The First Festival of Summer and it is a Geekfest - Part 2

Rochester is known as the Festival Capital of the World by those of us who live here. Last week I wrote about Imagine RIT (Innovation and Creativity Festival) as the first festival of the season. I made this claim, even though Imagine RIT seems, in general, to be overlooked as a festival.

To me the basic ingredients of a festival are food, music, and people. There was definitely food. In addition to the ice-cream I mentioned last week, there was a group of students who were making smoothies in a blender. This blender was powered by a bicycle. I didn’t try the smoothies, since there was a very long line and I am not patient. I did have a bicycle once and would have loved a blender on the back to mix up an ice-cold smoothie on a hot summer’s bike ride.

Besides these frozen treats, there was a portion of the campus filled with tents where foods from different countries could be purchased. Eldest, Littlest, and I went to an indoor eatery, that was air-conditioned, and sampled some American cuisine. We each had burgers and split an order of curly fries.

Boring, I know, but we were being patriotic.

There was music. Lots of music. Although RIT is known internationally for being a strong engineering school, there was lots of excellent student music. Everything from acapella choirs, to a faculty and student jazz band. Everywhere I turned, it seemed there was music.

That leaves the last, and most important ingredient, of a festival--people. There were many people that attended the festival. I lost track after having to take off my shoes to count them.

A wonderful thing about large numbers of people together is that it becomes easier to bump into people you know. As we were leaving one set of exhibits, Eldest burst forth with, “Grace!” Eldest was delighted to see a young lady she coaches who is named, Grace. The two young ladies greeted each other with a warm hug, like long lost sisters.

Grace was there with her father and two older brothers, Sam and Joe. I like these two young men. However, Joe has a special spot in my heart for a few different reasons.

First, because he would not be out-done by his sister. When he saw his sister and my daughter hugging, he ran up to me exclaiming, “Mr. D!” as he gave me a firm manly bear hug.

From left to right: Littlest, Sam, Joe, Grace, Eldest. Another reason I like Joe, his amazing hair reminds me of my hair.

Joe also holds a special spot in my heart from his time in my young teen Sunday school class. He is the only student in the almost twenty-five years of teaching, that I have had to admonish to stop playing tug-of-war -- with a chair.

Joe was at Imagine RIT with his high school robotics team. They were showing off a robot they had built that had won some major competitions. The picture above is of the robot. I do not know what it is designed to do, I think it plays tug-of-war with chairs against other robots.

The First Festival of the Summer and it is a Geekfest

Rochester is proud of its festivals and this weekend starts with our wonderful Lilac Festival, but this is not the first festival of the season. Imagine RIT was last weekend and officially starts our festival season.

Last weekend Eldest, Littlest, and I went, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), for the “Innovation and Creativity Festival”, otherwise known as Imagine RIT. I wrote about the same Festival last year, when Eldest and I visited.

One of the displays that caught my attention was an immense air cannon that RIT is working on as part of the “American Defense Against Uber Massive nerf Bombing”, or AmDUMB. This cannon launched nerf balls hundreds of feet into the air, hopefully shooting down any incoming nerf bombs.

One demonstration I wanted to see was the fencing demonstration. Having spent a great part of my youth in a rural agricultural community, I was keenly interested in the latest advances in putting up fences, which I remember as a painstaking, back-breaking process. Unfortunately, when I arrived, the demonstrators were playing a rousing game of Pirates instead of doing any fencing.

Eldest and Littlest went to see the science of making ice cream.  Scientists do it differently than normal people. They pour cream and flavorings into a bowl and add a solid form of carbon dioxide, or as Eldest says, “Dicarbon monolithic sulfate, but don’t quote me on that”. The result is a tasty frozen custard, scientifically speaking.  I tried some of Littlest’s treat and it was delicious.

One hidden display was this row of file folders with students name’s on them. This was how professors returned hard copies of assignments and such to the engineering students. I marveled out loud to my daughters that this was how things were done before the internet, email, and iThings. To which Eldest replied, “I know dad, I lived through part of the paper age.”

One last item of note, was some of the posters that were around the campus. Many of them pointed out some amazing exhibit that we should absolutely not miss. One poster, in particular, caught the eye of Eldest, who once posted on Facebook something along the lines of, “My boy friend told me he was going to break up with me because I live in a fantasy world. The jokes on him, he is a figment of my imagination.”

What do you call a dog with no legs?

There is a corny joke that goes, “What do you call a quadriplegic dog?” Nothing, because he won’t come anyway. Eldest and I went to Imagine RIT, a huge event at Rochester Institute of Technology, where we found a group of students who designed a specialized wheel chair for quadriplegic dogs. I suppose the new answer to that old joke would now be “Lucky; if he has one of these.”

My trip to Imagine RIT was a father/daughter date with Eldest, and the first exhibit we saw was a “homebrew” vacuum tube amplifier for a phonograph. The sound from the amp was amazing-- full, vibrant, and rich. The schematic for the amp was on display, and Eldest and I looked at it. I swelled with pride as she was able to identify the different symbols and the components they represented. With one notable exception, she could not identify the symbol for a vacuum tube. This was not surprising, as she had never seen a vacuum tube before.

As Eldest and I considered which displays to visit we consulted the map and we saw a display that we decided we would enjoy visiting. It was out of the way and difficult to find. We asked a student who promptly gave us directions to get us lost. As we wandered aimlessly up and down hallways for hours without any other humans in view, we discussed why the layout of the entire school was so complicated. Eldest observed, “This is a school for smart people. It must be that if a student cannot find their way to class they are expelled.”

We left the building, and as we walked outside, I noticed a unique architectural design that was easy to spot on the map. We rushed back into the building and there was the display we had been looking for. It was closed. I believe the student could not find where he was supposed to be and the Dean of Students has since expelled him.

Speaking of unique architectural features, we entered one building and found a staircase with the digits of pi engraved onto the steps. This delighted Eldest to no end and we had to take many pictures of pi.

Eldest taking pictures of pi

Take cream add dry ice and stir

Ice cream, delicious.

 On the floor above the pi staircase, young chemists were making homemade ice cream by dumping dry ice into cream and stirring. Eldest and I tried some and found it delicious. It also occurred to me that with the pi staircase and ice cream on the floor above, it was like pi a la mode.

On the way home Eldest and I talked about all the amazing things we saw. She said her favorite display of all of them was the “disk-turny-thingy.” I thought hard, running through all of the displays we saw and finally asked her what she meant. She said, “You know, the one with the vacuum tubes.” Apparently, not only were vacuum tubes foreign to her, but so were vinyl records on a turntable. She, however, claims that this is not the case, she simply could not remember the word “phonograph” and did not want to use the phrase “record player.”