I'm Ugly Like A Fox

It seems that the weather finally got a good look at the calendar, saw that it was actually December now, shouted "Great Scott!," and started making up for lost time. It was in the 30s and 40s today. I could have worn shorts on Tuesday & Wednesday. That's nuts, man.

Not much happened today, but it should have. Heather & I were supposed to meet with Pete the shop guy to talk about some kind of conveyor belt. We showed up to the Lab at 10:45 as promised, and no Pete. So I tried to load some carbon fibers on a tray for analysis, but got bored of that quickly.

Heat Transfer got really ugh-worthy when we started talking about Finite Difference Methods for transient problems (that's where something is getting heated or cooled over time). The bottom line was that you wind up having a 15 x 15 matrix that has to be solved for each time interval you go through. That gets really ugly, really fast. According to Dr. Antar, its not so bad now that we have these new-fangled 64-bit processors in our computers.

Dr. Antar let class out a few minutes early so that we could get to the seminar on time. For reasons that have not been revealed to me, we didn't have this seminar on Wednesday but on Friday afternoon instead. Aside from the scheduling inconvenience, it was a pretty neat seminar. The presentation was on current and future projects conducted by the Air Force Materials & Manufacturing Directorate at Wright-Patterson AFB. Topics included: biological heat seeking missiles, carbon-fiber aircraft (SHOUT-OUT), self-healing aircraft, transformers (robots-in-disguise), fire-fighting ATVs with super nozzles, and sentry bots that challenge intruders with a 30-caliber machine gun (SWEET!). I may have said that "SWEET!" a little too loud during the presentation, but oh well. If I were giving a lecture, I'd rather hear that on occasion rather than utter silence.

The Arnold Fitness center seems to be working out just fine. My calves & shins started protesting after my run, so I had to pass on the elliptical today. Oh well. Dinner at Ruby Tuesday's was awesome, Dr. Who was pretty good, and BSG was great. Jeff and I started watching 12 Monkeys, but he woosed out. We'll finish it tomorrow night, along with another Mystery Science Theater 3000. Good times.