erommel

The PSU student body president just sent out an update email and I thought I would share a couple quotes from it with you. First off is this beauty:
Finally, we want to foster healing and communication on campus through a process modeled in part after apartheid in South Africa....
Wow. Really? I don't remember seeing any Afrikaner National Party candidates on the ballot. Next up we have:
It is vastly becoming winter and our bodies require more energy in the colder months.
Vastly becoming? Is this like mad-lib e-mail?

I really hope this guy was viciously stoned and/or drunk when he wrote this e-mail. Unfortunately I think he's just plain old stupid.

I realize this is short notice, but Saturday, April 4th is the DaVinci Challenge at OMSI. I will be there as a judge and it looks like it will be fun. It's free so if you can make it you should check it out. It starts at 10:00 am and goes till 2:00 or so. There will be hourly launches from a trebuchet and some neat stuff along with the presentation by the 16 teams demonstrating their devices. Anyway, come by and say hi if you can.

I'm back for now at least. I'm going to try to start posting here on a semi-regular basis. I've recently been searching for an easy way to represent math in HTML. It would be nice to be able to throw an equation or two into a livejournal post if necessary. The best option I've come up with so far is to author my post in OpenOffice or Word, which both have decent equation edtors, save it as an HTML file then place the image files created in the HTML conversion in a folder on Photobucket. The last step is to add the base tag to the top of the generated HTML referencing the photobucket repository so it can find the image files. The downside of this method is that all URLs will consider the photobucket folder to be their starting point. This will make links not function properly. If anyone has a better idea let me know.

This has got to be one of the coolest videos I have ever seen. It is a video from a camera mounted on the external fuel tank of the shuttle during the last launch of Endeavor. You can see the separation of the solid rocket boosters, main engine ignition, and then separation of the external fuel tank. It is kinda long, but worth watching. The quality gets better as it gets out of the atmosphere.

I'm leaving tomorrow for Fremont, CA. I'll be staying for about a week, coming back next Tuesday. I'm pretty excited. It'll be nice to get away for a bit. I'll still have to work on schoolwork while I'm down there, but I'll have quite a bit of free time. Planning on going to Muir Woods and the Lawrence Hall of Science. I'll be sure to take plenty of pictures that I can bore you all with. Gotta go finish packing.

Wow, it's been a while since I posted anything on here. This is going to be pretty quick, I mainly just wanted to put up a few pictures. First, here are some pictures on Flickr from my flight on the Vomit Comet. It was pretty fun. I've also got a DVD of the flight video if anyone is interested. I haven't watched it yet. The experiment went pretty well, got some data and nothing broke. I'd call that a success. Houston sucks though. It's only redeeming quality is that it has a pretty nice art museum. To wrap this post up, here's another picture




Anyway, I've gotta get going, lots of work to do. Later.

I haven't managed to make the philosopher's stone yet, but I did turn 4000 pounds of steel into 24 pounds of aluminium. I cheated though, I didn't really do any transmutation.  I sold a pickup truck that had been languishing in my driveway for a while and bought a bicycle.  Specifically, I bought this bicycle, except in silver and white.  I've been commuting to school on it by riding to the MAX station, then taking the MAX downtown and riding to school.  My legs are complaining a little bit, but they are getting better.  It's been going pretty well, other than the two flat tires I got on the first day I rode to school.  Riding is a lot of fun though.  I especially like riding through downtown from the MAX to PSU.  On the way home I've started riding to the Rose Quarter, and I think I'll start getting off at the Rose quarter in the morning and riding to school from there.  My next big step is going to be getting off the MAX at Gateway, and riding from there so I'll only need a 1 zone ticket.  Oh yeah and in case you hadn't figured it out from the buying a bicycle part, I quit smoking a little over a month ago.  That feels good as well.

Almost done with this term at school.  We have to have our equipment ready to ship to NASA by the last week of March, then we go down and fly it the first week of April.  We're probably going to be spending most of our time getting that ready to go.  It will be really nice to be done with that.  At least we won't have the problem that some teams apparently had who were using hard-drive based camcorders to capture data.  I guess most of the new hard-drive based camcorders have accelerometers in them that shut the hard-drive down if it detects free fall because it thinks you dropped the camcorder.  A bunch of teams went up and as soon as the aeroplane started free fall to obtain microgravity, the camcorder would shut the hard drive off.  Oops.  The camera we're using had been tested to operate at up to 30g's.  That's probably one of the reasons it cost $30,000.  That and it will record at 90,000 frames per second.  Next term is going to be pretty fun.  I'm taking a feedback control systems lab for 4 credits, and I'm going to take LPSU for 4 credits for my two electives.  The rest of my credits will be the required stuff.  Then I'll be pretty much done with my Bachelor's.  Just a couple summer classes to finish off my general ed requirements. 

 

This started out as a a reply to a comment on my last post but got kinda long so I decided to go ahead and make it a separate post.

A reusable spacecraft is like a reusable condom, it might save a little money but it's not worth the risk. The Russians built a shuttle shortly after we did, orbited it once unmanned and then realized it was too unreliable and expensive to fly. The majority of the supplies going to the ISS are pushed up in Progress and Soyuz capsules on top of R-7 rockets by the Russians. One of the reasons that the Russians built a space station in the first place was they realized it was easier, cheaper and safer to push stuff up to the station with capsules and play with it there, rather than try to launch and land a temporary space station (shuttle), for every mission.

The other day in the lab, one of my friends was doing some CFD with OpenFOAM, which runs under Linux, and asked me for some Linux help because she couldn't get her files to save.  I don' t know Linux super well, but I figured I knew enough to fix the problem.  I went over to take a look and things just got worse from there.  First off, she was running Linux and OpenFOAM from a live CD, which explained the saving problem, since the live CD version was only allowing read access to the hard drive.  I thought maybe I could get a USB stick mounted up that had write access, so I got a command prompt up and that's when it became apparent that the version of Linux she was using was in German.  That wasn't too bad, she knew some German, and the commands are all the same, so I started typing.  Along with German Linux, comes the German keyboard layout as well.  It was like playing memory, since the keyboard was labeled for English.  It took me like 15 minutes just to mount the USB stick cause I had to just randomly press keys to find out what character they produced, and then try to remember where the ones I needed were.  We finally gave up and she used a different laptop with an English version of Linux installed.  It was fun for a while though.

I ran across this site the other day.  It's pretty cool.  I'm going to try to go to the competition this year.  That'd be a lot of fun to see the power beaming competition.  MIT is supposed to bring a carbon nanotube tether this year as well.  It's nice to know that there is a somewhat serious effort underway to spur space elevator development.  They are saying an elevator would bring the cost of orbit down to ~$100/lb, which is a huge improvement over the ~$10,000/lb it costs now.  The Mars Barn is another pretty cool challenge they set up that deals with controlling robotic construction equipment with a 20 minute communications delay, as would be the case for Mars.

Speaking of space exploration, we had our first video conference with NASA a few days ago.  While the conference itself was a huge waste of time, a couple interesting things did arise.  The engineer that gave the presentation is working on the new "crew exploration vehicle" which is going to be used for shuttling crew and supplies to the ISS as well as moon and eventually Mars missions.  They basically came up with a 6 person Apollo capsule.  It's nice to see that they've finally given up their unhealthy obsession with the shuttle.  Now maybe we can actually accomplish something in space.  The other interesting bit of info was the project of another university participating in this program.  They are working on a filtration system to keep lunar regolith out of a permanent lunar installation.  I guess they're serious enough about a lunar installation to actually put some money into it. 

The loop heat pipe project I was working on over the summer has gotten approval for phase II, which means we get to actually build a few of them and see if they actually work the way the analysis predicted.  Right now I'm writing the work plan for the phase II proposal.  I've spent the last couple of days going over the final project report from phase I as well as all the supporting analysis and MATLAB code, all of which I wrote, but now they are almost totally foreign to me.  Luckily the code is heavily commented otherwise I'd be totally screwed.  Phase II is supposed to last 2 years so I guess I better do some good documentation so by the end I can remember what I did at the beginning ;)