Nathan's Personal Blog

Yesterday I was scrolling through the old Instagram feed when a strange post from UberFacts came across my screen. UberFacts is a great account on Instagram that does exactly what the name would suggest: they post facts. Sometimes they post facts that are quirky or fun, and sometimes they just post facts that are relevant to the times. The post that caught my attention was this one:  So, naturally my first thought was, "how on Earth do they know this? No one has been there, and they certainly haven't taken their helmets off to smell and taste whatever is there." Well, apparently this is a bit of an exaggerated fact. This is all based on the presence of something called ethyl formate . This compound is what gives raspberries their flavor and apparently it also smells like rum. Don't get too excited though. Here's why it's exaggerated. They found a bunch of other compounds and molecules in this sample of electromagnetic radiation, so it's not like there are ...

The UEFA Champions League (UCL) starts today! Somehow it sneaks up on me every year, but it's here and it is glorious as always. The best thing about the Champions League is that during the group stage, there is almost always a good game on because there's so many happening and then in the knockout rounds, only the good teams have qualified, so all the games are usually pretty good. Here are the games I'm most excited for today. 3:00pm ET - Juventus @ PSG Two teams who have recently dominated their domestic league but failed to achieve European success. This should be a really competitive game as both teams have some absolutely world class players. PSG of course has Neymar, Messi, and Mbappe, but they also have serial winner Sergio Ramos and one of the best young prospects at any position in the world in Gianluigi Donnarumma at goalkeeper.  Juventus has been struggling in the last couple of years but still possess young stars Federico Chiesa, Manuel Locatelli, and Dušan Vla...

It's 11:07pm. I'm sitting on the couch in the house I grew up in watching two women I haven't heard of until this week play each other in a tight U.S. Open match. I woke up at 6:30am today, took maybe a 15 minute nap around 9:30am, and had a relatively good Saturday in my opinion. I  really should be ready to head upstairs, get a good night's sleep and enjoy not having to work in two days because of the long weekend. But I can't. Why can't I? Because I'm in a thought spiral (thank you John Green for naming that concept) regarding athletics.  I played competitive sports from the time I was about 9 years old. For a while, I played baseball, hockey, and soccer until I decided that I needed to pick two of those sports to focus on and I was worst at soccer out of the three. I had varying levels of success in both baseball and hockey over the years. Nothing more than a district championship though for my town (baseball when I was 9, and hockey as a sophomore in hi...