Last year at this time I ended a blog post with this:

I wish each of you health and happiness for you and your families as we start off in 2011, and when we look back on it a year from now I hope we will all see it as time well spent.

• We started the year off by getting a new puppy! A two month old Rottweiler named Toby.



• I gave the Scout Sunday sermon at the church I grew up in.
• I was a course participant in Wood Badge course W5-61-11-1



• Toby got bigger.
• Traveled to San Francisco at the beginning of the Summer
• Watched our kids start piano lessons, and take to it like fish to water.
• Toby got bigger.
• I was a camp councilor for our regions’s Junior Camp for 3rd through 5th graders.
• Took my son to Resident Camp in Longs Peak Council. I really enjoyed just being a Scout’s dad instead of the Cubmaster!
• Our family went down to the Philmont Training Center to take a Cubmaster training course.



• I started my second year as Cubmaster for Pack 223, with a great group of boys and volunteers.
• Toby got even bigger.
• I got a new camera, which should result in more photos being shared here as well as on Google+.
• We went back to San Francisco for Thanksgiving, having a wonderful time with my sister and her family.



• At work I got a brand new lab in a brand new R&D building, all ready for fantastic things in the next year!
• Toby got bigger still.
• I finished my Wood Badge ticket in December with a workshop on the physics of the Pinewood Derby.



• Spent Christmas here in Colorado, seeing family and friends for the holidays.

Not to be outdone, ’12 is going to be another year packed with activities.

• Unpacking all the stuff we moved to the fancy new lab
• Travel to Israel with my wife, mother-in-law, and some friends to see the Holy Land.
• I am going to be the Director (in Training) of Junior Camp for our Regional Churches.
• Continue to put on the best Cub Scout program I possibly can for the families of Pack 223.
• Head back to Philmont for the Philmont Leadership Challenge. A week in the backcountry of New Mexico extending the skills I learned in Wood Badge.
• Hopefully the end of 2012 also finds me working closely with the next Cubmaster of our Pack, because my tenure will be up by that coming summer.
• One thing is for sure: the dog will continue to grow.

How did people run packs before e-mail? For that matter, how did they do it before text messages, cell phones, the internet, and social media?

Case in point: a few days ago I got an e-mail (on my phone) from one of our Den Leaders. It said “I think the Tiger Picnic is scheduled for the same day as the Elementary School’s Carnival Night”. So I looked up the number for the school office (on the internet via my phone) and gave them a call. After confirming that they were indeed scheduled for the same night, I looked at the pack calendar (still on my phone) and figured a week later was Memorial Day weekend so that was out. But a week earlier didn’t seem to have any conflicts.

So I called my Assistant Cubmaster (who was responsible for reserving the city park where we are having the picnic) and left him a voicemail saying that we were changing the date by a week. A couple of minutes later I got a text message from him that he got my message while he was at the city desk filling out the paperwork to reserve the park. Just in the nick of time!

So long story (sort of) short, all this wonderful technology helped fix a pack problem within minutes all while I was driving down the highway at 80 miles an hour. No, not really. I was in the lab at work. But imagine how much more problematic that would have been without these technologies.

If I waited one more day I could just write this as a weekly update. But then again, 14 2/7 weeks of scouting doesn’t sound nearly as cool as 100 days. I have been crazy swamped with work and scout related things. I haven’t had a chance to put it down here. Lets see if I can remember what I did for the last four days…

Spinal Tap Engineering.

Today’s XKCD made me laugh out loud. Some problems are marketing and sales problems, not engineering problems.

Spinal Tap Engineering (Click to see original)

Units of measure are sooooo unnecessary.

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!

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.

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.

Last week, in addition to being introduced to the Miracle of Science Bar and Grill*, I had the opportunity to attend the professional short course from MIT’s Edgerton Center, High-Speed Imaging for Motion Analysis: Systems and Techniques.

Below are a few of the images captured during the course, during the bullet lab. It consisted of taking still images with a 500 nanosecond strobe of (what else?) .22 bullets going through things. These were taken in a dark room with the camera shutter open, and a microphone trigger for the strobe. I re-hosted these and others in the general photography section of this site and in addition you can find them on the Edgerton Center Site, along with others from previous years.

The course was great, split about 50-50 between lectures and laboratory work, starting with the basics of high speed photography and touching on some of the most advanced technologies that are just being released commercially. In the four days of the class we covered a wide range of useful topics:

• Camera and Setting Selection
• Lighting
• Lens Selection
• Laser Illumination
• Schlieren Imaging
• Motion Analysis Software

The 32+ course attendees were split into four groups and assigned a rather tongue in cheek project to be presented at the dinner the final evening of the course. This was a competition between teams, with prizes for the team with the “best” presentation. The point was to demonstrate some of the principles that were learned in the class, but also included points awarded for originality and entertainment. I won’t divulge details of what happened, but these were some of the funniest presentations I have ever seen. For some reason there were quite a few high speed video clips of people being hit in the head with things (including hot dogs and balls of clay). My group didn’t win the competition, but I must admit that the team that won earned every bit of it.

So many thanks to Dr. Jim Bales for the great course and the chance to have a little fun while we were at it!

* The Miracle of Science is a bar and grill about 3 blocks from MIT. Very much a tech college decor, the menu is nicely done as a periodic table on a chalkboard (I had the Rony Burger, chemical symbol “Rb”), and the bar and tables are the black lab surfaces that we all remember from chemistry lab.

As mentioned in the Cliff’s notes version regarding April, I spent a few days in Munich last month. It was part of the 10th International Conference on Hyperthermic Oncology. The trip was quick (yay for direct flights), and unfortunately the family didn’t get to join me. I did get to present a poster of one of the measurement tools we are using in my dissertation research, so that was a plus.

The conference venue was a hospital that was located about six or seven kilometers from the hotel, so I quickly learned the layout of the subway system in order to get back and forth each day. The hotel was close to the center of town, so there was a chance to see the Rathaus and wander around downtown each night.

One slow afternoon, I made it to the Deutsches Museum, by far the best science and industry museum I have ever been to. I could have spent days there.

After the conference was over, I spent my last afternoon in Munich vistitng the Olympic Park, and seeing where baby BMWs are made.

It was a nice trip, I really enjoyed Munich. Next time I’ll have to bring the family and spend some extra time.

Hmmm. It sure has been a while since I have posted! I seem to be missing the whole month of April. Sorry about that!

Things have been crazy, but I am still alive. So here’s the cliff notes version of April:

• School
• Work
• I helped build a train track around the boy’s room.
• School
• Work
• I went to Munich for a Hyperthermia Conference
• School
• Work
• I gave a couple of presentations on protiens including measuring denaturing energy with an atomic force microscope and computational methods for simulating folding.
• School
• Work
• School
• Work

More updates in the near future.