I encountered a Cornell tradition today. The Friday before spring break is “Dragon Day”. Freshmen from the College of Architecture design and build a dragon, which they parade around and burn. It’s quite a spectacle. Apparently there used to be rivalry between the architecture and engineering students, so the engineers build a phoenix every year to compete with the dragon. 
The event dates back to the early 1900s, and there are some pretty neat pictures on the Wikipedia page 
Category Archives: Cornell
Trials and Tribulations of Research
We decided not to submit our research paper again (the deadline is Friday). We’ve got a few useful results, but they don’t cohere well, and none of us think that they would make a good conference paper. I think we’re all getting kind of sick of this particular topic, and the best thing may just be to move on. It’s too bad, but I guess that’s how research goes. We are planning on submitting a few of the results to a games oriented conference – it won’t carry as much weight research wise, but at least we will have something to show for ourselves.
Good News
Our demo paper got accepted to SIGMOD, the largest database conference. A demonstration paper is a three page description of a system that you then demonstrate at the conference. It’s not as big a deal as a research paper, which is longer and contains more original (and generally theoretical) work, but it’s still great that we got in.
I just got back from visiting Divya in D.C. for the weekend. I had an excellent time: good company, good food, and good art. We visited the National Gallery and sculpture garden (with ice skating), went to a free chamber music concert at the Kennedy Center, and partook of restaurant week at Marrakesh Palace.
(The sculpture above is by Claes Oldenburg — the same artist who did Spoonbridge and Cherry in Minneapolis. It’s the sculpture garden at the National Gallery.)
Classes start tomorrow. This semester I’m planning on taking
- Logic
- Database Systems
Hope it goes well.
Fire
There was a fire in the parking lot right outside my office today. They were grilling for some sort of catered event in Duffield Hall, and the whole thing sort of went up in flames. The flames were maybe twice as big as in the photo above, and it was fortunate that there wasn’t anywhere for it to spread.
Luckily nobody was hurt, and the Ithaca fire department showed up in force. There were some gas tanks from the grilling that started to catch fire, and I think there was some concern that they might explode. The firefighters hosed them down for at least 20 minutes to cool them off.
I didn’t get so much work done this afternoon, but it was certainly quite a spectacle.