metal heart

First law of thermodynamics: energy is always conserved. Second law: energy is always wasted. The night before last, after five years of faithful service and continuous output, my desktop's power supply eeked out its last watt and gave up its ghost. With Juan Enriquez's TED talk predicting the combinination of stem cells, synthetic tissues, and robots fresh in my mind from a dinner-viewing the night before, I set off to repair my poor computer with the idea in my head that it could someday be a quasi-lifeform. (The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress didn't inhibit these thoughts, either. (See previous posts.)) So, I've opened this black box dozens of times -- in fact, I run my compy without its case on for better cooling -- but the last time I messed with the PS was the first time I put the other components in, years and years ago. I'd never pulled the PS out since then, because that basically requires stripping the case to its bones. Dismembering my case to this level felt like cutting open a patient for surgery, and removing the micro-ATX 240W power supply was like tearing out his heart. I'd never thought about it that way before, but a power supply is much like a heart.. even by looks:


I wasn't home when it went out, so I'm still not quite sure what happened. Before I could survey the extent of the damage (fried motherboard, charred RAM, etc.), I had to first acquire another PS. A friendly co-worker generously provided a spare, and my little black compy spent the night with a borrowed heart in the ICU:


Fortunte smiled on the little black compy, for none of its other components were damaged by what appeared to be a simple short in the PS. So I set off to buy a new one and chanced upon the discovery of a lifetime: the circuitry-wonderland that is Fry's Electronics. It's like a Wal-Mart dedicated to computer nerds. I was familiar with the website, but the store blew me away. I picked up a Thermaltake 430W power supply on the cheap... and some blank CDs, and flash drives, and compressed air cans, etc., because you can't go to Wal-Mart and buy just one thing.


This heart is much bigger physically (it doesn't fit in the micro-ATX case) and output-wise, so this happy story ends with a blog post from the back-from-the-dead little black compy.

I couldn't begin to guess (much less calculate with thermo equations.. well, maybe now that I think about it) how much energy I've wasted over the years by allowing my PS to convert precious watts of power into joules of heat throughout each night. But, as the second law guarantees, that heat adds up, and the PS functionality eventually degrades. With my shiny new PS, I won't take my chances again. But I'd better let it run through tonight, just to make sure its heart keeps pumping. And maybe the next couple nights, too. :) Who knows.. some day, it could be repairing itself.

matched asymptotic expansions

Kids shouldn't be afraid of learning, but sometimes material is downright frightening. Remember middle school algebra class, when you were first presented with the Quadratic Formula? Do you remember the trepidation you faced, not only due to the formula's complexity and relentless pursuit of roots, but also of its mere name? H'ok, exaggerated.. slightly. Even if the formula wasn't that intimidating, the memory of learning that particular piece of the mathematical puzzle still stands out in my mind as a slippery challenge. I'd like to believe that I've bolstered my math skills with... what, ten years of continuous math classes since then? Math shouldn't be scary anymore, right? Alas, not the case. I've come across my good friend Fear again this semester, and this time he's taken the form of matched asymptotic expansions.

I want to make matched asymptotic expansions sound tough and scary, but these creatures probably taste like cupcakes to mathmagicians and, as my Viscous Flows professor assures us, are like turning a crank once they're set up. Why, the last "example" we squared off against in class -- a stock second order ordinary differential equation -- took only 8+ pages of (very small print) notes and two class full periods to finish. Admittedly, the big-picture concept isn't so difficult... Fluid flow in what's called a boundary layer -- a region of altered flow near a surface that usually forms in high Reynolds number flows -- is annoyingly/interestingly different than flow far away from a surface. To discover how a boundary layer develops, this process solves for the velocity field far away from the surface, the velocity field close to it, and the velocity field in an invisibly small intermediate layer. Often, one cannot obtain exact analytical solutions to these situations because the governing equations aren't solvable.. instead, with this method, you can approximate conditions as you asymptotically approach the surface of interest and the thickness of the intermediate layer asymptotically approaches zero. Cupcakes, indeed.

I don't have a good grasp on this method, yet.. but it's almost halfway through the semester. After spending another lecture today madly scribbling fractions and exponents involving Greek characters, I'm more than a little unnerved that this class will completely fly over my head. Then again, I would be foolish to ignore the teachings of my amigo the Quadratic Formula: exposure, practice, and yes, more practice will expand my comfort zone with the material. Eventually, matched asymptotic expansions will click, and a solid understanding will make the math much less frightening. Hopefully, this revelation will even occur before finals. Regardless, remind your kids not to be scared of learning.


TL; DR: Math is scary, so knuckle up and work problems. As distraction, look at fun new picture.

Miyazaki is a genius

I'm sure I'm not the first to report this, but it bears repeating. Now, I don't really know anything about anime culture, and, besides a special pocket in my heart for life-changers like Ghost in the Shell, I haven't experienced much of it. Despite being graphic and intense, the plots usually twist out of my limited mental grasp and leave so many loose ends dangling that you could weave a hammock out of them. Anime is entertaining, no doubt, but it's frequently incomprehensible to me. (Aside: for some reason, American movies are the only ones that tie up most if not all of the loose ends. Undecided whether this is good or bad.) However, every now and then, an anime movie will stab straight to the point. Tonight's feature: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The movie takes place in too strange a world to describe here, but the characters are humans, and that's the only frame of reference one needs in order to relate to the story. The movie's themes are intertwined so well that it's almost poetic: love people, respect nature, fight for what you believe in. Can we live like this, please? Regardless of how fantastic the setting, many of these anime stories have a greater humanistic pull than our overused American tragic-romantic comedies. Those are powerful, sure, but it's hard to deliver the emotional depth-charge of something like Grave of the Fireflies with anything short of a three-part documentary. If you want to cry and/or temporarily lose all faith in humanity, watch that movie in a dark room. The point is, I could do with greater exposure to meaningful movies, and I now have a new place to look for them.

Incidentally, Nausicaa was the name of the princess upon whom Odysseus nakedly stumbled in Homer's Odyssey. I don't think that princess was quite as good at flying hang-gliders as Nausicaä, though.


In lab-related news, new pics are up (fotos section on right -->), including a brief gallery of droplets beginning here. Droplets, eh? Just water out of a syringe for now, but I'll post a shot or two with fog-juice (mostly glycol) and whatever else Mark and George will use to effectively seed Mark's dust-devil generator. Hopefully not grad student blood.


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Update (02/14/2009): Just finished The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein is also a genius, for many of the same reasons as Miyazaki. That quality of story makes me want to stay up all night reading. In fact, it did. Also, happy Valentine's Day!

battlechess

I rediscovered an instinct today that I haven't felt for a while -- competitive revenge. Granted, this occurred in about the nerdiest manner possible, but then again, I've never denied being a nerd. (While the lines blur somewhat betwixt dork/geek/nerd/etc., lemme assure you, this was a case of unbridled nerdiness.) Bluntly put, some guy calling himself "lucasalex" kicked my ass in chess, and in return I exacted sweet revenge on the next person I played, poor "Guest 80458....":

No, he didn't deserve humiliation, and no, nobody likes trading a queen for a queen, rook, bishop, and knight. Not a fair trade, he must have been thinking. If I'm honest with myself, the second game made me feel a little better after the first game's rout. It slid a support beam under the ol' self-confidence after it had taken a hit. But wait, dominating the next guy to make myself feel better? Isn't this the kind of instinct we're supposed to suppress? Don't we need fair-play and competitve professionalism in order to smooth over human interactions? Sometimes I feel like the world outside of chess doesn't much care who plays with respect. Parents try to teach their kids to; CEOs don't always teach their employees to; pirates don't have the word in their vocabulary. Should every kid on the soccer team get a trophy? Guess it depends which kid is yours.

Speaking of bosses and pirates, my advisor is out of town/country this week, which ironically means that glorious productivity will be enjoyed by all in the lab. Everyone has a ton to do -- take PIV, finish fluids/experimental methods homework sets, punch out code to drive our new equipment (of which we fortunately have quite a bit), design and send drawings into the machine shop, process vector data, read a paper or two -- but it gets done so much quicker when we prioritize it ourselves. My adivsor has a penchant for pointing out soft spots in our projects (which is a good thing, usually), but he's not so hot at determining the order in which they should be fixed. For example, right now he is more concerned that I learn PIV camera techniques and less concerned that the airfoil under observation does not actually exist yet. Both important, wrong order of importance. Nobody bakes the bread, then adds yeast. I should play him in chess sometime... Anyway, his absence opens the pressure release valve for everyone in the lab, and a happy lab is a productive lab.

Just as important: everyone gets a free grand-slam breakfast at Denny's tomorrow from 6:00am - 2:00pm. Jackpot.