Arlen Ward dot com

The latest XKCD comic hits on one of my favorite subjects. I am sharing it with you now. These two statements are correlated.

The first rule of street-fighting mathematics is…

The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club

Math is always portrayed as exacting and calculating, but there is a great need for those that deal with numbers on a regular basis to also have a sense for approximate answers. Throughout engineering school it is often referred to as “back of the envelope” calculation. Quick and dirty approximation that gives a sense of the exact answer.

A colleague pointed me to a class called “Street-Fighting Mathematics” over on the MIT Open Course Ware site. MIT OCW is a site with lecture notes, readings, exams and videos from quite a few classes. Now you have no excuse for sitting around doing nothing on a Friday night! Street-fighting Mathematics is taught by Sanjoy Mahajan, and it looks pretty well put together.

The course description reads:

This course teaches the art of guessing results and solving problems without doing a proof or an exact calculation. Techniques include extreme-cases reasoning, dimensional analysis, successive approximation, discretization, generalization, and pictorial analysis. Applications include mental calculation, solid geometry, musical intervals, logarithms, integration, infinite series, solitaire, and differential equations. (No epsilons or deltas are harmed by taking this course.)

Seems to be the thing everybody should review every once in a while. Here is your first assignment, now get to work!

Below is a video where a 9 month old describes entropy to a general audience. This lecture is compressed from 4 hours to 2 minutes.

From Swans on Tea

I see that a book based on the Last Lecture of Randy Pausch was released a while ago.

While it something that I would not mind reading some day, I really only mention it so that I can link to the YouTube video of the lecture Pausch gave for the Last Lecture “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”. Watch the whole thing, you will be a better person for it. The insights and clarity are not often available like this.

Oh what a public service announcement gone wrong…

This afternoon I got a surprise in the mail. Actually it wasn’t a surprise, I knew it was coming. I just figured it would be a few more weeks before I saw it. So the most shocking part of this might be that a governmental agency worked faster than I expected.

I got my official notification from the State of Colorado that I am now a licensed engineer. They issued my number and everything.

I knew this was coming because I got the notification from the exam administration that I had passed the Principles and Practice exam in the middle of finals week. While it was a nice interruption from studying for my last finals, I didn’t really have time to blog about it then. I figured I would hear from the state in mid-January, but they seem to be busy this time of year!

Anyway, it was a nice way to start the year!

Well, I have been remiss in updating the blog recently, though I have lots of good reasons. Actually they all boil down to one: I have been too busy to post.

What have I been up to? Here is the summary in five lines:

1. Working like mad to finish my last semester of classes (only three weeks to go!).
2. Installed new optical tables and workbenches in the lab (I’ll do a virtual tour one of these days).
3. Took the Professional Engineering exam at the end of October (I think I passed, but will know for sure in late December).
4. Working out at Emerfit doing the CrossFit thing (the longest I have ever stuck to a workout plan, including basic training!).
5. Any remaining seconds in the day were filled with family stuff, and sometimes sleep.

Just to keep you entertained until I have more time to post interesting things, I point you to The Periodic Table of Videos, put together by the University of Nottingham. Check it out, if only for the great hairdo of academia (you’ll know it when you see it).

For example, here is the Cesium video:

There are lots of great videos on their site.

I am sharing this will all of you because if I get stuck playing this too much, you should too.

Fantastic Contraption

9 Amazingly Unique Bridges You May Not Have Seen

Zoom into a Carbon Fiber
Uploaded by Weird_Weird_Science

There are more videos from Weird Weird Science here, including tours of steel, brass, aluminum, concrete, and hair.

Power is Work divided by Time.

I found a great site via the links at againfaster.com:

It is an work/power calculator for workouts!

Since I skipped out of town for the weekend, my last workout was from Friday.

So here’s the stats from Friday, and my less-than-stellar Fran time of 10:44:

Work Performed
66187.48 joules
6749.14 kg-m
48819.89 ft-lbs

Power Output
102.78 watts
0.14 horsepower
75.81 ft-lbs/sec

I am so geeking out over the data that are available via CrossFit. You all just wait until I start graphing all this stuff!