only been to three), it had a section explaining why evolution is a well validated scientific theory. I don't know why Americans get so hung up about evolution, but it does get rather tiring. One more interesting display compared different sized eggs, and pointed out that there is a maximum size and egg can possibly be, around 20 cm in diameter, 30 or a little more tall. Apparently this size is limited by the amount of oxygen that can pass through the shell. Now physicists should be able to model something like that, so perhaps I should have a go at it. So, consider a spherical egg...

On Tuesday, after her events had finished, Anna came to see MIT. I showed her around the campus: the tunnels, Stata centre, Kresge (by the way, I have a question: why don't people walk on Kresge? It looks like it would be so easy), etc. Really it was just a chance to catch up and spend a little time together. Like all of my Australia friends, she's been a very long way away. It will be good to have her closer (whether just up Mass Ave, or slightly further afield) from August.