Secrets and Lies

If you are like me, then you have heard that sinks and toilets drain one direction in the Northern Hemisphere, the other direction in the Southern Hemisphere, and straight down on the equator. This difference is due to the Coriolis force provided by the Earth's rotation.

LIES!
Nothing but filthy lies!

I shall now give you the Christmas gift of truth.

It is true that the rotation of the Earth does produce a Coriolis force, and that this force is responsible for the rotation of certain weather systems like hurricanes. However, this is only because such systems are very large and develop over long periods of time. The magnitude of Coriolis force is directly related to rotation speed. The Earth only rotates once per day, so the resulting force is very small. Given time, it will affect large bodies of fluids initially at rest, but things like toilet flushes are too small and happen too quickly to be influenced by Coriolis (the bowl would also have to be circular). Those rotations are instead determined by such things as the way in which they are filled and the shape of the container.

This site offers a more in-depth explanation that I found very enlightening.

Or just ask an Australian.

Merry Christmas!

We forgot November!

I just realized today that we forgot to post something for November. I'm sorry November :( .
In any case, life in the suite is going on as usual...we still eat Ramen, we still do lots of studying and homework....we still have lots of fun. This week is finals week, which means that on Thursday night we can forget about this whole school thing and pretend life is still easy! If only that were true about the rest of the semester...easy...oh well, it is almost over. Until next time...'may your days be merry and bright!'

There are beings there that do not sleep.

Aaaaaaaaand it's 4:00 AM!

Hooray for Digital Electronics!

At least it's Friday.

Well that's new.

I tried to give blood today, but wasn't allowed to because my iron content was 1% too high. That has never happened before. I didn't even know they had an upper limit.

It could be because this was a different organization than the Red Cross and they may have different standards. They had a different testing method, too. They used a centrifuge instead of the buoyancy method.

In other news, my work as a junior member of the ACL senior project has started. The goal of the project is to design an accurate model of the mechanical forces experienced by the human knee during and after ACL failure. My job this semester is basically to learn everything that Nathan Green has been doing the past two years so I can continue his work after he leaves. This is done through a series of research assignments that so far seem difficult but doable.

Another fun activity that I've recently gotten myself into is joining the Longview Chorus and Symphony for their upcoming performance of...

...dum da da dah...

Beethoven's 9th Symphony!
(Saturday, September 29 in the new Belcher Center)

Freude!

Some Say The World Will End In Fire...

This is a Red Caribbean, a particularly hot type of Habenero pepper:

This is what it feels like in your mouth:

I should know. I ate one today.

I would strongly advise that you do not.

For comparison, a Jalapeno is rated at 3,000 - 6,000 SHU (Scotville Heat Units), whereas this thing weighs in at around 350,000 SHU. VERY HOT.

I got the pepper from a supervisor at work who grows various types of hot and spicy things. He stops eating them at around the Jalapeno level, but grows the hotter ones for their bushes and to watch people at work suffer. I had eaten previous varieties that weren't quite as hot (serannos and lemon drops) and had been joined in doing so by several other guys. I told him that I was interested in getting a bag or two of the hotter varieties to take with me to college for various malevolent purposes, and he said he would bring me an extremely hot one. He didn't disappoint. For some reason, no one else wanted to eat this one and some were told not even to touch it. This was on Monday. At the time, I had a blister on my tongue (perhaps from the previous peppers?) and didn't want to aggravate it, so I told him I would eat it later. I got such a large response from people who wanted to see me eat it that I told them I would bring it back to work and eat it during break time on Wednesday.

I managed to eat the entire thing without touching the quart of milk or package of crackers I brought with me, and am told that my face turned as red as the pepper. Tears started streaming from my eyes. My mouth was pain, and it was getting worse. I quickly downed 3/4 of the milk and several of the crackers and the pain started to subside. After 10 minutes, my mouth was back to normal, but my face remained red for an hour and my stomach started to hurt. This hurt came and went throughout the day even though I continued to eat crackers and yogurt, but I can deal with pain, right? Apparently my system cannot, and it emergency evacuated the contents of my stomach up and out an hour before my shift was over. Fortunately, I had seen it coming and was prepared for it, but the pepper still burned my mouth almost as much as before. I was glad I had some milk left, and came home early.

Before today, I was seriously thinking about taking these different potencies of pepper back to college with me and using them as part of "extended orientation," much like the hot pepper-eating contest I had with Dex when I was a freshman. Perhaps I would even use them as weaponry if 41 was ever wronged. But now that I have actually experienced the hottest pepper available to me, I will ask for no more of it. I will hold no contest, nor will I use them in retaliation. Pain is one thing, but I draw the line once something actually upsets your system. At most, I think I might take a bag of the milder serannos to keep me awake during all-nighters.

And I think I'll avoid spicy food for a while.

End Of Line.

In my last post, I mentioned that I was designing a retractable desk for my room. Well, after several adjustments and re-engineering episodes (our first try didn't fit through the door), it was completed somewhere around two weeks ago. And now that a digital camera has come within my grasp, I can share some pictures of it:

Ta-da!

The three arms on either side allow me to lower the table top onto my bed when I want to work on puzzles or other things...








...then raise it up to the ceiling when I want to go to sleep.




The top of the table is designed to rest snugly on the outer frame and will not move on its own when in the raised position. Even so, I secure it in place with a bungee cord to keep it from crashing down on me during the night.

The reason the desk and only the desk is black is because of something I remembered from my days in wood shop. After we finished each project, our teacher would cover it with a clear coat of spray paint to seal all minor cracks. I thought this would be a good idea since the plywood boards weren't of very high quality and I didn't want to get any splinters while working. We didn't have any clear spray paint, so I chose to make the desk black, if for no other reason that to look like Master Control from the movie Tron.

The project on the near side of the desk is a puzzle given to me by Trolley, and the papers on the far side are the products of my latest en devour: teaching myself discrete mathematics using an "obsolete" textbook that TOME was giving away. I'm probably never going to take the class at school, so I might as well learn the stuff now. I'll have no computer major outsmarting me!

I'm Still Alive!

I am still stuck here at LeTourneau on my second to last day of class. I saw that I hadn't posted anything since....well, it has been to long. I cannot begin to describe how much I want to go away from college right now and it doesn't help that I still have a paper finish and two finals to study for, both due on Wednesday (6/20). Well, here's a post so enjoy.

May!

Ha! And you thought I would let this month slip by without a post, didn't you? Well take this!

Now I just have to think of something worthy to post about.



Hmmm....



Well... I'm working again. At the same place as last summer, so it's really boring. My department is also currently on mandatory overtime, so I'm working 10+ hours a day. That combined with 8+ hours of sleep a night doesn't leave much time for anything else. At least I'm getting paid well, especially for the overtime.

I saw Spiderman 3 and liked it, then I watched Spiderman 2 again. Dr. Octopus is my favorite villain, so I still kind of like 2 best of the series. Seeing those giant metal tentacles has ignited the engineer in me, and I am now trying to come up with a way to build my own set of Doc Ock arms. I think I have a idea that might work, but it will take some development to bring it into the realm of reality, and even more tweaking to make it something that I could build. That's speaking of the physical structure, though. The control programming is far beyond me and I'm sure would be hideous even to someone who knew what they were doing.

In the meantime, I'll be working on a free-standing retractable table for my room (a tower that lowers a flat working surface onto my bed when I want it, then lifts it up to the ceiling when I don't).

Jewish Wisdom

I should probably put something about the context of the following qoute here, I don't think I will. Who needs context anyway?

"You can't put anything I say on the Power Suite blog because mothers and girls read the Power Suite blog."
- name withheld (aka Frisbee)

Of Banshee Farms and the Advent of Pie

April is almost over.

There hasn't been an April post yet.

I think I'll remedy that.


It doesn't seem like there's a lot to talk about. That's not to say that nothing of interest has happened since the last post, it's just that most noteworthy things that occurred in the last month have already been adequately discussed through other mediums.

The giant Belcher Performing Arts Center was just dedicated, and as a member of the LeTourneau Singers, I can say that I was in THE first group to perform in it. Unfortunately, our performance was from a balcony overlooking the lobby area as everyone left the morning service, so I don't think may people heard us over the talking of the crowd. We did, however, perform again that evening; this time from the stage. The acoustics in that building are really nice. We were followed in performance by Dr. Richard Allen Farmer and Greg Buchanan, who were wonderful. All we needed was for Ravi Zacharias to give a short devotional and the evening would have been perfect.

Another recent event of interest in my life is that my hard drive crashed on Wednesday. It seemed normal when I left for class and when I came back it was trying to reboot and failing to find the operating system. I turned it off and back on, and things worked fine. At the advice of Fjord, I downloaded and ran a hard drive diagnostic program which told me that the heart of my computer was in poor health. Shortly thereafter, it died again. This time I turned it off and left it off. Through Fjord's computer voodoo magic and a few chicken bones all necessary documents and half of my music collection were able to be salvaged before the discs decayed irrevocably, so that's good. I'm currently back to the hard drive that was taken from my old computer when I switched at the beginning of the semester.

And now, I believe I am done.


The job of Banshee Farmer must have a very high turnover rate.

Then God said, "Let there be round pastries with a thick layer of fruit or other delicious filling." And God called the pastries pies, and saw that they were good.

WOW

Watch this. It's amazing.

This video brought to you by Stumble Upon, quite possibly the most potent and dangerous slacker tool every conceived by man.

In Case You Were Wondering...

The probability that a human being being of mass 65 kg jumping with a velocity of 4 m/s could make it all the way to Jupiter is roughly 10^(-9*10^51) or

1 / 10^9000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.


Yay for Modern Physics class!

Cat

HELICOPTER

A fine evening of model productivity from the Dry Suite.

Download movie. It is silent

The Dawn of a New Era

It just dawned on me that there are no Korean embassies in South Korea. Isn't that crazy?

Maniacal Laughter

My analyst told me
That I was right out of my head.
The way that he put it
Was that I'd be better off dead.
But I knew- I knew-
I knew I
was a GENIUS!


For behold! I have taken apart a DC electric motor, tinkered with the wiring, put it back together, and it is now a fully functional AC generator. This is so much more fun than homework.

I am a nerd. If you want proof of this, the orb in the upper right-hand corner of our group picture is a paper model of a complex polyhedra that I constructed for fun. It is an intersection of a Snub Dodecahedron (in blue) and a Pentagonal Hexecontahedron (in gray).
I started off majoring in Mechanical Engineering (because I like math and physics), but lately I have been re-thinking this. I would really like to major in Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Theoretical Physics, but this just isn't sane or possible. So for now I'm settling for dual majoring as an ME and EE, with the possibility of pursuing a math or physics degree in grad school.

The joy that I got from re-working this motor serves to confirm my choice to add Electrical Engineering to my course load. And so, Dozer, there no longer remains any question of whether or not I am ready for my future.
The true question is:

Is the future ready for me?

Digital Project

These are a few pictures of the project I had to do for Digital Electronics. There are 8 logic chips, 2 seven-segment LEDs, 8 regular LEDs, and I don't know how many wires. I was up all night last Thursday working on it, but I guess not sleeping paid off 'cause I got a A on the project. Please enjoy the pics. And to you, Grey, I give you your future!

Masquerade!

The Wisdom of the Power Suite after a communal watching of the Phantom of the Opera...

FULL SPEED AHEAD, CAPTAIN!



Many thanks to Frisbee for the picture. He is our honorary Power Suite member, EVEN THOUGH he has been on a date with, can you believe this, an actual girl? Difficult to conceive, I know.

Shake it, Space Man!

Frisbee wishes to contribute the following to the Power Suite blog:

Yesterday's Dilbert just had to get posted.

Breakfast of Champions

Our sidebar pic, clicky.

Homework

Why does homework exist? Is it to torture us students? Or is it for the professors to laugh at us when we fail? And what is up with profs not teaching you your homework? Here you go, here's a 60 page tutorial on LabVIEW that you need to know by this afternoon....oh, and here is two more homework assignments as well. Dumb, dumb dumb!!!! There is a verse in Ecclesiastes that says "meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless." I am finding more and more truth in this verse everyday. Homework...some call it a necessary evil. I call it a means by which teachers suck your soul out of your body. As Grey put it: "Give up your soul now, 'cause you sure aren't graduating with it!".

Aston Martin!

So, this is like the sexiest car ever! Aston Martin! Mmmmmm. In the movie The Italian Job, Handsome Rob says there's not much a girl won't do on the seats of an Aston Martin. I am inclined to agree with him.
In other news, I am proud to announce that this is my first blog. Yep, I'm a noob. Well, enjoy the Aston Martin and watch James Bond movies.

First Post FTW

Exuberance!