A Literary Publication of the University of Idaho Honors Program
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LOOKING GLASS Spring 2014
Volume 10, Issue 1
a NOTE from the EDITOR The University of Idaho Honors Program publishes The Looking Glass Literary Magazine to provide honors students the opportunity to exhibit their innovative and artistic talents. This publication shows that honors students are more than just good grades, but ambitious individuals with a variety of hobbies and gifts. This year we also incorporated a two-page spread about the Honors Program to provide a summary of this year’s community service, educational enrichment opportunities, and social events. This magazine would not be possible without The Looking Glass committee who brainstormed ideas then compiled and edited submitted stories, articles, and poems. I want to give a special thanks to Design Editor, Krista Stanley, for going above and beyond what was expected. The Honors Program continues to grow, and I am excited to see what it holds in the future! —Jennifer Downen
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LOOKING GLASS
Volume 10, Issue 1 The Looking Glass is a literary publication of the University of Idaho Honors Program, featuring creative and academic works submitted by students. A digital copy of the publication can be found at: http://issuu.com/honors_lookingglass
The works published have been reviewed by the Looking Glass editorial staff and printed primarily in their original, unedited form. The viewpoints expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Looking Glass, its editors or the University of Idaho Honors Program Every effort has been to reduce errors in this publication. The Looking Glass will not be held responsible for any errors that do exist, from human negligence or otherwise. Any questions or concerns should be directed to the University of Idaho Honors Student Advisory Board.
contact us: University of Idaho Honors Student Advisory Board The Looking Glass P.O. Box 442533 Moscow, ID 83844-2533 hsab@uidaho.edu
A Literary Publication of the University of Idaho Honors Program
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LOOKING GLASS Editor-in-Chief: Jennifer Downen Content Editors: Tela Barkley, Elizabeth Campbell, Taylor Kowalski, Kendra Miller and Amy Pendegraft Design Editor: Krista Stanley Cover Art: Photo “Spring Cleaning” by Kyle Flack
TABLE of CONTENTS Into the Depths by Alan Hendricks .......................................... 3 Stand Still by Tela Barkley ........................................................ 3 Rolling Summer by Kyle Flack .................................................. 5 Grace by Autumn Pratt ............................................................... 6 By Giants by Elizabeth Miller ..................................................... 7 Snow Day by Cooper Atkinson .................................................. 8 Spring Activities by Cooper Atkinson ..................................... 9 The Acceleration of Tensioned, Nearly-Balanced Masses by Brad Walker ................................................................ 11 Restitution by Mitchell Leibowitz ........................................... 12 Path to Knowledge by Cooper Atkinson .............................. 13 Paroxysmal Obsolescence by Mitchell Leibowitz ................. 14 L’appel du Vide by Taylor Kowalski ........................................ 15 Tranquil by Kyle Flack ............................................................. 16 About the Honors Program ..................................................... 17
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INTO the DEPTHS Alan Hendricks
In Greek mythology, the word siren refers to women who sang so sweetly and so strangely among the rocks in the sea that their music could lure unwitting sailors to ruin their ships in the shoals. They had the power to captivate the human mind and bend it to follow their whim. These days, the word siren means something different. Now, it refers to the cry of klaxon bells, intended to warn and alert. Few people know of the old sirens anymore. They’ve gone the way of mythological creatures, gods, and fairy tales—fit to be little more than the fodder for a children’s book. But aren’t they still the same thing, really? Sit in the middle of a busy metropolis and watch, listen, observe. Do you hear that whining cry, the sobbing, keening sound of a police siren, or an ambulance, or even a fire-engine? Do not listen to the siren. Watch the people. See how they stop what they’re doing and follow that vehicle with their eyes and ears and hearts, curious and wondering where it’s going, captivated for an instant, and oh my word, hoping it’s not the death-heralding cry for someone they know. I knew a siren once. She was a slender thing, barely a woman
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STAND STILL
03 Glass 17 The TheLooking LookingTela Glass Barkley
of twenty, but with the worldly wisdom of someone much older. Her eyes were the deep green-blue of the ocean, and her teeth were like pearls. Her skin was like the white sand of tropical beaches, and her hair… She dyed it the deep emerald green of the kelp that sways under maritime water. But when we made love, the tiny, almost dainty patch of hair between her thighs was so blonde it looked silver. She told me her name was Calypso, that day that we met on the beach. I never learned if that was actually her name, or if it was simply a nickname she picked up out of a knowing sense of irony. Everyone who knew her called her Calypso. Her voice was a siren’s voice. It called to me from the first moment she spoke, caressing me like the lapping water of water at a shore. I’m not sure what I was looking for that day I met her on the beach, but what I found was a her. She always dressed in greens and silvers and blues and golds, my Calypso, and she favored jewelry made of shells and pearls and other treasures of the deep. The only time I ever saw her wear the colors of fire was when we sat on the pier and the sunset or the sunrise reflected off the water and onto her skin. If anything, it made her more beautiful and made me want to cry, my own salty tears adding to the ocean below us. She seemed to know me, when I did not even know myself. I was lost that day I met her, wandering between lives with no more consideration for my path than the barest, faintest amusement at where my feet had taken me. I had dreamt perhaps of winding my way up steel-andglass staircases and then taking the final step, from stories high above, to descend to the street below me. But my feet had other ideas. Instead of taking me to fly among the pigeons that roosted on the skyscrapers, they had taken me to sleep with the fishes. Or so I thought, as I gazed out to sea. Wading out to my death had a certain poetic allure. I could not swim then, and by the time anyone noticed me floundering in the water, it would have been too late. The voice I heard then did not call me to ruin myself on the rocks. It called me to stop, and nothing more than
my toes got wet that afternoon. You never hear the stories of sirens that save lives, only those who destroy them. And so, life continued on. It became brighter, as though lit by a new star that illuminated more than the sun ever could. I began painting again, and my subject matter turned from musings of consuming fire and dark despair to lighter considerations of seas at dawn, and dolphins, and fish like swirling rainbows in cyan waters. Calypso was fiercely independent, but she created a sort of nest for herself at my apartment, like a shore bird building a home in the rocky crag of a cliff. She would sit in my window seat as I painted, watching the sea gnaw hungrily at the beach. I could not stop from including her in my paintings, I found, as a maiden standing on a cliff, or a mermaid deep under the surface, or as a young woman wading into dark waters to swim naked with a lover. We had done that often enough that I could paint that particular scene with no effort at all. Calypso, through teasing me with the promise of feeling her body in its natural habitat taught me to swim. She cavorted like a seal in the waves, unafraid of the sea even after dark when I always wondered what hungry, needlemouthed things lurked in the gloom. I do not remember now how much time I spent in her company. I remember the pass of seasons, and how she shifted moodily from day to week to month. Her moods went in cycles that coincided, I discovered, with the phases of the moon and the pull of the tides. At times she was choppy and irritable and given to squalls that could last for mere seconds or days. At other times, she was smooth and languid and inviting, and frequently a rather demanding lover. Even at others, she was lazy, lounging on
the window seat in my apartment like a sunbather. She was in an irritable mood the day I lost her. We bickered over the same things we always did: how I was too clingy, how I relied on her too much, how I was smothering her independence. When she screamed at me in anger, her voice sounded like a seagull. I could not help but shiver and close my eyes, feeling the murderous pull of her personality. When I opened my eyes again, she was gone. I spent that day looking for her. She was not at her own apartment the first several times I stopped by in the painful hope that she would be there. Giving that up, I wandered our favorite haunts and traced the beach more times than I could count. I was on my way to check her apartment again when I heard the siren. Not my siren, but a fiery siren. A death-herald siren. Her apartment building burned. A faulty piece of electrical wiring, the newspaper reports said two days later. There were casualties. Calypso had returned to her true roost while I was wandering the beach. My beautiful mermaid had burned, a fate far too ironic, far too cruel, to bear. Now, as I’m standing on the beach staring out to sea, I can feel the heavy weight of the rocks I’ve slipped into my shoes and the pockets of my coat. I’ve collected them gradually over the last five days, wandering this beach and thinking of her. I haven’t gone to work. I haven’t painted. I haven’t taken any of my medication, either. I’ve only returned briefly to my apartment when I finally admit that no, this day is not the day. I think I’ve been waiting for her. Last night, I had a dream for the first time in the week since her death. I dreamt that I was painting a scene: my siren, standing among the waves with her arms spread in welcome. I am the man in the painting, wading into the sea to be with Calypso. There’s a bit of kelp that
“CALYPSO WAS
FIERCLY INDEPENDENT,
BUT SHE CREATED A NEST FOR HERSELF AT MY APARTMENT.”
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ROLLING SUMMER Kyle Flack
has washed up on the shore, the same color as Calypso’s hair. And as I’ve been standing here for the last half hour in the waning light, I think I can hear her singing to me. It is clear today, not stormy like it has been for weeks. The setting sun is lemon yellow, and if it were not so painful, I would enjoy the way it dusts the top of the waves. But it reminds me of the way Calypso’s gold jewelry glinted along the curves of her body, and so once again my tears mingle with the ocean water that the breeze occasionally sprays onto my face.
Calypso is still calling to me. But this time she does not beckon me to remain on the beach. Smiling, I step the water to feel the sea’s embrace. Once I pass the point where my feet touch the sand below me, I begin to swim towards the golden sun. But the rocks are already pulling me down, and the fatigue and grief of the last week have left me exhausted. It is not long before I will sink to join Calypso. There with her, I will not feel the fish nibble at my fingers, nor the salt water sluicing the flesh away from my bones.
GRACE Autumn Pratt
A cloudy night, A dawn of rain, I step into a gray-blue day. The pavement wears a mirror sky, In which the worms go gliding by. What glorious rain, when worms can fly.
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by
GIANTS Elizabeth Miller
The universe was formed in a giant’s footprints. When the glass shattered, big pieces melted into planets and dust became the stars, choked together into shadows of memories, of the giant’s childhood. Shards of a silver-handled mirror prickled at the edges of footprints whisper of a clumsy boy, waiting for his mother one day, the fallen rain shining, making the whole world blind. And when the universe was still forming along the edges of fluid glass, its surface burnishing into galaxies and solar systems, when her casket was buried between two moons, the giant scattered dandelions across the crystal sky. The petals sighed where they fell, lost in a flurry of metallic dust
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SNOW DAY Cooper Atkinson
SPRING ACTIVITIES Cooper Atkinson
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ACCELERATION of TENSIONED nearlybalanced MASSES Brad Walker
After three labs exploring gravitional acceleration of a particle, we have great confidence that gravitational acceleration is constant. What can we discover about gravity beyond its effect on a particle? We decided to investigate a more complicated gravitational problem involving a rope, a pair of pulleys, a pair of masses, and a variable mass. We vised two metal poles to our lab bench and attached a pulley to each one. We positioned the pulley pair at approximately the same height and also angled along an imaginary line so that a rope segment suspended between them would be of minimal length. One of these pulleys doubled as our measuring instrument; while rotating, it measured the durations among fixed angle increments. From this DataStudio calculated the circumferential velocity. We ran a rope through the pulley system and attached congruent objects to the rope ends hanging from each pulley. We designate these approximate masses as m1 and m2. After setting up our apparatus we began our experiment. For each trial we attached to m1 mΔ, an object with mass between 2g and 20g. Then we elevated the aggregate mass, released it, and measured the acceleration of m2’s ascent. Our apparatus made us unable to precisely measure acceleration; every time we released the aggregate mass, one of the poles undulated, causing continual variations in rope velocity. As a result DataStudio recorded sinusoidal acceleration. We tried dampening the harmonic
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motion to no avail. Unable to obtain constant acceleration plots, we resorted to applying linear fits to interpolate constant magnitudes. We performed a series of experimental trials but we only include a limited selection in our analysis: five trials with 200g m1, m2 and two with 20g m1, m2. To determine what relationship might exist between m1, m2, and mΔ, we first analyze the system of forces. Before attaching mΔ to m1, the balanced masses are in equilibrium. Gravity exerts equal forces on both masses and the tension reactions exert equal force on the pulleys. The pulleys react and exert equal force on one another through tension. The system then has four pairs of forces on four objects and four zero net forces. After attaching mΔ to m1, the field force and tension of the aggregate mass’s rope segment increase in magnitude. This greater tension “propagates” through tensions in the rope and the system’s net forces all become a common non-zero magnitude. The aggregate mass pulls the rope downward, the pulley nearest m1 pulls toward itself, the pulley nearest m2 pulls m2 upward, the tension of the rope segment between m2 and its adjacent pulley increases, and m2 defies gravity. Now that we have claried the system, we quantify the aggregate mass’s acceleration as a function: a = f(m1+ mΔ,m2) ∙ g. The tension of m1’s rope segment is the negative of the field force of m2 or m1: T = -m2 g = -m1g ∙ ∙∙ m1 = m2. The three particles’ forces act through the rope and net to mΔ g: ∑ F = T + m1 g + mΔ g = (-m1 + m1 + mΔ)g = mΔ g. The trinary net force acts on the system’s mass;
our simplied model omits the mass of the rope— .∙ . mtotal = m1 + m2 + mΔ. From a = F ∕m [1], we uncover the function in the below equations. Letting mb represent either approximate mass allows further simplication. a=
mΔ pulley system can be expressed simply as a = ±9.80 m/s2 2 mb+ mΔ [2].
m1, m2 (g)
∑F m + mΔ -m2 mΔ = 1 g = f(m1+ mΔ,m2) ∙ g = g mtotal m1 + mΔ+ m1 2 mb+ mΔ
Our model seems reasonable. In the table below, the “aR” column reports our actual interpolated acceleration constants and the “aI” column represents predicted values. These are positive whereas our model predicts negative values—they required inversion since the pulley measured the counterweight’s ascension. The actual accelerations are bounded by the predicted values. The discrepancy between actual and ideal values increases as mΔ decreases, as well as when the system uses smaller balanced masses. The omission of the rope’s mass would explain this discrepancy, as would unaccounted friction. With data close to our model and potential hypotheses for the discrepancy, we have great condence that the acceleration of nearly-balanced masses in an earthbound
200
20
mΔ (g) 20 16 14 12 10 6 4
aR (m/s2) 0.375 0.330 0.305 0.149 0.104 0.671 0.278
aI (m/s2) 0.467 0.377 0.331 0.285 0.239 1.28 0.891
References: [1] Physics 211 Lab Manual, Spring 2013, \Lab 4” [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard gravity
RESTITUTION Mitchell Leibowitz
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PATH to KNOWLEDGE Cooper Atkinson
PAROXYSMAL OBSOLESCENCE Mitchell Leibowitz
Return to ruin While wasting away Convalescence just out your reach Regretting today the non threat it seemed so harmless a use of your own blasphemous time A pass of the flame Whilst wilting away A view of yourself the coward the fool A plea for guidance Reprieve for your sickening ways Accused of filth While writhing away Paroxysmal Obsolescence An indulgence in futility
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L’APPEL du VIDE Taylor Kowalski
We fell into each other in that gentle dark, clothing cast off like warnings ancient and new and unheeded. We drank sky-wine with the gods at the end of the world and madness or love or both flurried in our bellies. We traded virginities like secrets whispered between kisses when the night is quiet and the stars wheel and bloom, peeled away ivory childhood like a mask like a second skin. We were infinite, divine, free radicals, closed circuits, MĂśbian snakes eating our own tails. We stood at the cusp of the unknown contemptuous of the yawning void, and for all our cleverness and invincibility we fell.
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TRANQUIL
Kyle Flack
ABOUT the HONORS program T
he University of Idaho Honors Program (UHP) has provided an enriching course of study since its establishment in 1983. The UHP offers a range of activities, including concerts, plays, films, leadership retreats, alternative Spring Break service trips, and “Fire Side Chats� with professors. In addition, students have the opportunity to participate in honors seminars and lectures, which is a great way to meet like-minded students across colleges and majors. For more information, see the UHP website at http:// www.uidaho.edu/honors.
Photos provided by Alton Campbell
University Honors Program Director
Honors Student Advisory Board Robin Baker Co-President Kelly Deobald Co-President
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Brooke Deans Jennifer Downen Emily Gehlken Christopher Goes Tyler Jaszkowiak
The Looking Glass
Photos provided by Alton Campbell
Kalyn Lewis Calvin Miller Ricky Titcomb Katie Vandenberg
Dr. Alton Campbell is the University of Idaho Honors Program Director and he oversees all classes and events within the Honors Program. Alton is definitely a role model and mentor to many students. Without him, there would not be a wide array of classes or social and service events for honors students. He not only leads the Honors Program, but he also works to engage students through leadership development, club activities, service programs, living groups, undergrad research, study abroad, and national student exchange. Alton is always available to lend an ear or give advice to anyone that walks into his office. The Honors Program continues to progress because Dr. Alton Campbell has new and innovative ideas to make our Honors Program unique and interesting.
MEET the EDITORS
Photos provided by Cooper Atkinson, Elizabeth Helwick and Rayce Bird
Tela Barkley
Jennifer Downen
Wildlife Resources
Mechanical Engineering
“I love to climb, mountain bike and ski, and in the future I would love to have a career in wildlife rehabilitation.”
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: Only love can do that.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Taylor Kowalski
Krista Stanley
English, Psychology
Mathematics, Advertising
“I like writing books and vintage dresses.”
“The trick is to just start, for ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’”
“The Honors Program at UI is great because you get to participate in more in-depth classes that do more than just teach you the basic material.” —Keala Bush “I like being in a community with others who have the same desire to further their education and put forth their best effort in college.” —Michael Botterbusch “I like the amount of personal attention and opportunities it makes possible.” —Clara Bowen “I like the free tickets to concerts.” —Peter Haley “This program allows me to be a better rounded member on campus.” —Brooke Deans “The honors program is a great way to meet people and have the opportunity to challenge yourself in a large diversity of classes.” —Kylie Martin “The Honors College is a great way to meet people from different years, who one might not otherwise. The fall of my freshman year, I showed up to a ‘Things That Matter’ info session and met a Junior who has since become one of my best Spring 2014 friends.” —Brita Olson
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