Alas, my Spring Break has come to a close. I did have fun, though. I got Sonic & Knuckles for the SEGA Genesis and enjoyed time with friends and family. This week I get a midterm for my grad level E&M class. We have over two weeks to do it, though, which is quite nice. Also, Happy St. Patrick's Day, all! If you are old enough to drink, please do so responsibly.
Just finished replaying the first game in the series, and it's still awesome. The world, the music, the characters, the story – all are so wonderful and charming. The soundtrack has to be some of the best music in video game history. After the long, gruelling process that is inputting a Gold level password from my Clear Data (I don't have a GBA link cable with me), I'm now starting The Lost Age. I will miss Isaac and Co. for now.
This evening, KK and I will embark on an epic quest to return home via Greyhound bus. Neither of us has ever partaken in such an adventure, so it will probably be full of intrigue, drool, and snorts due to the fact that we leave after midnight. 'Twill be interesting indeed. In other news, scattering theory is still something that eludes me. This is funny, because one of my research projects sort of uses scattering theory as an approximation technique. I get it there, but not when it comes to G
Source: Gravity Falls Topic I made a Gravity Falls discussion topic in Completely Off Topic. Feel free to fuel the discussion over there if you're a fan of the awesome Disney show.
When I first came to this site, I was very much a lurker. My brothers and I had gotten into BIONICLE from its beginning in 2001, and we eventually stumbled on this site in the early, awkward days of the World Wide Web. It was here that I saw the creative output of the fandom – sprite comics, artwork, MOCs, comedies, epics, and much more. Fourteen years ago, I became a part of that creative output with the premiere of Akano's Comics. It's been six years since I made a comic (sorry, everyone,
Yesterday, I obtained my 4-year…Norik head? Exactly what am I supposed to do with it? ~tries putting it on his face like a mask~
You know, after one year, you can control time, after two years you get power over light, three years you get invisibility, but all I have now is a Rahkshi head?
The fourth year stinks. XP
So, I'm working on a computer project for my Electrodynamics course. I'm using a computer method called the Relaxation or Finite Difference Method. It basically takes a physical scenario, divides the space of interest into a grid, and assigns voltages for each grid intersection. Then, using a computer language of choice (I'm using FORTRAN, like a boss), I make a program that essentially takes a weighted average of all the points whose voltages aren't fixed until the program doesn't change those
It's finals week at my grad school, but since I didn't take any classes this semester, I have no exams to study for (except my prelims, which are at the end of the summer ). I am, however, holding office hours for my students before they take their exams, so I'm not without stuff to do. I also went to Philly BrickFest two weekends ago, but I was only there for a couple hours since I had to leave for choir rehearsal. I did snap some pics, which will hopefully end up on my Brickshelf at some poi
Rob Paulsen responded to my question I tweeted earlier on whether his voice was in the LEGO City: Undercover trailer. While not a definitive answer, it still has made my day.
Going to spend some time with KK, Tekulo, my mom and my roommate for the next week. I'll have BZP access, but I'm not sure if I'll actually be on during that time, so if I'm quiet for the next week, you now know why.
So, this past week was my Fall Break, which allowed me to enjoy the comforts of home and gave me the opportunity to say hello to people who are still at my undergrad. I also received and played intensely Pokémon White 2, hence my lack of blog posts. I just beat the 8th Gym today (Marlon is weird...) and now have to prepare lecture for Wednesday. :\
I was on a walk the other day after lunch and a beautiful aroma hit my nose. It was faint, almost fleeting, until it got slightly more intense, then faded away. It is the best smell in the world
It is the smell of a fire burning in the fireplace of a distant house, which means one glorious thing: Winter is on its way.
Today I want to talk about something awesome: Special Relativity. It's a theory that was developed by this guy you may have heard of, Albert Einstein, and it's from this theory that arguably the most famous equation in physics, E = mc2, comes from. I'm not going to talk about E = mc2 today (in fact, I've already talked about it, but it's not the whole story!), but I wanted to talk about two other cool consequences of Special Relativity (SR), time dilation and length contraction. First and fore
My very first Equation of the Day was about the wave equation, a differential equation that governs wave behavior. It doesn't matter whether you have linear waves (sine and cosine functions), cylindrical waves, or spherical waves, the wave equation governs them. Today I will focus on the second, the so-called cylindrical harmonics, or Bessel functions. A harmonic function is defined as one that satisfies Laplace's equation, For cylindrical symmetry, the Laplacian (the operator represent
You may have learned once that classical mechanics all stems from Newton's laws of motion, and while that is true, it is not necessarily the best way to solve a given physical problem. Often when we look at a physical system, we take note of certain physical parameters: energy, momentum, and position. However, these can be more generalized to fit the physical situation in question better. This is where Lagrange comes in; he thought of a new way to formulate mechanics. Instead of looking at the t
I made it in GIMP. A cardioid is the envelope formed by a set of circles whose centers lie on a circle and which pass through one common point in space. This image shows the circle on which the centers of the circles in the above image lie. A cardioid is also the path traced by a point on a circle which is rolling along the surface of another circle when both circles have the same radius (here is a cool animation of that). What is the cardioid's significance? Well, it looks like a heart, which
If you're building something and want to tell other people how to build it, it's useful to show the dimensions of said something (how big it is) relative to other things that people are familiar with. However, there are very few things in this world that are exactly the same size as other similar things (e.g. not all apples weigh the same or have the same volume). So, some smart people once upon a time decided to make standards of measurement for various properties of matter (which I think we
Just so everyone knows, I obtained the awesome LEGO Haunted House over Fall Break and have pictures that will work wonderfully in a review. You can probably expect that next week at some point (I hope). For now, let's go over another fun physics equation! This one is probably very familiar to you, though you may not have any idea what it means. I give you mass-energy equivalence: Where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light. It's a very simple-looking equation with only
Today I wanted to talk about one of my favorite equations in all of mathematics. However, I won’t do it justice without building up some framework that puts it into perspective. To start out, let’s talk about waves.
A wave, in general, is any function that obeys the wave equation. To simplify things, though, let’s look at repeating wave patterns.
The image above depicts a sine wave. This is the shape of string and air vibration at a pure frequency; as such, sinusoidal wavef
