Darn You, Old Man!

It was a long weekend, but a good weekend. I got in Thursday night, and stayed through Sunday afternoon. I got to spend a lot of time with Jennifer, and got to see the family too. Jennifer and I saw Catch and Release, which was a pretty good movie, for a chick flick. We spent pretty much all afternoon at the Memphis Law Library, doing homework. I always feel so out of place, solving 2nd order partial differential equations and doing cross products when everyone else is doing case briefs and other law student-type things.

Anyway, it was a good weekend, but it left me tired all day today. It was hard to notice during Mechanical Design (I'm usually on autopilot in there anyway). It didn't really hit me until I went by Dr. Vakili's office to pick up some research. As I was knocking, it hit me how beat I was feeling, and I realized that I was dead meat if he wanted to ask me any kind of serious engineering questions. Luckily, conversation remained superficial. He gave me a research paper to review - Dynamics of Fiber Unwinding. Which is great, because my thesis is on Fiber Winding. *begin sarcasm* I figure I can change some plus signs to minuses, slap together some pretty graphs, and call it a thesis. I can get that to him next week. *end sarcasm*

At the end class last week, Dr. Flandro gave us a problem to figure out, if we got the correct solution, he said we'd get an automatic A. The question was this:

If a ball bearing is dropped from 1000 m above the earth's surface at a lattitude of 37 degrees (the approximate lattitude of Tullahoma), in what direction would an observer standing directly below the ball bearing have to move in order to avoid being struck in the head by the ball bearing? Earth's rotation must be accounted for, other assumptions must be justified.

I know you all figured it out in a minute or two, but for the record, the ball bearing will strike about 55 cm due East from the observer. So, if this happens to you, don't move. You'll be ok.

Anyway, Jeff and I were the only ones (2 out of 4 attending, 1 person MIA) in the class to have any answer, let alone a correct one. So what about that garunteed A? Well, what he meant was that if we got that right, we'll should have no problem getting an A. Not cool, man. Not cool.

Dr. Vakili couldn't make it to Viscous Flow, so he had the video people post a lecture from "years ago." Its old enough that he's balding, but the hair is black instead of gray. From what I can tell, this was not a good lecture to miss. Oh well.

I wound up blowing off the homework group for Mechanical Design that was supposed to meet at 4:00. I was exhausted by 1:oo, and needed a nap in order to keep functioning. So, that's what I did. It was so very nice. I miss naps.

There was some dinner this evening, as well as Star Trek and Heroes. Its very cold outside, and we should get a "wintry mix" soon. Yay.

Note: The student recently referred to as "Motown" will be redubbed "Applejacks," as it is more poignant and does not repeat a nickname currently employed by Jeff and I.