Posts
This was supposed to have been posted yesterday. Something went screwy.
Here is yesterday's post in all it's lovin' glory. I'll have a new post tomorrow after my physics test.
...I've even been known to jot down the odd poem, when the muse descends.
What a wonderful day. And not because it's Valentine's day. I'm not really sure that I buy into all of that. Hearts and candy and teddy bears, all seem like a cross between Christmas and National Get New Teeth Because Your Old Ones Rotted Out Day. On the other hand, it is as good an excuse as any to creatively express one's love for another.
In that vein, I've tried my hand at a sonnet. It's been a minute, and I'm rusty. Once I have SWMBO's permission, I'll post it here.
What a wonderful day. Seventy degrees, light breeze, partly cloudy, and no rough weather for at least a week. Don't get me wrong, I love my snow. I just like my spring-y weather too. I'd like to think that I can get in an extra two runs this week. My neighbor is a fair-weather runner, so this stuff shouldn't be too tough for her.
Speaking of running, I should mention that I've managed to hit my running goals for last week. I'm back to where I wanted to be mileage-wise, and I'm on track to run the Rock-n-Roll half at the end of March. Every once in a while, I'll pop out a seven minute mile as motivation. Like, I can't believe that I can run this for a mile, much less for thirteen! Maybe by the end of the year I'll be able to do that.
What a wonderful day. My new laptop is here! A Dell Inspiron 15R. It's fast (zOMG!!1), pretty, and mine! Microsoft has finally made a good operating system in Windows 7. It's fast, stable, and pretty. Too bad it took twenty years, but better late than never, eh? Speaking of fast, Office 2010 Professional (Plus! w00t!) installed in about twelve minutes. I'm blown away. This is what I've always wanted n a computer.
If you're wondering if this means that I'll be back to regular updates, fear not. It does. My goal is to get about ten posts ahead by the end of the semester. That way, any problems that I have will be covered by blog filler (blog + bondo = blog-do? bond-log?). No more weeks and weeks with nary a sign of life.
Okay. Here's what's on base. I want to do something about how private spaceflight ventures are really working well with NASA. I have personal research to do and report on. I finally figured out what the thrust of my masters research will be (fluid dynamics!) and want to get started into that right away. There are also posts on kids, babies, tweens (no Beiber), and married life. Stay tuned, it's gonna get hot in here...
Cheers,
-- Zach (Dude! I gotta Dell! (great, I just verbed a computer company))
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Love. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Feature: Tasty Food
Today I'd like to talk a little about a subject neat to everyone's heart - food. Having three children with another on the way means that we spend a large part of our time devoted to the simple acts of preparing food, shoving it in our faces, and then cleaning up afterward. This is the first in a long-running and semi-irregular series on cooking in our house. One of my goals for this year has two parts. First, I want to do more of the cooking. I like to cook, even though I'm not any good at it. That will improve over the course of the year, but I have to actually cook more first. Second, I want to try one new recipe a week. I'll post those here, along with some feedback as to how the cooking went and if the food was tasty.
Coincidentally, my wife went grocery shopping last night. She returned with twelve paper bags full of primarily breakfast and lunch foods, along with a smattering of fruits and veggies. Oh, and five pounds of ground beef and a ROAST! Woo-hoo! We love roast.
Okay, on to the cooking stuff. We have now two crock pots. I'd like to think that we'll use them maybe twice a week for roasts or chicken stuff or what have you. There are six one-pound bags of different types of beans in the larder. I'm dying to try out a slow cooker bean recipe. One problem - the baby and I are the only two people in the house that eat beans. What I really need is a way to cook beans so that they don't have the texture of beans.
We usually keep a couple of pounds of frozen veggies. There's almost always frozen chicken breasts too. I wonder if you could stir-fry frozen chicken and veggies at the same time and have it come out right. There's an avenue of research.
We love fruit and vegetables. Often, a bowl of fruit becomes a meal. Another recipe that I'm dying to try out involves a steamed veggie plate. I could be bad and add cheese to it, to make sure that the kids eat it. Or, I could just wait until they're really hungry ;-) Fruit salad should be a weekly thing in our house, but I don't know if it's substantial enough. What would one pair with a fruit salad? Would you put salad in your fruit salad? Inquiring minds want to know.
I think that we maybe eat too much red meat. Rather than have it four or five times a week, I want to cut that down to once or twice a week. That should help with our health and with our budget. If I could figure out how to get everyone else to eat beans, I'd be home free. Beans are a prime red meat replacement. Maybe I'll just have to wait and make the bean-things for my lunches.
There's another topic for discussion - lunch. The Pickle gets her lunch for free from school, but she usually doesn't like it. I want to send her lunch with her, but it needs to be inexpensive. Sandwiches are only palatable for so many consecutive days. Maybe she'll start taking leftovers once or trice a week. Pizza, chicken, and roast are all good cold, and she loves them all.
Okay, I'll admit that this isn't my best post ever, but it will get better. Tonight, the missus wants to make a roast. Tomorrow, I'll try making something. I'll let y'all know how it goes.
Until then, bon appetite.
Cheers,
-- Zach
Coincidentally, my wife went grocery shopping last night. She returned with twelve paper bags full of primarily breakfast and lunch foods, along with a smattering of fruits and veggies. Oh, and five pounds of ground beef and a ROAST! Woo-hoo! We love roast.
Okay, on to the cooking stuff. We have now two crock pots. I'd like to think that we'll use them maybe twice a week for roasts or chicken stuff or what have you. There are six one-pound bags of different types of beans in the larder. I'm dying to try out a slow cooker bean recipe. One problem - the baby and I are the only two people in the house that eat beans. What I really need is a way to cook beans so that they don't have the texture of beans.
We usually keep a couple of pounds of frozen veggies. There's almost always frozen chicken breasts too. I wonder if you could stir-fry frozen chicken and veggies at the same time and have it come out right. There's an avenue of research.
We love fruit and vegetables. Often, a bowl of fruit becomes a meal. Another recipe that I'm dying to try out involves a steamed veggie plate. I could be bad and add cheese to it, to make sure that the kids eat it. Or, I could just wait until they're really hungry ;-) Fruit salad should be a weekly thing in our house, but I don't know if it's substantial enough. What would one pair with a fruit salad? Would you put salad in your fruit salad? Inquiring minds want to know.
I think that we maybe eat too much red meat. Rather than have it four or five times a week, I want to cut that down to once or twice a week. That should help with our health and with our budget. If I could figure out how to get everyone else to eat beans, I'd be home free. Beans are a prime red meat replacement. Maybe I'll just have to wait and make the bean-things for my lunches.
There's another topic for discussion - lunch. The Pickle gets her lunch for free from school, but she usually doesn't like it. I want to send her lunch with her, but it needs to be inexpensive. Sandwiches are only palatable for so many consecutive days. Maybe she'll start taking leftovers once or trice a week. Pizza, chicken, and roast are all good cold, and she loves them all.
Okay, I'll admit that this isn't my best post ever, but it will get better. Tonight, the missus wants to make a roast. Tomorrow, I'll try making something. I'll let y'all know how it goes.
Until then, bon appetite.
Cheers,
-- Zach
Monday, January 24, 2011
Feature: Mindless Link Propogation
One of the things about being subscribed to several different industry digests is that I receive a ton of email updates. These updates are usually about trivial things or things that don't interest me. Often, however, they are interesting - sometimes very interesting. I'll usually find three to five unique things every day that tickle the proverbial fancy. This leads me to a problem.
See, I only type about sixty words a minute. The bulk of my blogging happens in the morning, between shower and breakfast. Trying to write about all of the nifty things I see in the course of a day is incredibly difficult, especially if I want the entries to be more than, "Hey, I found a link." One solution to the problem is to try to work all of these thing into one big post every week. Another solution is to simply ignore the problem and hope it goes away.
If I did that, I'd be shirking my responsibility to me readers and to myself. We don't like shirking.
I think I'll do a big link propagation post every ten days or so. This lest me keep space open to write about the other seven-hundred thirteen things I want to write about without letting the mindless links take over the site (like zombies).
Here we go, then, in no particular order.
There's a story on TechNewsDaily about how researchers have come up with a way to hide an object from sonar. The object is placed in the center of this disk-thing. The disk has several concentric rings which have different indicies of refraction. The sound pulse from the sonar is bent neatly around the center of the disk, reforming on the other side and continuing on as though nothing had happened.
I'm instantly reminded of my first Physics class, and so thankful that I understood what my professor was saying. This is a brilliantly simple idea with scads of potential applications, from medicine to building to cars and aircraft to the mentioned sonar-evading submarines.
Also from TechNewsDaily, this is a countdown of seven technologies in cars that got their start in aerospace. I love articles like these, for obvious reasons. I feel like the work that I'm doing now and will be doing in the future will really pay off. Worst-case scenario, I can work just about anywhere and do just about anything with a degree in physics and aeronautics.
December 14 of 2011 is the scheduled launch date for Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus X1 craft. The purpose is to test the Commercial Orbital Transportation System, a system designed to dock with the ISS. The payload is a token cargo load. Obviously, the primary function of the launch is to test the technology being used by a commercial vendor. Orbital has achieved 17 of the 21 milestones set for it by NASA to ensure a successful launch and rendezvous with Station.
I'm super excited about this. I fully believe that this is the way to go with respect to getting cargo into space and performing crew ferry functions. Let NASA do the really interesting stuff, and let the private sector do the mundane chores. The parallels between now and the early part of the Space Race are strong. The NACA was transiting into space, leaving private companies to handle further refinements in aeronautics. Everyone won then, everyone will win now. Go Orbital!
MIT has a blog called Technology Review. One story that they published last week was that Russian physicists had figured out how to work around the radio blackouts associated with re-entering spacecraft. The concept is simple - since the plasma sheath blocks radio waves, why not turn the sheath itself into a transmitter. The work is still very preliminary, but it has the potential to be a very useful tool.
Apparently, the moon has a core similar to the Earth's. Sifting through Apollo-era data, NASA researchers have concluded that the moon has a solid inner core ans a fluid outer core. The biggest difference is that the boundary layer between the crust and the core is much larger, as a percentage, than the Moho in our planet.
The primary mechanism for this discovery is advanced signals processing capabilities developed over the last forty years. Previously, there had been too much noise in the seismic signals to accurately divine what was in the moon. Now, new signals processing techniques have allowed researchers to cancel out the noise, leaving a clean signal for analysis.
China has unveiled a new fifth-generation stealth fighter. Actually, it looks more like a fighter/bomber, owing to its gargantuan size. Similar in shape to the F-22 but sized more like a Tupolev Tu-28, the J-20 is designed for air superiority and first-strike duties. Given the high ground clearance and apparent large internal space (for fuel or weapons), it would seem that the J-20 is primarily designed for long range strike duties. It's most likely not for aircraft carrier use - the thing's just too big.
The real question is who is the intended target of the J-20? Russia and China have never been the best of friends, and China seems interested in pushing the US out of the Pacific. Whether this aircraft can perform at the level of Russian or American fifth gen fighters remains to be seen.
That's enough for one day. Tune in tomorrow for a musing on the space race and how it's applicable today.
Also, before I forget, today is my fourth anniversary!. Woo! Go us! Love you hunnee :-)
Cheers,
-- Zach
See, I only type about sixty words a minute. The bulk of my blogging happens in the morning, between shower and breakfast. Trying to write about all of the nifty things I see in the course of a day is incredibly difficult, especially if I want the entries to be more than, "Hey, I found a link." One solution to the problem is to try to work all of these thing into one big post every week. Another solution is to simply ignore the problem and hope it goes away.
If I did that, I'd be shirking my responsibility to me readers and to myself. We don't like shirking.
I think I'll do a big link propagation post every ten days or so. This lest me keep space open to write about the other seven-hundred thirteen things I want to write about without letting the mindless links take over the site (like zombies).
Here we go, then, in no particular order.
There's a story on TechNewsDaily about how researchers have come up with a way to hide an object from sonar. The object is placed in the center of this disk-thing. The disk has several concentric rings which have different indicies of refraction. The sound pulse from the sonar is bent neatly around the center of the disk, reforming on the other side and continuing on as though nothing had happened.
I'm instantly reminded of my first Physics class, and so thankful that I understood what my professor was saying. This is a brilliantly simple idea with scads of potential applications, from medicine to building to cars and aircraft to the mentioned sonar-evading submarines.
Also from TechNewsDaily, this is a countdown of seven technologies in cars that got their start in aerospace. I love articles like these, for obvious reasons. I feel like the work that I'm doing now and will be doing in the future will really pay off. Worst-case scenario, I can work just about anywhere and do just about anything with a degree in physics and aeronautics.
December 14 of 2011 is the scheduled launch date for Orbital Sciences Corporation's Cygnus X1 craft. The purpose is to test the Commercial Orbital Transportation System, a system designed to dock with the ISS. The payload is a token cargo load. Obviously, the primary function of the launch is to test the technology being used by a commercial vendor. Orbital has achieved 17 of the 21 milestones set for it by NASA to ensure a successful launch and rendezvous with Station.
I'm super excited about this. I fully believe that this is the way to go with respect to getting cargo into space and performing crew ferry functions. Let NASA do the really interesting stuff, and let the private sector do the mundane chores. The parallels between now and the early part of the Space Race are strong. The NACA was transiting into space, leaving private companies to handle further refinements in aeronautics. Everyone won then, everyone will win now. Go Orbital!
MIT has a blog called Technology Review. One story that they published last week was that Russian physicists had figured out how to work around the radio blackouts associated with re-entering spacecraft. The concept is simple - since the plasma sheath blocks radio waves, why not turn the sheath itself into a transmitter. The work is still very preliminary, but it has the potential to be a very useful tool.
Apparently, the moon has a core similar to the Earth's. Sifting through Apollo-era data, NASA researchers have concluded that the moon has a solid inner core ans a fluid outer core. The biggest difference is that the boundary layer between the crust and the core is much larger, as a percentage, than the Moho in our planet.
The primary mechanism for this discovery is advanced signals processing capabilities developed over the last forty years. Previously, there had been too much noise in the seismic signals to accurately divine what was in the moon. Now, new signals processing techniques have allowed researchers to cancel out the noise, leaving a clean signal for analysis.
China has unveiled a new fifth-generation stealth fighter. Actually, it looks more like a fighter/bomber, owing to its gargantuan size. Similar in shape to the F-22 but sized more like a Tupolev Tu-28, the J-20 is designed for air superiority and first-strike duties. Given the high ground clearance and apparent large internal space (for fuel or weapons), it would seem that the J-20 is primarily designed for long range strike duties. It's most likely not for aircraft carrier use - the thing's just too big.
The real question is who is the intended target of the J-20? Russia and China have never been the best of friends, and China seems interested in pushing the US out of the Pacific. Whether this aircraft can perform at the level of Russian or American fifth gen fighters remains to be seen.
That's enough for one day. Tune in tomorrow for a musing on the space race and how it's applicable today.
Also, before I forget, today is my fourth anniversary!. Woo! Go us! Love you hunnee :-)
Cheers,
-- Zach
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