Will and Norm from Tested.com paid a recent visit to the Reed nuclear reactor. The result is last week's 25 minute featured video. Check out the control room (6 buttons do most of the work, just SIX buttons), the blue glow from the reactor, gamma ray measurements, plus lots of face time with student reactor operators and Melinda Krahenbuhl, the Reed reactor director.

After you finish watching, check out 60,000 Dominoes Doing What Dominoes Do Best

By ian brook fisher '07, senior assistant dean

As the end of our centennial year draws to a close, we write this 100th Voices from Reed post in honor of the students who graduated today--the class of 2012. Commencement morning is filled with campus energy, as thousands of family and friends descend on our tiny campus to celebrate the achievement and future of their proud Reed graduates. I've never seen or heard of a commencement without beautiful sun-shining weather--an excuse for sundresses, sunglasses, and--in the case of one group of underclassmen--a tiny wading pool in which to keep their feet cool.

As in every year in my own memory, the march of the seniors begins to the unmistakable hum of the bagpipes. Graduating seniors processed in front of Eliot Hall before pausing to applaud the faculty and staff members who made their time at Reed unique. (In a wonderful act of reciprocation and symmetry, professors applaud graduates as they recede from the commencement tent).

Once seated on the front lawn, everyone was officially welcomed by the chair of the board of trustees--a Reed graduate from '73--who said that this graduation wasn't unlike his, except that many more students were naked on his graduation day. We were all audience to a farewell speech by Colin Diver, our president for the last 10 years. He commences the rest of his life this summer, leaving behind a college that has gotten better in every imaginable way during his time here.

The commencement address was a special one, in no small part because it ignored--and even mocked--the casual platitudes you hear so often at these sorts of events. Robert Smith '89 encouraged the seniors to engage in the process of finding their own voices. He acknowledged the powerful uncertainty that comes with a moment like commencement (one where "what's next?" is as common as "congratulations!"), and made sure that parents and students alike recognized that this moment is all part of the journey. Instead of imploring students to follow their dreams, he admitted that he felt anxious that he didn't have any dreams in college--or maybe that he had too many to ever stop and pay attention to just one. He championed the "summer sabbatical," arguing that the writers of great history never mention the idle summers that great men and women spent "just figuring things out," because they have been edited from the narrative. But these periods in our life are as important as our significant milestones in creating the person we are to become--and in shaping the voice with which we speak.

We'll miss this class of Reedies. In particular, this class is the first group of students whose applications I read, whose interviews I conducted, and whose envelopes I stuffed with confetti. While I'm sad to see some of my favorites leave Reed, the great comforting knowledge in admission is that a new class enters next fall. They will never replace what these seniors have left, but they will bring to our campus powerful young and new ideas. We're excited for the future at Reed.

Congrats, class of 2012.

W-w-wind up your Reunions!  Dr. Demento (Barry Hansen '63) here, calling all Reedies to join us at Reunions ’12: Reedfayre!  It's like Renn Fayre, but with better wine and less mayhem. You'll greet old friends, meet new ones, and say farewell to President Colin Diver after ten sweet years.

One of my favorite things about Reed College--maybe my favorite thing--is the way that students here discuss their passions. There is a beautifully unscripted intellectualism about any topic of conversation, from comic books to ultimate Frisbee, data visualization to nuclear science. Their unpolished smarts continue to blow me away, even as a staff member who has now been at Reed for nearly nine years.

A handful of Reedies have really upped the ante in this video, published by Tested, an offshoot of the Mythbusters franchise. In short, Tested says they will cover "Anything that's awesome." You came to the right place, fellas. Reed College, and the world's only undergraduate-operated research reactor.

Take a few minutes and give this video a look. I promise you'll learn something.

Mamie Stevenson finished her thesis last week and passed her orals this week. After four years as a Reedie and three years working in the admission office, she had this to say about her prospie/Reedie experience. In the photo of interns below, Mamie is the one in the sunglasses.

By Mamie Stevenson '12

Reed Admit Days just happened just last month and thanks to our Admission Office, the event was (as it usually is) incredibly well received. I myself went to RAD as a young Reedie and the experience solidified my enthusiasm for enrolling at this amazing college.

I want to tell you about my interview for Reed, because as my time here comes to a close, I think more and more about how much of an impact the Admission Office has made on me since even before I enrolled here. Sometime in January 2008, I was contacted by Reed with encouragement to interview in the Denver/Boulder area. At this point, I had been rejected by my Early Decision school, and had very little interest in pursuing other colleges. (This was the result of an immature and outright misguided attitude that there was only one school for me—and that school did not want me.) However, it felt good that Reed reached out to me during this time, even if the Admission Office had no idea about my overwhelming feeling of disappointment. I drove up to Boulder one weekend to meet Melinda Brown, a Reed graduate, now Admission Counselor for the state of Colorado. I wore a cream and blue floral dress and a bright yellow sweater; I probably changed six times before settling on an outfit while practicing my smile in the mirror.

When I sat down with Melinda at the Trident Bookstore on Pearl Street, I felt weirdly at ease.  I had had college interviews before, but never with people who went to such lengths to make me not only feel comfortable, but wanted at their college. Melinda and I talked about the basic things: high school coursework, extracurriculars, my “strengths,” blah blah blah. But given Reed’s casual interview style, I was able to ask some of my own questions throughout. I knew Melinda had been an English major at Reed and I was curious about her thesis topic and experience writing it. She said, “I wrote on this Modernist author from New Zealand.  No one has ever heard of her.” In my AP Lit class a few weeks previous, I had read a short story called “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield, so I asked Melinda if that is who she had written about. Her eyes widened as she said, “It was Katherine Mansfield!” And at that moment, as cheesy as it sounds, I felt like I was destined to go to Reed College.

"When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins. This is why one never gets the important things done because there is always something else one has to do first. Naturally, we will always tend to do the most urgent tasks first. In this way, the slow and long-term activities lose out. In an age when the distinctions between work and leisure are being erased, and efficiency seems to be the only value in economics, politics and research, this is really bad news for thorough, far-sighted work, play and long-term love relationships." (Eriksen, Tyranny of the Moment, 2001)

I invite your (patiently cultivated, well-turned over) comments.

The total energy is obtained from a model in which the nuclei are frozen in place. Therefore, the total energy fails to include the kinetic energy of the nuclei and cannot be compared directly to the standard enthalpy, H, at 298 K, 1 atm. This post describes the procedure for obtaining the missing kinetic energy (and the standard gas-phase enthalpy) with SPARTAN'10 using the EDF2/6-31G* method.

Calculations for methanol, CH3OH, are used to illustrate these method. To follow this example on your own, build methanol and calculate its Equilibrium Geometry at Ground State with Density Functional EDF2 6-31G* in Vacuum. Set Total Charge: Neutral and Multiplicity: Singlet and check the boxes next to IR and Thermodynamics.

Anyone who ventured outside the Chemistry building in March/April discovered one of the coldest and wettest Portland springs on record. A much better idea was to stay inside and check out the chemistry stories in the Reed Magazine’s spring issue …

For more than 100 years, Reed students have written papers, conducted physics experiments, and even occasionally danced to the sound of jazz. Now a new generation is clamoring for its turn in the spotlight at a storied music club next week.