Archive for March, 2007
This post and the next one are a great demonstration of what happens to my brain when I leave it on for too long, and why I never get anything done.
The shower curtain effect is the name for that annoying tendency for said curtain to bow inwards towards you when you’re running the water. I usually try to wet and stick it to the bottom and sides of the tub, but sometimes surface tension can’t hold it. Apparently people have actually investigated this in Scientific American (okay, and the IgNobel). I’m going to have to experiment tomorrow morning when I go in for my shower - I haven’t been paying attention to the shower curtain, but I’m going to try to see if there’s some kind of experiment we can set up to figure out what’s going on. Sweet!
Somewhat related (one possible explanation for the shower curtain effect) is the Coanda effect, which is described as “boundary layer attachment.” Although I know what the three words mean separately in a fluids sense, I have no idea what the phrase means when it’s put together. Apparently you can demonstrate both Coanda and Venturi effects by putting the back of a spoon in running water. Here’s how it works, to the best of my ability to understand it:
- Water running straight down in a nice stream, thanks to gravity.
- You bring the back of the spoon close to the water. As the spoon nears the water stream, the channel of air between the spoon and the water stream gets narrower.
- Air is moving through this channel (because the water is flowing beside it, dragging air molecules alongside). As you narrow the channel, the airspeed through this channel increases (it’s the equivalent of blowing into the open mouth of a funnel; the same amount of air has to go through a smaller area).
- Bernoulli’s principle says that faster-moving fluid (air, in this case) has lower pressure. The Venturi effect says that this creates a vacuum - in this case, a vacuum pulling things towards the spoon.
- The water stream is pulled towards the spoon because of the Venturi effect. It gets closer and closer until - whoop, it touches the spoon!
- Now the Coanda effect kicks in, meaning that the water follows the curve of the spoon (it will drip off the tip of the spoon) instead of just touching it at a tangent and continuing to drop down…
Okay, so I still don’t understand the Coanda effect. Is the water sticking to the spoon in some sort of moving version of surface tension, is that it? There’s a thin layer of water that directly touches the spoon and is pretty stationary, and the moving stream of water actually flows on top of that, and the water-spoon bond sticks because of… surface tension, and the still-water-moving-water bond sticks because of… surface tension? Ack. I don’t know the first thing about fluids. I wish I did. I get the feeling that my knowledge of partial differential equations would get so much better if I learned about fluids.
And someday I have to learn about how airplanes work. (This being related to the Coanda effect.) Sometime later, though, maybe when I go for my pilot’s license (and I will someday; I’m going to learn how to fly at some point). I wish I had time to follow all these mental threads down.
And surface tension is… molecules being attracted to each other, because - well, they just are, somehow? Is it the charges on the molecules being attracted together? Ach, I know I sound like an idiot right now; I don’t know anything about this stuff. I need to learn chemistry; I want to be able to understand this stuff, and understand food chemistry when Debbie talks about it in Foodlab. Maybe I can bribe Karen, Tim, or Jessie with chocolate cake sometime and beg for some explanations, or stop by Chris or Debbie’s office with cake slices and lots of questions. I should set aside time to read a chem textbook first, though. Oh, man. I just want to learn stuff, just wander around and teach people stuff, ask people to teach me stuff.
Last night Alex Davis blew my mind by talking about how magnetism is really relativity acting on electrons. Ask A Scientist and UIUC explain it better than I can. Alex said he learned this from Steve Holt. I’m not surprised; last year I wandered by Steve’s office and he waved me in all excited, and five minutes later my mind was reeling because he’d just derived the speed of light from Maxwell’s equations on a sheet of paper in front of me for no apparent reason. I was just walking by and he thought it would be fun. I freakin’ love our professors.
Why is it that I always learn more outside of class? Always, always, always?
Okay. I’m going to work now. Actually, I’m going to go to class. I’m two hours late.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Two terms I’ve fallen in love with:
- Awesome - as in “Are you for Awesome?” (Of or relating to human rights, social entrepreneurship, sustainability, or general saving the world as defined by Olin students.) When you’re describing (for instance) your new social entrepreneurship project with great gusto, someone will inevitably say - without thinking - “oh man, that’s awesome!” and then you both catch the double meaning and laugh. It’s a choice of words that can only be described as… well, awesome.
- Wicked - as in “wicked problems.” I didn’t know there was such a term, but the engineering equivalent is probably Systems. “Wicked problems have incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements; and solutions to them are often difficult to recognize as such because of complex interdependencies.” These are the problems I love to work on.
Isn’t it great how we can reinvent semantics by just talking and thinking acting as if the definitions we want things to have already exist?
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Couches are surprisingly comfortable places to sleep. A bunch of us crashed in the Foundry’s lounge under flimsy blankets this morning, warmed largely by the fireplace and the jackets we were wearing. I woke up this morning to the sound of people leaving for class and Dan Cody trying to tug his power cord from under the couch cushion I was sleeping on, rolled off the couch towards the fire, and spent a happy half-hour learning a new text editor, reading about startups, and typing this post.
I like being migratory, being able to live with my work, with those I work with. I like being able to set my schedule, my deliverables, being beholden first of all to myself. Ironically, I think I’m more productive that way, measured by the amount of things I’m able to produce for other people. Maybe I’m a natural wanderer. Or maybe it’s that I need to pare down on responsibilities, that new places are good because I’m slightly unburdened when I get there, and I keep running from place to place so obligations don’t build up so fast.
Either way, this summer will be an interesting experiment; I’m going to try to go the entire time without a “real job” (as defined by the parental units) and see if I can eke it through on odds and ends. I know I can at least survive, because my aunt needs a house-sitter and their pantry has far too much food (and $200 is more than sufficient to buy enough calories for 2.5 months and I definitely have that). Then probably get an actual internship for the fall to bulk up the savings before I head off on my trip around the world in Jan. or so.
Ah, yeah. My post-college plans. I need to type them up better so I can formally announce them, but the nutshell is that I’m taking “time off.” I’ve been saving for the last three summers to be able to do this. I am going to have no money whatsoever afterwards (ok, a few thousand bucks I’ve put in my retirement fund that I will never touch unless I need a heart transplant and can’t afford it or something dire like that), but it’s going to be worth it.
I’ll be buying a round-the-world ticket and visiting engineering universities around the world. I want to see the different subcultures of engineering education - you learn Maxwell’s Equations whether you’re in Shanghai or Colorado, but the way you learn them, the reason you learn them, how you use them - the culture, the pedagogy. I’m hypothesizing that each school and each country is different somehow in the way it shapes and trains its engineers, and I want to see if that’s true and how the students turn out differently, if they do at all (and if they don’t… well, then why?) How do they train engineers in India? Is that different from how they teach them in Japan? Does this make a German engineer work differently than an Australian one? Is the demographic of who becomes an engineering student different in Russia than in the United States? Can we use this to get a better understanding of how to train engineering students in general? Can we figure out how to make engineering education more accessible to everyone who wants it?
Broad questions, I know. That’s why I’ve got to finish that research proposal - so I can make sure that I’ve got a good chance at getting useful information to start answering them.
President Miller says I should write a book. Sherra Kerns thinks I should take a road trip and visit universities across the country first to get a baseline of different American institutions. I might do that, if I can find a way to get a car since my brother gets the Camry when he goes to college. Or I can convince myself that biking is sane - it probably isn’t, but the romance of the idea is compelling enough for me to have a hard time shaking it.
Better announcement coming soon, since I promised my profs that I’d be able to tell them something shortly and I need to turn my hack of a proposal into a nicely digestible one-pager so I can give something to the people who keep asking me what I’m up to. But in any case, that’s what I’m working towards, and I’m going to go as soon as I’m convinced I’ve got enough money to see it through and enough background learning to do it well (I will leave no later than my 22nd birthday, to put a deadline on things; that’s May 2008).
Any suggestions for engineering colleges to visit? Classes or professors to see? Countries to hit, pedagogical techniques to watch out for, things you’re curious about related to the way engineers are trained? Companies to talk to? I also want to talk to companies about how they perceive the way engineers are trained, and to pre-college students and their parents and teachers to see how they view engineers, how and why they prepare themselves to study engineering if they do at all (but that’s a a side bonus, a much smaller component, and my focus is on engineering universities themselves).
This is going to happen, but the details of the plan are subject to change. This is the rough draft of what I’ve got, what I’d tell you if you asked me what I was doing right now. Working towards making this reality. (Actually, I’ve been working towards it for the last 2.5 years. I only just got the courage to start telling people this semester.)
Right then. Broke my spacebar last night trying to demo to a Wellesley student how keyboards worked. Time to hit IT.
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 4 Comments »
Continuing my grand tradition of volunteering for things I don’t actually know how to do, I’m setting up a website for the International Development Design Summit and learning Textpattern (a lightweight and flexible CMS) as I go. I’m writing this documentation in the hopes that other Textpattern newbies will find it useful someday - or at the very least, so I can refer to it again later.
Disclaimer: As the title suggest, I’m using Dreamhost. YMMV on other web providers.
First, download and unzip Textpattern into the directory of your choice. Note: I’m using version 4.0.4, the latest as of this writing. Change the numbers to reflect the version you want to install.
- Download Textpattern. I typed wget http://textpattern.com/file_download/29/textpattern-4.0.4.zip into my shell prompt.
- Unzip Textpattern. Predictably, this is unzip textpattern-4.04.zip in the shell prompt. (Yes, shell prompts are in bold italic here.)
- Move the files to the directory you want to install them in. The slash-asterisk (/*) means “[move] everything inside this folder.” Since I wanted to move them to my current directory (denoted by a period) I typed a period at the end; replace the period with the name of your directory if you want. mv textpattern-4.0.4/* .
- Remove the empty directory and the zip file, just for cleanup. rm -r textpattern-4.0.4*
Create a database.
- In the Dreamhost control panel, go to Goodies > Manage MySql.
- Scroll to the bottom. Follow the instructions for creating a new MySql database. It doesn’t really matter what names/hosts/passwords you use, as long as you remember them.
Install it.
- Go to yourwebsite.com/textpattern and follow the prompts. (yourwebsite.com is the folder that you moved the textpatterns into in the first section of this tutorial). You’ll have to…
- Pick a language (I go with English-US, but you don’t have to; it’s just that I only read English fluently at the moment.)
- Remember the passwords, hosts, usernames, and stuff you created in the second section of this tutorial, and type them into appropriate forms.
- Copy-paste some PHP code the installer provides you with and use it to create config.php in your yourwebsite.com/textpattern folder (I use vim in my shell; you can also ftp in a document you make in Notepad).
- Make an account. It doesn’t matter what you use for your password and login, as long as you remember it.
Basic options
- Go to yoursite.com and log in. Congratulations, you have an install!
- There’s a tiny drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner. Use it to go to admin > preferences.
- Change the fields as you will.
- View your site.
That’s it. Next up: customizing the look and feel of your site.
Monday, March 5th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
(triggered by eating some of my Mom’s cooking today - Dad brought it up from home last week when he came.)
My family is from the Philippines. You can probably tell by looking at some of my comfort foods:
- Lumpia - shredded vegetables and crushed sugared peanuts in a wrapper
- Lugaw with century egg
- Champorado (sticky rice boiled with dark chocolate)
- Macaroni and cheese
Ok, the last one is just because Velveeta boxes were the only hot food I could cook by myself as a small child. This was before instant noodles hit our local supermarket. Then there’s also my mom’s stories of how I used so many Tagalog words that I thought they were English - “What’s the Filipino word for basura? (garbage can)” I once asked her.
The Philippines is my borrowed country, if there is such a thing. I’m not culturally or genetically Filipino. I can’t speak the language. I’ve never held my legal residence there, although it’s the “foreign” country I’ve spent the most time in by probably an order of magnitude since we have so much family in Manila. I’m American; we come from the Philippines, and we’re Chinese. You’d think the two end points would carry more weight than the middle place we just happened to swing by in passing.
It’s left its mark, though. The foods I like, the accent I adopt when I’m frustrated (when my parents get mad, they pick up a thick Tagalog accent; when I get mad, I pick up a slight one), the weather I prefer, the exposure to a culture of a third-world country wholly unlike my own. The religion I was raised in. The expressions I still occasionally use (when I’m building circuits you’ll hear me mutter “Ay nako, baliktad” which roughly means “You idiot, you plugged it in backwards.”) A strong respect for those who do domestic work - pretty much all households in the middle-class and above have maids, and our relatives in Manila are no exception (I still feel really weird having someone else cooking and cleaning for me, though). A healthy appreciation for clean water, good public schooling, and a relatively corruption-free political system. A taste for sweet spaghetti. Another continent that I can in some way call home, if I want to.
My grandparents were born in China and moved to the Philippines. My parents were born in the Philippines and moved to America. I was born in America and… well, we’ll see where I go.
Sunday, March 4th, 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
Didn’t intend to take a day off official work today, but ended up doing so anyhow. I woke up rather early in the morning (but too late for breakfast), spent a few hours in bed reading Anthropology books that weren’t actually homework, then went to rehearsal for the drag show where we finished choreography for our act on Friday. I’ll be borrowing my costume from Eric Gallimore; more disturbingly, we borrowed some of our choreography from N’Sync (no, we’re not doing a boy band song).
This will be my third time in drag; I enjoy it the same way I enjoy making costumes for Halloween. It gives you a chance to be someone else for a while. I’m not a huge fan of the hypersexual tones that seem to accompany the idea of “drag” sometimes; I think my group manages to pull off the drag aspect in a funny way that doesn’t need to drip exaggerated sexuality in order to work, and I like that. It’s just one musical number (and then - okay, we are MCing the show) but it’s a chance to put on a skin that’s clearly not mine, and it’s fun to play with that.
Rehearsal was followed by a yearbook photo shoot with the OSA crew for which I alternately wore a suit and jumped around like a fool in an orange scarf, which came with the somewhat less enjoyable task of lugging my props - a stack of heavy engineering books - to all three non-dormitory buildings on campus looking for a table that could approximate a board meeting room. We finally settled on the upper level of the dining hall and made our corporate motto “Killing babies is profitable,” right beside the pie chart that showed the rising revenue from ammunition sales. A black and white photograph of that bored board meeting will be shown beside a huge full-color one of us running, jumping, and hoisting each other, posters, banners, books, and miscellany outside. That’s the idea, at least; we’re still looking for a funky caption.
Spent some time with Candidates, spent more time reading, spent a few hours watching a most excellent production of The Importance of Being Earnest (way to go, FWOP!) and now I’m back to the reading. There’s plenty of it that I’ve got to do; I’m not doing any of that, but instead reading books I want to read right now. (So these are books like Educating the engineer of 2020, the common place of law, and social robotics, which could hypothetically sort of be homework… but they aren’t. I’m reading them because I want to. It makes a difference, darn it.)
I wonder what my life would have been like had I been allowed to unschool myself in fourth grade. I wanted to, but my parents said they couldn’t handle it, so I continued to go to school. But to be able to read, just read and pick up random projects because I wanted to, not to be beholden to somebody else’s syllabi - it sounds so strange as a way to learn, and it seems strange to me that this should sound strange. Wouldn’t that be a great way to learn? Wouldn’t that be a great way to live?
I still have this crazy notion of someday working part-time in a bookstore (just for cash… and a book discount), living in a crappy little apartment to save money, and just spending my time learning completely and utterly random things. An utter “waste of my education.” It would be the best sabbatical I could ever imagine.
Back to my moratorium on productivity. Off to tinker with websites. Then to go back to reading. And then, I suspect, it shall be time for bed.
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments »