Service at the Cathedral of Knowledge

One of the questions I get the most about Yale is “how hard are the classes?” That's always a tough one to answer, because that assumes there's a “standard” or “average” class. Instead of trying to give a vague, all-encompassing answer, instead I'd like to show you how I keep up with one particular class.

This is Sterling Memorial Library, sometimes jokingly referred to as A Cathedral of Knowledge (the architect really wanted to build a church instead).

Now zoom in to my personal fortress.


This is where I did most of my work for a graduate seminar I took this fall, JAPN 559: Reading, Literature, and the Humanities (possibly the most vague title ever) that focuses on translating some pretty advanced short stories, poems, and literary critiques from Japanese to English.

Since it's a class on reading literature, the range of vocabulary and imagery is way broader than would be used anywhere else. That means it's suddenly a lot harder. But with the right sources, I've been able to get through some incredibly tough translations. Let's break down my collection of toys-

At the most basic level, I use an English-based online dictionary of standard vocabulary (jisho.org) and a Japanese-based dictionary that includes more contemporary and casual definitions (alc.co/jp).

I also use a Japanese game for the Nintendo DS that functions as a dictionary where I can write in characters using the touch screen. I got the software shipped from Japan for $50- equivalent standalone touch-screen dictionaries cost more like $300.

When those fail, I resort to two character dictionaries: Koujien gives the most comprehensive definitions once I know how to pronounce a word, but usually I have to start at a kanji dictionary to look up an unfamiliar character by radical and stroke count. These are the end-all be-all of Japanese definitions in Japanese, so with enough labor I can define anything.

Now I can read words. That's a start. Beyond that, I keep a grammar dictionary on hand for things that confuse me. But the funny thing about literature is that it likes to reference other literature, and history, and names and myths and all those silly things that look like words but don't show up in a standard dictionary.

For that, I keep a Japanese literary encyclopedia on hand, as well as an open link to the huge database collection of Yale's East Asia Library. It encompasses periodicals, dictionaries, encyclopedias, photo archives, and more, coming from both original japanese sources and English scholarly collections. This is especially useful considering Wikipedia once led me to mistake Maeda Ai, the most influential literary critic of the 20th century, for Maeda Ai, the voice actress best known for playing Mimi in Digimon. Oops.

Even with all these sources, the class is tough. I thought I had prepared the assignment Arigatau thoroughly for class, thinking it was a nice little short story about a polite car driver appreciating the finer moments of the season's beauty while he drove a mother and daughter to a far-off city. But since it was written in the 1920's, it included a number of now obsolete ways of writing common words. So when I didn't recognize 賣る really meant 売る, I missed the crux that turned the story into a struggle about selling the daughter into prostitution. Oops.

Put together, I can spend an hour or more trying to fully comprehend a single page of text-- thankfully, assignments for the class are short. The challenge comes not because the class takes the most hours but because I have to take every sentence so critically, not just plowing through it linearly. Instead, I have to constantly re-examining the meaning of what I'm reading through a ton of angles. Its hard, and I love it.

Congratulations, 2014!

It's December 15th. There were a lot of people anxiously hitting refresh on their browsers all day, waiting for the admissions decision to go live on the internet. Now, Josh and I want to be among the first to congratulate all our awesome new admits for 2014.

See how excited Elliot is to eat that yam?
He's even more excited for the class of 2014. So excited there's fireworks!

Josh will offer you all congratulatory high fives, too.

We're heading up this blogging initiative, leading a team of awesome Yalies to try to share with you a taste of our personal experiences at Yale. We'll all be putting up new posts regularly, so be sure to check in often! We're here for you and to answer your questions, and we want to tailor this website to what YOU want, so drop us a comment here or a private message if there's something you want to see our blogging team writing about.

But for now, have fun with the site, meet your incredible future classmates, and have great winter breaks!

Yours in Lux and Veritas,
Elliot and Josh

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dinosaur

As the son of an art teacher, I feel like I might be betraying my genes: I can't draw to save my life. Yet this hasn't stopped me from plunging into the underground art scene at Yale- I hosted an unofficial exhibit last year and was just legitimized by the inclusion of my work into a college-wide gallery.

Let's back up: the basement of Jonathan Edwards, my residential college, has a long hallway reserved as gallery space. Previously, it was filled with professional museum quality prints from all over the world, with exhibits changing every month or so. But there was a period my sophomore year where the exchange between exhibits took too long, leaving nothing but bleak white walls. And that's just boring.

So, enterprising young artist that I am, I gathered my resources (The "MIGHTY DINOS" coloring book and crayola crayons, a gift from my older sister) and invited everyone I knew to come color a dinosaur. I then surreptitiously put the dinosaurs up all over the gallery. What it lacked in artistic pedigree, it made up for in awesome, bringing together the creative energies of a ton of friends and filling the space with color (and DINOS). I couldn't help smiling every time I heard the buzz about the mysterious dinosaurs that had proliferated overnight.

They eventually took my dinosaurs down once they replaced it with a real exhibit, and a great sadness fell across the land.
But this year, the student curators of the gallery sent out a call for all JE artists to submit their work for a new gallery called “KIDS: The Art of Growing Up”, loosely interpreting the themes of childhood, youth, and families through any medium. With funding from JE, I expanded the original “wax and fibrous pulp medium” works into enormous laser-printed glossy posters, with even brighter colors than before.

So amid sketches and photographs created by actually talented people, my dinosaurs debuted at a grand catered reception one Friday Night. Critics have received my work warmly, praising my “ability to stay mostly within the lines surpassing that of even the best second graders”.

I try not to take myself too seriously, so even when I'm supposedly working hard, it's nice to have the chance to take a chill break with some color crayons and dinos.

Birds Gone Wild : Spring Break in Ecuador

Since taking office, two of University President Richard C. Levin's goals have been to expand funding and research opportunities for the sciences and to increase the number of international opportunities and connections for undergraduates. In a stroke of brilliance, the two were combined to create my spring break, where my ornithology lab got full funding to go on a birding trip in Ecuador, applying everything we had learned about behavior and taxonomy in the classroom to actual field study.

One of my favorite birds from the trip, ensifera ensifera, the sword-billed hummingbird.

This post may be a long one, because I have a lot of cool bird pictures to share, but it's worth it!

The trip was a pretty small group, consisting of the 12 people in the lab, the grad student TA, our professor, and his birding colleague, the director of inverterbrate collections at the Peabody Museum of natural sciences. I didn't know most of them too well before the trip, but now we're all really close. The professor is no longer "Professor Prum"- just Rick.

Our total for the two week trip ran to 455 unique bird species identified- for someone like me with no birding experience, it was an intense crash course. (In this picture above, I like to imagine Dan is about to throw out his pokeball and say "Oscillated Tapaculos, I choose you!")

We saw birds that still hold a legendary status among the birdwatching community, like the Tanager Finch, an unclassified bird that hasn't been spotted in 50 years. Above is the incredibly rare Giant Antpitta- this individual was known as Maria, and with the help of some native guides we got within feet of her.
I had always imagined birdwatching as something that bored old people did as a hobby, until I tried it myself. Serious birders are perfectly happy to get up before the crack of dawn for the early birds, hike all day in search of diurnal birds, stay out late for the nocturnal ones, and get up the next morning driven to do it all again. My professor, the most intense birdwatcher of all, is honestly an inspiration- if I can ever find nearly that degree of passion for anything that could compare to what he holds for birds, I will count myself a successful man.

As we drove up, down, over, across, and through the Andes in the nonstop quest for birds, we encountered some pretty epic conditions. We dealt with landslides, roads washing out beneath rivers, and even fallen boulders blocking the road. In a rampant display of manliness, a few other guys and I pushed the boulders off the road. Rarely has driving been such an adventure.

On our second day of exploring the western slopes of the Andes around Mindo, we spelunked an oilbird cave. It was literally a crevasse torn deep into the earth, and we had to traverse slime-covered ladders and waterfalls in our descent.

The ladder actually went right through the waterfall- we got soaked!

But for all the effort, we found nesting steatornithidae, one of the most ecologically unique birds out there. They use echolocation to navigate within the caves at night, and eat only avocado and palm oil. In fact, they're so oily that Quichoa natives in the area traditionally ground up the birds for cooking oil and candle making.

I have a long history of climbing statues that I'm probably not supposed to- so when I found this oversized statue of the Andean Cock-of-the-Rock, I couldn't resist climbing to the top. We all had to notice, though, that the coloration here isn't true to the real bird. I was absolutely ruined when I tried to buy souvenirs, because most of the bird-themed trinkets weren't real species and I couldn't bear to buy any that weren't biologically accurate. :p

On our last day in Mindo, we went to a restaurant with an array of nectar and fruit feeders right outside the glass windows. We had the chance to watch tanagers battle for banana supremacy while we supped on pallanchingos.

On our first trek to the East of the Andes, we hopped a half hour flight from Quito to Coca. From there, we boated along the Rio Napo, one of the major tributaries to the Amazon. I played the computer game Amazon Trail as a little kid, but never imagined I'd actually be there- it still blows my mind.

We got into still smaller canoes for the last leg of the river to Sani Lodge, part of the reservation for the Quichoa natives who now run eco-tourism ventures, because the water level was so slow. I spent this boat ride with just me, the guides, and my professor on the one boat- my bird count went WAY up for spending some time with the guy, and I learned a ton about the incredible research he's now doing with soft matter and light defraction in the structural colors of feathers.

The view from outside Sani Lodge, along the river.

The latter half of the trip was mostly in the Amazon lowland basin- here we started climbing an observation tower built into an enormous queypac tree.

My camera couldn't begin to handle the scale, but the tree went over 150 feet straight up! I tried my hardest to ignore the presence of a termite nest living at the top.

Look closely- that's not just a dead stump. It's a potoo! This family of birds has the adaptation of looking and behaving exactly like a dead tree (AKA not moving all day) to avoid predation.

The rainforest definitely isn't the stereotypical college spring break, but we still stayed at some pretty swanky resorts in between long bouts of birdwatching- all on Yale's dime. Relaxing in the tropics is great- we even went swimming in a cayman-infested lagoon near this lodge, and somehow lived to tell the tale.

Again, not the typical spring break. Instead of wet t-shirt contests, we had wet poncho contests when we got caught in tropical storms.

Even though the focus of the trip was on birds, traveling with such brilliant minds I picked up a lot about rainforest biology of all kinds. Here, we took a quick break from searching for Pointtail Palmcreepers for Rick to explain how the strangler fig had grown up around and finally dragged this other tree down.

Ecuador is about the size of Connecticut, but for its size its one of the most biodiverse places in the world. You can get a sense of it by the huge variety of terrains here, from mountainous cloud forests to lowland rainforests to barren rocky lakes far from civilization, all in search of more birds.

I couldn't believe that there'd still be birds on the highest peaks of the Andes, but we braved the elements in search of those rare ducks and hummingbirds crazy enough to make the moss and fungus covered summits their home.



Our resort up in the Andean slopes around Papallachta had hot springs heated by volcanoes. Let me tell you, this was HEAVEN. This makes up for all the sweat and grime and bugbites you could possibly accumulate in two weeks of trekking the wild.

This is just a silly picture I had to share- some of the snack bars we ate looked exactly like packed bird seed. Here, I do my best impression of a parrot swooping in.

Speaking of parrots swooping, we visited a parrot lick, which is a mine into a hillside naturally formed by foraging parrots. They eat a lot of seeds, so to deal with the all the natural plant toxins that build up in their diet they eat clay right out of the ground that neutralizes the poisons.
I like to imagine the mealy amazon parrots here are telling themselves NOM NOM NOM as they chew up this rock.
Look at him go- Rick is always on the lookout, and it's infectious. Back in New Haven now, I can't stop identifying the latin names and behaviors of the birds I see.

We discussed a lot about different behaviors and adaptations to ecological niches- this glossy tanager actually puts his entire lower jaw inside the feeder intended for hovering hummingbirds.



And for your viewing pleasure, a few more hummingbirds- we saw 56 different species in Ecuador. You could actually consider this a little low considering there were more than 150 in the country to be found. Above is the male racquet-tail. A bandy winged puffleg: they're never still! Also, some birds have very silly sounding names.

A violet trainbearer (left) and the pteryian bronzewing (right).

Not a hummingbird- just a really scary looking spider.

The sapphirewing. Even with the high end photo equipment brought for the trip, hummingbirds are so hard to capture on film. They never stop moving!



Early in the trip, when I looked across the slopes and saw the shape of an enormous Y formed by the growth patterns of trees, I knew it was a good omen. This was the adventure of a lifetime, exploring such a remote and wild part of the world while learning an absurd amount of ornithology. To the unitiated, I probably seem a little bizarre now for the kind of glee with which I'll point out any bird on the street, but I love it. I have the seen the light, and now I know: birds are awesome.

Embezzlement 101

I'd like to share with you a piece of advice I received from a senior as I first stepped on campus as a freshman-"Your goal for the next four years: get as much money from Yale as you possibly can". I chuckled at it then, but have come to realize the wisdom of it. I'm not out to be the next embezzlement CEO champion of the modern world, but instead, I'm finally taking advantage of how much money Yale will give me to do stuff. My new year's resolution for this year was to travel (preferably on somebody else's dime). Lo and behold, only a few months into 2009, I've made some sweet headway on that front. I think when resolution time rolls around in 2010, I'll be giving myself enthusiastic high fives for what I'm about to do.

For spring break, I'm going to Ecuador to hang out with birds! This semester, I've been enrolled in Evolutionary/Ecological Biology 273: Ornithology. Through that, I'm getting complete funding to spend two weeks out of spring break in Ecuador, exploring the cloud rainforests and doing some ornithological field work with the 12 other students in the lab. The Biology department is covering all the expenses for the expedition, and all I had to do was take care of my own injections (I got yellow fever and typhoid shots on the same day... ouchies. Although it's kinda fun to tell your friends that you just got yellow fever).

See that tiny red hut in the lower right? That's one of the stops we'll be making through this valley
of one of Ecuador's largest cloud forests. I'll have tons of crazy bird photos to share on my return.

I also won a fellowship to study abroad in Japan this summer- I haven't decided where just yet, but I'm looking at a couple different language institutions that cram a whole year's worth of Japanese study into an intensive summer session, staying with a host family, and going out on cultural excursions over the weekend. The Richard U. Light fellowship is amazing, covering my travel expenses, tuition costs, living costs, even incidental spending money. Read more about it at http://www.yale.edu/iefp/light/.

This sign outside of one of the classrooms in Hakodate is a reminder of the "日本語だけ" rule- most of the programs come with a language pledge to speak only in the language you're studying while in class (the Light Fellowship applies to language programs all across East Asia). In case you're wondering what the sign says... the question "English, OK?" is asked by an alien and receives the response "dame, NIHONGO!" ("that's bad, JAPANESE!") from what I can only assume to be an ostrich. Sometimes I really love Japanese sign making.

The Tokyo program I'm looking at has classes right outside this urban park- classy, no?

I'm way excited for these opportunities to spend Yale's money. I leave for Ecuador in just a week and a half (maybe I should start packing...? Nah.) and would hop a plane for Japan sometime early June. I'll keep you posted how these turn out.

Tell me what you eat, and I'll tell you who you are

Confucius once said "Girls only want guys with sweet skills". Or maybe it was Napoleon Dynamite who said that, but the wisdom is still there. That's why I think that viewing the college experience exclusively as intellectualism and classes and learning from books is kinda silly. The opportunities I've had to learn and grow my sweet skills, beyond what's covered in class, are immense, but let me share one of my recent favorites: Iron Chef.


Yale College Council is the student government tasked with (among other things) spending large amounts of money to entertain me. One of their new creations for this year was an Iron Chef competition pitting teams from each residential college in the ultimate culinary battle for eternal glory, cash prizes, and having their recipe immortalized on the menus of dining halls campus-wide.

The Jonathan Edwards Team: Felicia, Jingying, and me.
Notice our sweet chef toques with the JE crest on them.

Our largest dining hall, Woolsey Commons (which was where they filmed the library motorcycle chase in Indiana Jones IV) was converted into a "Kitchen Stadium", with cooks lining the edge and enormous screens projecting all the action as it happened. The whole thing was mocked up to be just like the Iron Chef TV show itself, with film crews from YTV interspersed. As everyone else came through for dinner, they had the chance to watch our hardcore cookery in action as they explored the kitchen stadium or watched on the giant screens. The only thing we were lacking from the actual Iron Chef was the guy who does backflips.

And the secret ingredient is...

...butternut squash! (Ooh, dramatic fog machine!)
(And then the announcer in the middle did backflips.) (Except not actually.)

Unlike the show, we knew our secret ingredient of butternut squash in advance so we could plot out and practice a recipe, because none of us of are actually professional chefs. (Err... actually most of us aren't. I was competing against people who had taken gap years to cook professionally in Europe.) Each team worked with the dining staff in their own colleges to invent their own recipe and practice it to perfection.

My team created an appetizer that was candied squash and fried goat cheese medallions on a bed of arugula, garnished with pink onions and a vinaigrette that featured vermont maple syrup, as part of the competition's focus on using local and seasonal flavors. We then bloomed our own spice blend from scratch to make a chicken and squash fall curry, served in a hollowed-out squash bowl with a trench of rice carved into the wide stem of the gourd.

The judges, Dean-turned-Provost Salovey, Dean Miller,
and the Head Chef of Yale Dining, debate their favorites.

Best of all, after the judges had sampled a plate,
everyone else got the chance to taste all the dishes.
Nom nom nom.

Cooking requires enthusiasm! I even got to keep the sweet sign
for my team's area, now hung proudly in my common room.

YTV is in the process of editing all the footage together to make a professional, hour-long episode of the competition. Once that's all put together, I'll definitely share some video footage with you. My team didn't win, but I learned some ballin' new cooking techniques and scored major points when I made that salad for my family on Thanksgiving.