It's going to be busy for the next little while

This next month is going to be a little busy for me; and here are the reasons why:

Comming Tuesday -- Fluid Mechanics Test (in Japanese)

The exam itself isn't going to be too hard. There are no equations or anything. We are presented with a bunch of data and points that the teacher made in classes an are expected to answer some thinking questions for the test. The trick is to be able to read the Japanese, understand it and make myself understood. Got the practice plan down... read the material, write out notes in Japanese and write out mock questions for myself and answer them in Japanese. Hoepfully I can have this down in a week.

Numerical Analysis

I got a few projects to finish before August. One of them is to make a model of a spring system and determine it's equilibrium point in software. A second project is to either make or use a differential equation solver and solve some kind of boundary value problem. I'm working on the latter at the moment, looking on the web for a solver. I have a problem that I want to solve which is to calulate the electric field concentration that occurs at the tip of a carbon-nano tube. My gut is telling me that the smaller the nano-tubes are the more intense the electrical field magnification.

The interesting thing is that Richard Feynman had problems explaining this phenomina a long time ago in his lecture series. The answer should pop out from modelling the solution... that's what I'm hoping atleast. We'll have to see where this goes.

Control Systems:

A walk in the park. I remember the first time I took the course; I hated it with a passion. The book wasn't enlightening and the professor was horrid. I ended up skipping classes from time to time after facing mental break downs from listening to stuff that made no sense to me.

Round 2 of control systems... after studying differential equations from other parts of physics and math, everything started making sense. Matlab and Mathematica users, eat your heart out! I've been able to model differential equations in Excel in less than half the time. Quick and dirty.

Today my labmates used matlab to model a differential equation representing a swinging pendulum with friction. With no friction, you expect the total energy of the system to stay constant with time. But add increading friction, you expect the system to come to a stop sooner. The problem is that the kids are just playing with the number to see what happens... I saw one guy use the program to automatically generate 400 plots simultaneiously and doesn't understand the results. The computer/calculator is both a blessing and a curse.

Oxidization:

It's criminal the way this course is run. The teacher picks a book in English (and photocopies it for everyone) and makes everyone in class present a chapter in English. It's supposed to be to help train Japanese students for presentations in English. What a mess, no one knows what is going on in class. Either I'm sleeping or working on my laptop doing homework for a different class. I'll be looking forward to my presentation... heh heh heh

Research:

I have a lab presentation comming up in Sept, that and I have an internship thing to do for 2~3 weeks over the summer which means that it's going to cut time out from me to get some appreciable results for my next in lab presentation. That and I want to travel for a few weeks for my up comming summer vacation. Here's hoping that I get some nice results soon.

It's 2:00 am now and I'm getting tired... a little. Time to get some rest.