Engineering At It's Finest

Welcome to life on Mars

“He's told us not to blow it Cause he knows it's all worthwhile”

How to do engineering homework: An informative guide and window into life.

1) Procrastinate while convincing yourself you're being productive

2) Find a Location to work

3) Write down the problem

4) Get halfway through and go to staple something

5) Break stapler...

Spend the next, far too long period of time disassembling and reassembling your stapler until several things occur:

- you are fully confident that in an exam situation you could, completely disassemble and reassemble your stapler in less than 5 minutes

- the components of the stapler get so worn out from disassembly and reassembly that the stapler no longer functions quite right in spite of being once more reassembled

-it occurs to you that you will not be asked to reassemble your stapler during an exam and you will be asked to turn in this homework

Addendum: After this particular event occurs, admit it to other engineering students. Upon request demonstrate your ability to disassemble and reassemble your stapler completely and pass off the stapler to another engineering student who obtains an initial 30 minutes of joy from disassembly and reassembly of the stapler. The stapler which still worked marginally after first rounds of reassembly no longer functions from wear. Gift it to the other engineering student and resolve to purchase a new stapler.

Already too much

When I was 11 years old I crashed my mountain bike. I was hauled out of the woods in an all terrain ambulance and rushed to the hospital. They stitched me up and I was fine. 

This is the point I have come to. That I know it is almost over, that the semester is almost over. Just like the doctor almost being done with the stitches. But it hurts so bad and I’ve already been through too much. I’ve got no more left in me, I can’t take any more, but there is still more to go. 

Stay Safe. 

Conclusion: I should not consume caffeine based pain killers

Sometimes I'm "that" person. I take to statics with fond memories of vectors from my trouble causing multivariate days and my appreciated too late linear days, allong with a bystanders view of euclidean geometry. This is to say: I draw a mean triangle and think I know more than I actually do.

So when the problem is posed in such a way that it forces one to make one of two conflicting assumptions, I cant help myself.

And when I find that the solution most people will be bringing in makes both of those conflicting assumptions.... something in me can't resist.

I'm 2 pages in on a 4 page detail of why said assumptions break the problem, steadily on my way to the conclusion that the problem statement is ill posed, when I realize what I've done. Ive taken caffeine based pain killers, at night, my resting heart rate shoots up to a conservative 100 beats per minute and my hands are too shakey to write clearly.

I am forced to succumb to a different conclusion: I should not consume caffeine.

That said...I have an explanation. I just hope its correct and not a caffeine + exhaustion based misinterpretation of the problem.

One step closer to becoming iron man

Even Tony Stark would be impressed with this Iron Man suit. 🔥 

“Torrefaction” and the Potato Principal

There comes a point at which my mind no longer wants to absorb new information and I become extremely distractible. Junk food and music become the primary motivators for staying at my desk. This is the point at which I consider my mind a fried potato. 

Tonight that point was hit with the word “Torrefaction,” which describes a process of heating a biomass fuel in an inert atmosphere (like nitrogen) to make it into a more efficiently burning source. Pretty cool right?

I’m working on understanding some Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) techniques for something I’m writing and hence came across the word. 

Today began at 9am with some light physics (literally physics regarding light)

Continued on with some dynamics that took way longer than it should have

Came back around to TGA hit “Torrefaction” and now my mind is burnt toast. 

Aside from interuptions for food, hygene and laundry (bothersome repeated tasks we’ve yet to find ways out of) today has been dedicated to engineering and yet here we are nearing midnight, still with more to do and a fried potato of a mind. 

We are curvature.

If one thinks of life as a series of moments with good and bad wrapped into them, then is would life be worth living if the net sum of the good - bad was bad?

My initial gut feeling was yes, but as in mathematics we cannot just say things are so because of a gut feeling. After all, one could argue that my intuition says so, because the net sum of my moments has been positive.

Consider net happiness as being approximated by the riemann sum of the given good or bad of a set of adjacent short periods of time. Now take the limit of this as the change in time approaches 0. In short, I invite you to consider happiness as the integral of some curve. Where the curve is defined by f(t)=lifes instantaneous happy levels (positive or negative) and the area underneath which is net good/bad.

This is similar to how the integral of position with respect to time is displacement aka net change in position.

Now determining if life is worth living should be a nice integral of a function (which for most would be continuous) and a simple little apple of the fundamental theorem of calculus.

But consider this:

1. We dont know the bounds, so unless a nice little trick or assumption comes in we cant apply FTC. Also of one factors in considerations of life after life on Mars then this becomes an improper integral from 0 to infinity. If you believe that you are reborn then the bounds become negative infinity to infinity. Both very improper.

2. We don't know the function, so we cant integrate it.

3. Even if we could integrate it, we couldn't solve for C, so integrating f(t) as an indefinite integral would be pointless.

So what do we know?

We aren't very good judges of if things are getting better or worse at any given moment so we only have a very rough guess at the rate of change.

We aren't very observant, so we can only notice a few things at a time.

We really only know the moment that we are in, and not where we are going, and what's more I'd like to purpose that our lives are affected by more than one thing.

I purpose that we experience at any given moment the second derivative of the function of life, which is not simply f(t) but rather, a function of infinite (as many as necessary) variables. We know not where we are or where we are going, we dont know how the future will change us. We simply know where we are and have an idea of whether allong a particular direction we are concave up or down.

Life is a n'th dimensional hyperspace and we experience it as the curvature allong whatever path we trace allong whatever level surface we happen to have focused in on.

Aka, we experience life as the curvature (k, second partial derivative) of one level surface of it's n'th dimensional hyperspace.

So we don't know, but just the mere thought of riding allong this hyperspace brings a certain kind of satisfaction, and a unique quest for knowledge.

The Devil Wears A Suit And Tie

He has been reported multiple times. He has a known track record and some young women are lucky enough to be warned to avoid him...

Others are not.

He invites the younger of the college girls, particularly ones with rough home lives, depression, anxiety, self doubt, anyone who is vulnerable or *has a reason to drink*. And then they get drunk and him and his friends take advantage of them.

He does not know who I am.

About a year ago, I stood with another pushing a door open against the cold beconing in two young women. They had made it out of one of the "parties".

We had acquired information about the "party" and one handed under the table I had passed just enough on to an SRA. The party was "not found". The young women had made it out on their own. We snuck them in through the side door of our residence. They would likely have had to leave school if caught.

As we got them warmed up and sobered up (blankets, soda, water), one of them told us half sobbing what happened, the other sat in near silence and said she was fine. They got out before the night was over, but others don't.

Once I saw a man standing outside, a tall almost iconic image of a businessman, smoking a cigarette, wearing a suit. And then he turned and I saw his face and some cold reality hit me. He looks like he owns this place. He does.

May hell be real & worse than any literature imagines & may his cigarettes send him there.

Roller Coasters & Higher Education: The Hardest Part

I like roller coasters, at least sometimes, but they are designed to shake you, scare you a bit, give you an adrenaline rush, an experience, before they place you back on the ground. 

For me the hardest part of any roller coaster or amusement park ride is always waiting in line. Waiting in line is when you have a choice. Every moment I have to stand there, watching the ride, listening to the screams, I am making a conscious choice to get on the ride even as this new information is presented to me. My friends will get me into line, and once I am on the ride itself I put my faith in the safeties designed by the roller coaster engineer  and let my body be thrown from side to side. Loop da’ loops or dramatic three story high dives, locked into my seat the greatest stress is over and I can relax and enjoy the ride.

College too is designed to shake you a bit, give you an experience and place you back on the ground. And here too I find anticipation and decision stifling. I find the choosing of classes, the navigation of my non-standard course map to be a horribly straining task. I would rather just go forth and do, but I feel an obligation to myself to consider my options thoroughly. Issue is, I can’t see the future, there’s no way of knowing what option is truly best in the long run. It’s like being asked to solve for a variable, but being given an indeterminate matrix and some subjective phrases or playing 20 questions with only non distinct questions.  You just have to take your best guess and move on.