Duke Basketball Season Ticket Campout

So this last weekend I attended the well established tradition of Duke Basketball Season Ticket Campout. For those who are not acquainted, allow me to give background info. Basketball at Duke is s HUGE deal. Duke is consistently ranked in the top ten teams in the nation. The venue for home games is Cameron Indoor Stadium. It holds less than 10,000 spectators. It is, arguably, the toughest place for an opposing team to get a win. The student spectators are affectionately referred to as the ‘Cameron Crazies.’ As you can imagine, acquiring tickets at such a venue is not an easy task.

Duke, like other schools with great basketball traditions, has a lottery system to attain tickets for their graduate and professional students. This was implemented in attempts to make it fair, but not easy, to get tickets. Unlike other schools you have to endure a 36 hour campout to even get your name in the lottery! This is known as the Duke Basketball Season Ticket Campout.

A few weeks before the campout, everyone who wants to participate must register online. The campout starts at 7PM Friday and ends at 7AM Sunday. We were allowed to set up our tents Thursday afternoon. We had to check in by 7PM Friday. We claimed a spot Thursday by setting up our tents. That was the easy part. Getting to our spot Friday was fairly difficult. Some people opted to bring U-Hauls to sleep in rather than tents. Now how many people are we talking? Well over 2,000! Traffic was a nightmare, U-Hauls everywhere, we weren’t allowed to unload anywhere near the site, and it was hot and humid. We had a lot of food and two coolers; one of which could easily be used to hide a body (that had all the beer). We had to haul those for about a mile.

Once we were settled we checked in and they explained how the campout worked. We were not to leave and to ensure that we didn’t they held roll call at very random times; we had no idea when it was going to happen. The way it worked is a siren would go off and then everyone, a 2,000 plus, had to join their line, designated by last name. They were about 15 different lines. They then checked your name off surprisingly fast. If you had not checked in within ten minutes of the siren going off you had officially missed the check in.

The first check in was not until about 11PM. Then there were a few more until after 2AM. The check ins started up before 6AM and were very random throughout the day. They again did check ins until after 2AM Sunday morning. They then called us at 5AM and told us to begin the end of the campout. They had us clean up EVERYTHING before they would let us know the results of the lottery. We had to take all our gear to our cars. We also had to have all trash put in the dumpster. We were not done until 8 at which point we got into our lines. We went up individually and were told if our names were put in the lottery and if we were selected to buy tickets.

So there is how the lottery went. The rest of it was a HUGE 36 hour party. Complete with copious amounts of alcohol and loud music. There was very little sleeping. The girl’s basketball team came to visit the first night. We all went to listen to them. The second night was a real treat. The men’s basketball team came, even Coach Mike Krzyzewski (Coach K)! He is a legend! He currently is the head coach of the USA Olympic Basketball Team. He, along with his team, won Gold in Beijing in 2008. He explained some changes at Cameron and how we should act as fans (be loud and irritate the opponent). He then took questions. Let me say I’m glad I didn’t ask him a stupid question; he doesn’t like those! Suffice it to say he came across as very arrogant and surprisingly rude. The arrogance I don’t mind, he has accomplished a lot (not that that’s an excuse). But the rudeness I could go without.

To wrap it up I won tickets! We had a group of five, three of us won tickets (we beat the odds; there were only 700 tickets). We will divvy up the ticket and the cost thereof between the five of us.

There you have it. It is now entirely too late. I will say Good Night! GO BLUEDEVILS!!

Here are some pictures.

My Homework

I thought I'd share my PhD level homework. We were given a coloring book and told to color two figures. Who knew Crayons would be required for graduate school? Thank goodness for Photoshop!!!!!!!!!

Can you see the 3D character given my shading?

PhD programs are tough!

Two Weeks!

Random Picture: Wellsville Mountains 2006

I have, thus far, been in class for two weeks. I am taking three seminars and two lecture/discussion type classes. We do a lot of reading! We read articles out of scientific journals and then have group discussions. There are no tests. Interesting; but why?

The idea behind this is that we are being trained as scientist, research scientists to be specific. As undergraduates we were taught principles of various aspects of science and then were tested to see if we had learned the principles. This approach does not allow too much wiggle room to seriously question what is being taught. Sure, as undergraduates we can ask, ‘how do they know that?’ If known, the professor can explain an experiment that was used (or may have been used) to ascertain the information. In undergraduate courses this system works great because the courses, for the most part, teach established data. However, as “PhD’s in training” we are now focusing on how scientific knowledge is gained. Also, if we are given a lecture, the material will most likely be penetrating the current boundaries of knowledge. It does no good to read an article and then say, ‘That’s it; we’ve figured it out.’ We need to seriously analyze the data and see if it makes sense. As scientists we have the responsibility to question the publication and, if we have the same research emphasis of the article’s authors, perhaps perform experiments to confirm or discredit the publication. Enough on the processes of scientific discovery.

This last week I started my first rotation. Again, a rotation is an eight week projects in a research lab that allows the student to essentially ‘test drive’ the lab. We do rotations in three different labs and then we can choose the lab that fits us the best. There is a story about how I got into my first rotation. I was looking at three different labs for possible rotations. There was a fourth lab that actually really wanted me. They had a computational project and I was an obvious fit as computation is all I do. However, working at McDonald’s was slightly more appealing than working in that lab.

Anyway, I had three labs that I was seriously considering for a first rotation but none of them could really take a student for the first rotation. Two were going to be gone for most of the first rotation and one was moving to a new lab. So I had a choice; see if I could rotate with the lab that was going to move or I could go to the fourth lab that really wanted me. I took the former course of action. When I explained the situation the PI, he said that I could do a rotation despite the eminent move. Now they have another set of hands to help move!

If you care to know what I do in my rotation, by all means keep reading. If not, that’s perfectly fine; I’ll say good bye and thanks for reading.

In my rotation I am working with a husband and wife team; the Richardson’s. They are very significant figures in the field of computational structural biology. In the lab I am trying to find patterns of errors in low resolution models. Now what does that mean?

(Disclaimer: The following may not be scientifically correct but gets the correct ‘concepts’ across nonetheless.) Protein structures (models) are made from shooting a crystal of the protein with x-rays. For the current discussion suffice it to say that we take very crude ‘pictures’ of the protein (scientists: please read disclaimer). Imagine a picture of a clock. At high resolution we can see the hands, the numbers, the screw holding the hands on, flaws on the face, every little detail. With this ‘picture’ we can then make a fairly accurate model of the clock. But you very well could have a low resolution ‘picture’ too. You can imagine that it is going to be difficult to make a model from this ‘picture.’ However, when low resolution is all you have you do your best. My goal is to find patterns of errors in models derived from low resolution ‘pictures.’ I hope that made sense.

I hope you all are doing well. Feel free to drop me a line. Have a wonderful week!