Liquid Nitrogen and Ping Pong Balls

Do you know what happens when you place 1500 ping pong balls in a container with liquid nitrogen? Take a look at the bottom video in this IFLS blurb to find out. It is really damn cool! (The top video will help prepare you for the physics.)

My Old Ping Pong Coach

There is a small chance that I'll be able to get tickets for Olympic ping pong, which is the only sport that I care about in the Olympics. I decided to e-mail my old ping pong coach (Olympian Wei Wang) to see if she has any opinion about which countries have the most exciting players to watch. It would be really cool to go see some Olympic ping pong in person.

None of the Stereotypes are True!

Quora compiled some of the search statistics of some of the top US schools (Caltech, Stanford, etc.), and they found that there is no evidence whatsoever that any of the stereotypes are even remotely true. Really. I mean it.

I think my favorite part of this is that the kings of sports at Caltech are table tennis and chess! (Go Caltech table tennis!)

(Tip of the cap to Julius Su.)

What happens in Urbana-Champaign stays in Urbana-Champaign

Tomorrow morning I will fly away from North Carolina to visit University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and give a seminar in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering.

Back in 2002 (when I was still a graduate student), I interviewed for a faculty position in that department. It was still called the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the time, as the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics had not yet joined forces with it. This is my first time visiting UIUC since that long-ago interview.

I know quite a few faculty members at UIUC both in that department and in other departments (in fact, one of my friends from graduate school is in the MechSE Department), and one of my friends from my postdoc era at Caltech is currently a graduate student in physics at UIUC. She was my regular ping pong partner back then, though whether or not we actually play ping pong or hang out in some other way (she'll be picking me up and dropping me off at the Indiana-Bloomington airport, for example) depends on whether we can actually find a ping pong table.

Illness + Ping Pong + Zelda

I have had an awful sore throat all day and I'm feeling very fatigued right now. I will try to fight it, but people have been getting sick around here the last couple of weeks and I think I may have finally succumbed. (I started feeling a little bit bad physically a few weeks ago, but it was thankfully a false alarm, as I felt fine the next morning.) Sigh...

I played ping pong today because I needed to skip last week to go to the Alison Moyet concert (about which I'll blog at some point) and I didn't want to skip two weeks in a row. I actually played pretty well despite how crappy I felt, and I did well against challenging competitors. A couple of the people I played today are particularly good practice opponents for me because their style of play forces me not to get overaggressive (by trying to kill a shot instead of just applying pressure to get a better shot the next time). Hence, playing them helps me develop better playing habits in general. They also often hit the ball to my backhand, and I have noticed that I have been getting a bit more consistent with my backhand as a result of practicing against them. (Well, my opponents tend to hit to my backhand so that they don't have to face the wrath of my forehand loop, but today was doing a couple of reasonable backhand loops, which is something I need to practice. My backhand needs to be stronger simply so that I can get more forehand shots and kill people with those.)

I also almost beat Zelda: Twilight Princess last night. Unfortunately, I had some trouble with the final battle against Ganon/Ganondorf and I ultimately died. My eyes and hands were tired, so I didn't try a second time yesterday. I'll try again in a week or so---I think I will take a break from Zelda and play some Super Paper Mario in the intervening time---but I am finally almost done with the game. It's about time too, as a couple of my students now keep asking me every week where I am in the game (and have now started asking me if I've finished). I feel like I can't let them down and I don't want to disappoint them by letting this game linger even longer than I already have. (I'm also planning to do the game's "Cave of Ordeals" before I start focusing on other games, though I may need to wait until spring break to do that because I suspect it might take several hours of real time to go through the whole thing. I probably will not bother getting all the special fighting moves, though one of my students tells me that those will really come in handy for the Cave of Ordeals. If I fail without those, I might go ahead and get those. I'm not going to bother collecting all the poes and golden bugs because that just isn't a good use of my time. I have OCD in numerous aspects of my life, but for the most part it doesn't extend to video games. I just don't get much enjoyment out of collecting everything in a game for its own sake.)

Riddle me this

This is a mini-rant.

Riddle me this: How come when people are trying to reacquire stray ping pong balls and the ball goes to the next table, so many of them will aggressively go after it even if the players at the other table are in the middle of a point (which means they should bloody wait until the point is done!) even at the expense of their own health? I have seen this everywhere I've played ping pong and because the quarters we have at Oxford are close ones, I see it more often than usual here. It's also a great way to get seriously hurt --- I've seen multiple people get smacked in the head by a paddle because they did this, although nothing truly serious happened to them as a result of that. The most extreme case I saw today was that I was about to return a ball with a very hard top spin and I suddenly noticed out of the corner of my eye (or out of half of my eye) that somebody's face was suddenly between my paddle and the ball (and I was about to hit the ball really hard and was swinging accordingly). I had to stop short to make sure I didn't nail the guy in the side of the face and I twisted my knee slightly in the process of cutting short my stroke (basically, it's all people involved that can get hurt when people go too close to another table with a point in progress). It still hurts a bit but it should be ok (but part of my mind is telling me I should have just finished my stroke and not risked hurting myself because it was the other idiot who couldn't even wait 20 seconds for the point to finish). Be patient, people!

George Carlin had it right:People are fucking stupid!

(At least this post reminded me to add the 'ping pong injuries' label. That became a meme among the ping pong gang at Caltech the last couple of years.)

Ping pong in Oxford

Or as the Chinese say, "ping pong."

I went to my first meeting of Oxford's table tennis association yesterday. Unsurprisingly, the club here is done more formally than it is at Caltech. They have uniforms, warm-up jackets, and all sorts of other stereotypical things one would expect to see for sports at a place like Oxford. The team members are pretty hardcore, though a couple of them did have trouble with my serve. The other people I played --- others in the club and people considering to join the club --- couldn't hit my serve at all (which is the usual thing I see). I didn't notice anybody using the pen-holder grip, though I did some some play styles that I knew about and had occasionally seen (Wei Wang demonstrated them). It will be good to get more of a chance to play against people who employ those styles regularly.

I only played once during the summer, so I was a bit rusty. One could thing about the club being more formal is that we do some drills during the club meetings, which makes up for not having a class as we do at Tech. This was a very pleasant surprise. The drills we did on Sunday were pretty familiar (though they were specified a little too much, IMO). This included a particular drill with the backhand loop, which I don't have but most of the team members do. Also, there was a variant on this in terms of playing a 21-point game with one's partner and not being allowed to use forehand at all. That was a good drill, although I lost a couple of points when my opponent used forehand anyway (granted, in shots that definitely called for it).

Most of the club members seem nice, but a couple of them seemed to have the sort of stereotypical holier-than-thou attitude that one hears about Oxonians. We'll see how that goes.

I played for 2.5 hours yesterday, which is a bit much for me at one time. The surface on which the tables were placed is made of some sort of rubber turf. The ball wouldn't bounce when it hit it, so there was a lot more bending down to get the ball than I'm used to. I found that to be both annoying and tiring. Also, it didn't help my knee, which was a bit sore before I started. Playing on that surface seemed bad on my knee, so we'll see how that goes as well. I feel like it's much easier to hurt oneself seriously with this surface rather than just a wood one below the tables. One person did suffer a slight ping pong injury, though he was better in a few minutes. (Some dumbass went right behind him while were were in the middle of a point, so of course there was a collision. Why can't people understand that when somebody is in the middle of a point, you give them space and don't go right next to them? I fail to grasp why people find this so difficult, and most of the ping pong injuries I've seen occur when some dumbass does this. Also, is it so hard to wait for the end of a point? It's not like they last that long at non-professional levels!)

This club also charges --- it's 15 pounds per year or 30 for life (as long as one is affiliated with Oxford). I chose the latter because that's a dominant strategy if one is going to be around >= 2 years, and I'll obviously be around a lot longer than that. Oh, and I'm not eligibile for the team because permanent faculty aren't eligible. Grrrr.... At Tech, postdocs weren't eligible because the NCTTA rules work just like the NCAA ones. Now I go to a place where postdocs are eligible but permanent faculty aren't. Ah well. Next Sunday, I'll try out for the team anyway and if I would end up making it (which is iffy, but I might sneak in there at the bottom, which is what happened both at Cornell and at Tech when I was an undergrad), then I'll be allowed to practice with the team in their extra Friday practice and just won't be able to participate in tournaments. Alternatively, I could just be the mascot again...

Anyway, it was great to play ping pong again! (No Sean mauch sighting this time, however... I would have been really impressed had I run into him doing martial arts there.)

Caltech women's table tennis

I should blog about this a bit, since I have a close friend on the team and refer to various ping pong things pretty frequently in general.

Anyway, the Caltech women's table tennis team was in lovely Columbus, Ohio for the past few days competing in Nationals. (Yes, a Caltech team made Nationals. That's pretty much the impetus for this blog entry.) They returned to Pasadena on Monday and because of the tiring weekend, my friend went to only 4 hours of class on Monday instead of her usual 6 (hard core!).

A couple of months ago, both the men's and women's teams went down to San Diego to compete in a regional tournament. They were ranked something like 14th before it started and on the strength of our #1 player, who went undefeated there, the women's team rose all the way to an 8th place ranking at the time and (after some more regional tournaments took place) received the news that they got into Nationals as a wild card team. For Nationals, the team needed to have some sort of uniform, so I helped in some preliminary discussions for part of the design (I basically provided some feedback) and more directly with manpower in helping to make the shirts.

The team had heard about some great players on other teams in Nationals, so it was known that things would be tough. I got some information on Sunday morning and got some more today. Caltech did finish in last, but they almost didn't. So while most schools wouldn't consider this a huge success, getting to Nationals (which is unheard of for teams from Tech) and almost avoiding the cellar is an extremely nice foundation. The #1 player is a freshman, so I'm optimistic about another trip to Nationals next year. The #2 player (the person with whom I hang out) won one of her matches and won a game in an at least one other match.

Almost the entire team (except for the #4 player) experienced injuries or sickness. There were eventually some "ping pong injuries" (a meme that has been going around the Caltech ping pong crowd at least since first term), but there was other stuff, too: The #1 player got sick walking around in the rain (the team is at a hotel not associated with the tournament, so they were walking instead of taking a shuttle), and the #3 player apparently broke out in hives.

I requested to be the unofficial team mascot because I wanted to mention that snippet of infomatin in a bio for a math article of mine (the football-team ranking one) that is coming out this year. My coauthors and I have been mentioning sports-related stuff in our bios, and I already needed to update mine because of recent victories by the Caltech basketball teams. However, I wanted to mention ping pong instead because that's the only Tech sport with which I have any affiliation. Anyway, a vote was taken on Sunday morning, and it was agreed unanimously that I should be the team's mascot. This is one of the proudest moments of my life. I am shedding tears of joy. :)

Back from Berkeley

I came back last night. I'm still kind of tired, and I'll need to do a little work tonight for my book and in reading the draft of a SURF proposal. I finished the recommendation letters I needed to do imminently, so tomorrow I'll get back to dealing with something else with my book (that I meant to do before finding out that I needed to go through the edited text cover to cover to find all the things I wanted to change back or otherwise alter).

So, as Gazebo's flickr post for today indicates, one of the things I did up in Berkeley was develop my Guitar Hero skills. I had previously played either one or two songs on easy in Guitar Hero I -- I Love Rock & Roll (which I know very well) and some other song I can't remember. Cooperative Guitar Hero II was the weapon of choice on this occasion. After figuring out the controls (I was confused about them my first couple games), I started off by getting about 77 % success on level 1 songs and I ended up by getting low to mid 90s on all tiers, with a 89 % victory on Freebird. Then I graduated to medium and in my first game got only 57 % on a song I know really well. After that, I got 86%, 85%, and 83% on two level songs and one level one song (in that order), so that's pretty much my current level after a few hours of practice. Not spectacular by any means, but definitely far above where I started. I played in acoustic mode the entire time and as you can see in the picture, I stared down in the general direction of the floor in the best grune tradition.

On Sunday, while I was waiting for my plane at the Oakland airport, I ran into Meredith Alden '01, who I hadn't seen in a long time and with whom I hadn't kept in touch. The long-lost Kaon is now living in Olympia, WA and just got married in November.

Today, I played ping pong for the first time in 2 months with a pre-arranged sparring partner who I managed to pelt only a few times. (It was not on purpose, despite accusations to the contrary.) My foot is still a little sore, but I'm pretty much better now. If you asked me a week ago, I would not have expected to play today. I think my backhand loop got a little better, which is good because I really need my backhand to get stronger.

Also, I confirmed with Wei that the Thursday 9-11 pm slot had been the slot for the advanced class for the entire history of the course, so my prior confusion on the change for this term certainly had a lot of data behind it.

Curveball

I was thrown for quite a surprising curveball this evening. (Note that this is technically redundant the way I am using the word "curveball.")

I am back from the Bayou---I'll have some more BayouBlogging later (probably tomorrow)---and I decided I would go to my ping pong class tonight even though I am absolutely exhausted and feeling sick from my flight. I'll be out of town for another week after being in town for the next 10 days, and I didn't want to miss 3 of the first 4 classes this term.

It turns out, however, that the advanced class is meeting Mondays from 7-9 pm this term, despite the fact that the class has met Thursday from 9-11 pm every term since at least fall term of my frosh year (Fall 1994) and I believe several years before then. Technically, it's possible the class met at some other time while I was away from Tech, but I've never seen this class meet at another time and I've taken it 13 times before this term (and it also met at this time every term I was at Tech, so my sample size is 19 and I figured it was the same in the 7 years I was gone because the times before and after were the same---I know, this is not exactly rigorous or even the induction of the sun rising every day, but it's what I have).

Some of the BayouBlogging I have is pretty amusing, but I'm really tired and hungry and don't feel like going through it at the moment.

Trailer for Balls of Fury

Here is the trailer for Balls of Fury, which is slated to come out in the second quarter of 2007.

This is the movie for which Caltech ping pong coach Wei Wang served as an expert instructor. (Actually, she apparently did this previously for Friends, which I didn't know until today.) She did her Christopher Walken (the main evil guy in the film) impression today, based on what he did when he showed up to the club where she teaches in Santa Monica.

As you can see from the trailer, the film looks quite campy. (It makes me think of the trailer for Dodgeball, which I never actually saw even though there are a couple things from it I like to cite.) It certainly has the potential to be awful, but I'm going to see it anyway. By the way, the nun in the trailer is Wei. (They used computer imagery to change the face.) She's also apparently in some music video that goes with this (as the nun), so I'll have to look out for that as well.