That's Not Very Elegant, Paul

What a day, what a day.

Mechanical Systems was pretty informative. I hadn't made very much headway on the Ch 2 problems ( 1 part laziness, 9 parts gross incompetence). Today, Dr. Dekken starting covering a lot of the stuff I'll need to get through it. Also, everyone in the class agrees that the auther was on some mind-altering substance(s) when he sat down to revise the book for this edition. We have compressive forces causing expansion (can't happen), impossible problems (can't be done), and very few pictures (makes me sad).

After class, I stuck around and started going through some of the problems with Seth (he works on the base, and goes in at 10 am. Yuck). We helped eachother on a couple of early problems, and walked our way through the rest of the problems. We're planning on doing that after every class now. It's better than sitting around; idle hands are the devil's playground.

Just before Tactical Missile class started, Jeff, Amy, Scruffy, and I were discussing our various trajectory codes with Paul Gloyer (he ain't a doctor, and I don't respect him enough to award him with a "Mr."). One of the problems we have is that our missiles are supposed to release the payload at a certain altitude. As of right now, none of us have figured out how to make our programs do that. So Gloyer tosses out that we could just let our code run until we return to the ground, and chop off our data afterwards (pretty easy, from a do-nothing point of view). As he's saying that, Dr. Flandro walks in, overhears him, and says, "That's not very elegant, Paul." And I swear, the "Paul" part had a profane emphasis on it. Hilarious. Also, Jeff inadvertantly accused Dr. Flandro of having a mistake in his equations of motion for the problem, so we worked through it again. At the end, with the right answer, Flandro points out that its a good thing we reached the right answer because he's been using that code on various designs for +30 years. Ouch.

Dr. Vakili made it back for class today. He missed last week because his wife was having some kind of operaton, so I'll cut him some slack there. He was definitely back in full force today, blowing right through those evil Navier-Stokes Equations. Again, I must stress that you should avoid them if you can.

After class, I returned to the gym. It's been way too long, and it was time to take action. Maybe I'll go again tomorow too (if I can hobble out to the car in the morning - oy!).

Finally, Heroes is a great show. Watch it.