Macroscopic Bits
Daily adventures, from OPERS to the dining hall.
Photo by Celina Chen
#1: Cluster 8
2, 4, 6, 8, no one does it like Cluster 8! Cluster 8 brings passion, hype, incredible lyricism, and of course, sea lion calls! Their energy each week has even convinced students from other clusters to clap like sea lions along with them.
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#2: Cluster 6
Cluster 6, it's time to devour Along with plenty of energetic sustainable power references and rhymes in their call-and-response chant, Cluster 6 enthusiastically stands up for their cluster chant to spin in circles like a turbine!
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#3: Cluster 3
Cluster 3! We love trees! Cluster 3’s chant ties into both the flora and fauna of Bugs and Bones, and relates to their lip sync battle, once again putting a humorous tone on how they catch and kill insects for science!
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#4: Cluster 12
Cluster 12! 👏 👏 👏 Cluster 12’s chant is creative, fun, and memorable, keeping it short and sweet by reciting the full government name of their cluster each morning. They then bring the right energy to the Discovery Lectures by doing the wave!
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#5: Cluster 11
Cluster 11, we have a confession: Both honest and concise, Cluster 11 found clever ways to rhyme the number eleven and tie in the statistics portion of artificial intelligence in their chant.
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#6: Cluster 10
10, 10, silicon! We get quizzes too often! Showcasing fun and catchy rhymes with the number ten, Cluster 10 jokes about their alarming amount of quizzes in their cluster chant, and occasionally ends with a strong “We love Shaowei Chen!”
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#7: Cluster 9
Cluster 9, we're Barbie dancers Cluster 9 manages to innovatively rhyme “dancers” with “lecture,” and includes a nice shoutout to their instructor Dr. Wang!
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#8: Cluster 7pH 7 'cause we're not basic, in this cluster 'cause we're all aces! Cluster 7 gets a reaction out of us each morning with their chant’s clever pH and acid-base puns.
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#9: Cluster 2
Cluster 2! Cluster 2! Cluster 2’s chant displays lots of love for their professor and our UCSC COSMOS Program Director, the one and only Shaowei Chen! Their efforts have inspired a battle of who can shower Shaowei with the most praise through cluster chants at his Discovery Lecture, but of course, Cluster 2 still won Shaowei’s heart.
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#10: Cluster 1
6 mod 5, we don't go outside! Cluster 1 found a creative way to make us do math each morning with the modulo operation, and has joked that they don’t go outside so much that Katrina quoted them in the weekly COSMOS life recap sent to our parents!
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#11: Cluster 5
Cluster 5, we feel alive! With a cute rhyme about the trials and tribulations of game design, we only wish Cluster 5’s chant was longer!
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#12: Cluster 4
The end is near 👏 👏 👏 With a reference to their fear of Schrödinger—king of quantum mechanics and dead-and-alive cats—Cluster 4 scares us each morning with a foreboding “the end is near,” quoting a 2012 Instagram caption from their physics professor.
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SIP Chant
S-I-P, S-I-P, this is where we want our tea! |
Cluster 2 Chant for Prof. Chen's Discovery LectureGo, go, Shaowei |
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POG Review: Passionfruit Orange Guava
“Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.”
- Albert Einstein What is POG?
POG is a delicious, refreshing juice that quenches your dry throat. It is a nourishing and hydrating drink. The ambrosia of the gods. A bit of liquid trickles down your chin as you slurp down the juice.
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California Scrub-Jays have white bellies, blue wings and heads, and white throats and eyebrows. Like other Jays, Scrub-Jays are omnivores, feeding on insects, fruits, and nuts. They are also highly vocal and often call with a raspy shriek while foraging and hopping around in trees and scrubs. You can check out the Scrub-Jays’ calls here: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/California_Scrub-Jay/sounds.
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Oak Titmouse
Oak Titmice are small songbirds that feed on insects and seeds. They are gray overall with lighter bellies and have short bills and crests. Like chickadees, Titmice dart across trees to catch insects. They are also true romantics - they form pairs during their first year and mate for life.
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I can never pass on rice and fries when they are included on the menu, so I grabbed both. I have absolutely zero complaints about Tuesday’s rice because, unlike in the first and second weeks, the rice was not dry at all. In fact, it was actually decent rice. By default, the fries were good (I thought they kind of tasted like McDonald’s fries). In addition to the rice and fries, I also chose to eat a vegetable dish that I forgot the name of and teriyaki chicken wings. The vegetable dish had well-seasoned eggplants, carrots, (I think) tomatoes, and some other vegetables. The teriyaki chicken wings were shockingly tasty; I enjoyed the strong teriyaki flavor.
Overall, I rate this lunch a 9/10. Every dish was fairly delicious, and it seems like, as COSMOS progresses, the food quality progresses with it.
Along with water and diet sodas, there are four juices available at the dining hall: cranberry juice, orange juice, passion fruit orange guava juice, and strawberry lemonade. All of the juices are very sweet so I assume they add a lot of sugar in them, but I can’t verify that because their nutritional values aren’t available. Keep that in mind and don’t consume too much juice to prevent a blood sugar spike. Despite my warning to you, I’ve recently adopted a bad habit of replacing my water with TWO cups of juice every meal…
What you are seeing here is the best drink to ever exist at the dining hall: a mix of passionate guava juice and cranberry juice. Here’s my recipe to create it: add how much ice you want, then add about a 3:4 proportion of the passionate guava juice to the cranberry juice, and voila! The color of the drink should be a lot lighter than what’s pictured because I accidentally added too much cranberry juice that day. This drink should have a slightly sour but sweet taste, which is then followed by a weak aftertaste of cranberry juice. I’m really bad at explaining things, so just try it for yourself when you get the chance!
I rate this drink an 11/10–the highest score yet! Also, I will patent this drink so I can open a company and become rich. No one patent my idea before me!!
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8/3 Lunch
There will never be COSMOS news worse than this: the ice cream machine has been broken for two days straight. I guess that’s not even bad when you consider the fact that the ice cream machine was broken throughout the entire program last year, but I really wanted to have soft-serve ice cream one last time before I left COSMOS. Anyway, I’m going off-topic because this has nothing to do with Thursday’s lunch, which was…
It wasn’t that I forgot to take a picture until after eating 3/4 of my sandwich, but that someone ate 3/4 of my sandwich while I was filling my water bottle. I now have beef with this person. I worked so hard at the sandwich bar to put vegan mayo on my whole wheat bread, to choose the most perfect lettuce leaf and the juiciest tomato slice, to pick out the most excellent purple onions, to painfully pick up the uppermost turkey and beef slices because the tongs they had were too big to properly grab onto the slices, and to finally spread some tuna salad on the bread. I can’t believe I only got to eat 1/4 of my sandwich after all that work, which was really good mainly because of the tomato, tuna salad, and mayo (an interesting sandwich combination by themselves).
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