Brandon pointed out to me the new website for the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering Department has launched, featuring my logo in the document footer, similar to how ECE’s is.
My understanding is that there will be an official unveiling in the summer term, at which I’ll be asked to give a brief explanation of process and inspiration. So you can all come out to that with your clappers and big foam fingers… or just know that the inspiration was doodling on a tablecloth at Montana’s, and the software used was the excellent Inkscape.
January 20th, 2007
Since Wordie showed up, I’ve been using it to collect together words I like. I find that vocabulary is not something I can recall on demand—I think of the words in situations that demand them, and then afterwards hit up Wordie to log them for later perusal.
Punctuation use, for me, is similar. It’s more instinctive than thoughtful, which is a bit odd, considering my nature generally. But unfortunately, it seems that for many, the use of commas, apostrophes, and even basic spelling is neither instinctive nor thoughtful. Recently, I lashed out at someone on IM for using the letters u and r in place of the words they sound like. “The only situation,” I typed furiously, “in which it is acceptable to abuse letters of the Latin alphabet in this manner through written correspondence with me, is if you are cute, female, and single.”
The thing about poorly-punctuated emails and IM chats, though, is that the vast majority of people are at least aware that it’s informal. It’s like people doing the grind—it’s fine at night clubs, not so much at a formal occasion. 1
So yeah. Despite this general awareness of incompetency, dashes are an area of punctuation that a lot of folks remain permanently in the dark about. I thought it might be helpful to put up a quick summary of the four main kinds you need to know about. Read on…
January 8th, 2007
I had another opportunity recently to make a visualization out of JavaScript; I thought I’d share two examples of using the language for this purpose.
The 6-Stroke Wankel
Last winter, there was brief flurry of activity over some guy building a six-stroke engine. The principle was ingenious—rather than waste excess heat through a cooling system, why not harvest it as an extra power stroke, by injecting distilled water into your cylinder? The rapid expansion of the liquid into gas would provide a small boost, plus drastically reduce the amount of cooling infrastructure necessary on the engine block.
My immediate thought was, well, what about doing that with a Wankel? A Wankel rotary engine is a lightweight, high-torque system. Mazda uses standard 4-cycle Wankels with their RX7 and RX8 cars, but what about a 6-cycle one, that implemented this water-injection cycle?
Jeff helped me out with some of the formulas, and we ended up figuring out what the thing should look like. Now, it could certainly be modeled in a tool like SolidWorks, or AutoCAD, or maybe even MATLAB, but what’s the fun of that, when only people who have the software can look at it?
Instead, I tried going the SVG route. SVG is an open standard vector language that’s positioned to compete with Flash. Through various problems, it’s not as widespread as it could be, but all of Firefox, Opera, and Safari provide reasonable support for static SVG, and Firefox provides excellent support for SVG animation. So you’ll need to be using Firefox to view this, but here’s the animated demo of the six-stroke Wankel. Read on…
January 1st, 2007
One of the troubles with putting a website to sleep is you have difficulty finding a topic interesting enough to be worth waking it up for. Each whack at the snooze button makes trivial posts about nothing that much sillier.
I’ll have more to say about New York over the coming weeks, but this is just a kind of funny side observation from my time in the city, unrelated to the city itself. (For the impatient, there are a handful of pictures here and here)
And it has to do with memory. Read on…
It’s been a slow month for blogging, what with exams and all. But all is done now; I’m more convinced than ever that engineering school is less about academics, and more about proving yourself against outrageous expectations and under extreme stress.
That said, I don’t think I’ll ever forget how to set up a band pass filter or a summing amplifier.
Looking ahead, I treated myself to a new camera, and I plan to post lots of pictures from NYC. I thought I’d also publish my fledgling list of stuff to do while there:
- A Broadway show.
- A ride in a yellow cab.
- The Statue of Liberty.
- The site of the Savoy.
- A carriage ride through Central Park.
- Tapings of Stewart and Colbert.
- Museum of Modern Art.
- The NYC Opera.
- Grand Central Station.
- The federal reserve.
- A meal costing more than $100.
- Times Square on New Year’s Eve.
- “prewalking.”
- Ground Zero.
- Rockefeller Center.
- The Empire State Building.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- Ray’s Pizza.
Suggestions welcome.
Jeff had recently floated the idea of reversed sleep schedules. The advantage of studying all night and then sleeping during the day is, of course, the absence of many distractions during the wee hours. I was considering exploring more of a biphasic approach, but in the end it’s been more of a less complicated “sleep when tired” approach.
Anyhow, there was a bit of drama in our front hall yesterday morning:
Interestingly enough, Pico didn’t seem all that interested in actually gutting the little intruder. It was terrified and exhausted from being chased, but once backed into a corner, all it got was a bunch of swats and nasty scowls. So I scooped him up with a glass and deposited him outside on the other side of the street.
After another ten minutes of confused stalking about, Pico fell right asleep on the couch; I kind of wonder if she’s going to sleep a wink in the two weeks that I’ll have her over Christmas in Toronto.
My room is the cleanest it’s been in months. The dishes are washed, and the counter is wiped. This morning I had bacon and eggs for breakfast, and last night I baked fresh bread. Now there’s a delicious-smelling pot roast on the counter that’ll be ready in a few hours.
It is officially exam time. Can you tell?
I don’t normally just post random funnies, but this is pretty much the most hilarious conversation I’ve read in a long time: Man hired to kill woman instead warns her. I’ve never been a DND person, but that tounge-in-cheek earnestness is right in line with my prejudices about tabletop RPG players.
For another laugh of a similar ilk, see also xkcd #189. (for the borderline nerds in the audience, str is strength and con is constitution)
I swear, the longer I’m in engineering school, the funnier and funnier Wasted Talent becomes. For a synopsis of the last three months, see Angela Melick’s life of a second-year mech, part 1 and part 2.
My next-door neighbour has these taped to her door.
Rands has a fantastic article this week on truth and spin:
Traditionally, the opposite of Truth is Spin. Spin is a pejorative term that comes out of Public Relations land. Spin is the deliberate selection of facts constructed to prove a specific point. For example, if there was a presidential debate where one of the candidates magically transformed into a blue whale in the middle of the debate, there would be someone from the blue whale’s camp on camera, after the debate, explaining the many benefits to America of being lead by a blue whale. They’d point out, “Are you aware of the average brain size of a blue whale? What do you think they’re doing with all that grey matter? Can you name a single war involving a blue whale?” While the rest of us would be giggling, someone, somewhere would think, “Yeah, I really want a blue whale as President… we could really use a bigger pool in the White House”.
In the rest of the article, he goes on to discuss the efficiency of communicating enthusiasm that good spin has. I was reminded somewhat of this guy, who was told by YCombinator that he was a “Woziak looking for a Jobs.”
Sometimes a good idea isn’t enough; you need a good idea and the charisma to persuade everyone else of its significance.
