Calculus III midterm and Chillax'n

Finished another episode of Macross Frontier and again it does not disappoint, I've also been keeping up with The Tower of DRUAGA, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Spice and wolf, Naruto Shippuuden, and Kanokon. Each being a weekly affair, so far I have been loving The Tower of DRUAGA, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, and Macross Frontier with each of the episodes progressively getting better, Naruto Shippuuden and Spice and wolf seem slow recently and Kanokon is just in it's own little world with every guy's wet dream and insanity running wild not to mention with comedy to boot. On another note, I've finished Devil May Cry and Final Approach, with the former being the anime to the popular combat adventure series Devil May Cry and with a short run of 12 episodes it was a solid take on the series. The latter, Final Approach is in contrast a romantic comedy where the series looks at arranged marriages and we see how it plays out for main characters, with each of the 13 episodes running only 15 minutes including opening and credits it is short and sweet, definitely worth checking out. On a serious but happy note I've finished the first of my summer midterms and as far as I could tell it seems to have gone well, and I am quite happy.

Got side tracked by Engineering & Math Jokes

A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer are all given identical rubber balls and told to find the volume. They are given anything they want to measure it, and have all the time they need. The mathematician pulls out a measuring tape and records the circumference. He then divides by two times pi to get the radius, cubes that, multiplies by pi again, and then multiplies by four-thirds and thereby calculates the volume. The physicist gets a bucket of water, places 1.00000 gallons of water in the bucket, drops in the ball, and measures the displacement to six significant figures. And the engineer? He writes down the serial number of the ball, and looks it up.


Salary Theorem
The less you know, the more you make.
Proof:

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power.
Postulate 2: Time is Money.

As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time
And since Knowledge = Power and Time = Money
It is therefore true that Knowledge = Work / Money .
Solving for Money, we get:
Money = Work / Knowledge
Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of Work done.


Q: What's a polar bear?
A: A Cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.

How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?
1. A sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane.
2. An inclined plane is a slope up.
3. A slow pup is a lazy dog.

Much more here.

Undergraduate Research Assistant, Classes and Slacking off

Got that Undergraduate Research Assistant position with the Environmental and Bio-Engineering Labs, unfortunately they don't have the budget so it is unpaid. I've met all the people on the team it was cool to be able to see all the equipment used for water and soil testing, even better later they will be getting new equipment, so this summer will be interesting. As for class, I need to get started on homework sooner, as to better learn the material, otherwise it is going to overwhelm me.

Some anime that I have finished include, Full Metal Panic, Full Metal Panic FUMOFFU!, and Full Metal Panic : The Second Raid. It is interesting how "full metal" is usually a reference to full metal alchemist another anime that I finished before, full metal panic in contrast is very different from alchemist, it blends the crazy robot action with high school life, it is like someone threw Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in with Appleseed or Gundam into a blender and made a delicious smoothie. It is quirky and funny, mixing well the funny moments with the serious ones, I do hope they continue making seasons, as there are many novels to left to cover.

So far I have seen two anime it seems officially put up on youtube by animation studio GONZO, the first being the The Tower of DRUAGA -The Aegis of URUK an anime I am already following, the second one is Blassreiter or ブラスレイター which basically means "pale racer" it is just in it's first few episodes so I will see how it turns out. Blassreiter is a mix of standard drawn anime but some of the models are rendered in CGI integrated into the animation, it seems rather bold killing off a main character so early on in the series [or so it seems] so I will be interested on how the series progresses. Another ongoing anime that I am following is Macross Frontier, a space based robot anime set in the Macross universe having started April of this year it is another anime I will be keeping an eye on. Just found Chiko, Heiress of the Phantom Thief and I'm really excited about it, I can't wait so see how it plays out. ,

Summer Classes and Entertainment

Summer Classes start tomorrow, it is Calculus III and hopefully this summer can go well. On a lighter note, I'm following the Doctor Who series, currently the tenth doctor, and in it's 4th season; and I absolutely love it I can't wait for the next episode. As for anime, I've checked out the first few episodes of Spice and Wolf, The Tower of DRUAGA [the pilot episode was perhaps one of the best parodies of Japanese video game and anime culture ever], and Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. All three seem good enough to keep up with and I look forward to following up on them in the future. A couple that I have finished include The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and Haruhi with her SOS Brigade started off a little slow but I found that I loved it, not to mention finding out that the dance is famous throughout Japan, this clip is great it is the actual voice actors on stage doing the Hare Hare Yukai dance. The two movies Appleseed [2004] and the sequel AppleSeed Ex Machina [2007], were both a great cross of Blade Runner and love drama. If I recall correctly I was following TokyoMango and I read about Ranald MacDonald, and the book Native American in the Land of the Shogun: Ranald MacDonald and the Opening of Japan, quite interesting. Oh and I just recently checked out Hulu again, and it seems they have stepped up their game with much more content ad supported, not only TV shows [with some only a few days after the official TV premiere] but Movies as well, all ad support yet not annoyingly so, perhaps they have learned from Google, non-annoying ads get people to watch, if they can keep the ads non-repetitive and entertaining, while gaining more backing from big studios then this could be the next revolution in TV on the Internet, it is perfect for college students who want to watch TV but don't necessarily have a TV, we are willing to watch the ads it means bring the shows we want to our desktops. I wish Hulu luck and hope it does well.

Finals Week and EWB Project

It is finals week at Washington State University right now and it is hectic, I've got an exam lined up for each of the following days Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. This is even a lite semester, next fall is going to be a full load not to mention quite the nightmare. Yesterday, my friend and I went to open to close at the ZZU, for mechanical engineering ASME, meeting a few friends there, then we went to Mike's aka Stubblefields down to the dance floor, it turns out I knew the bouncer and we got into the basement dance without even waiting in the line. After waking up late today, Andy, Jaclyn and I got together and went over the viable options for the EWB at WSU chapter and looked at the safety of the countries, the travel costs, the professional contracts and advisors, as well as personal preference and we found that the project that best fit up was the Santa Cruz, Ecuador project. Now we will need to lock in the project by writing the proposal and filling out the paperwork for the project and other logistics. Onward to studying so I can pass my classes, Bon voyage.

Hanners-logic, Bookmarks, Afganisu-tan, and 21

Been reading an awesome comic Questionable Content, it is witty and funny. I've been trying to catch up starting from the beginning, and I like how the art style has slowly changed, the obscure Indy culture references are both off putting and funny at the same time, and the Coffee house of Doom sounds like the perfect anti-culture to Starbucks. Oh and Hanners-logic is awesome.

Some other bookmarks I keep track of are, Penny-arcade perhaps the most renown, Red vs Blue of the Halo machinima fame, MegaTokyo for the anime and quirky inside references, XKCD a favorite of mine, for it's engineer's style inside humor - its like what Dilbert has always wanted to do, Weregeek for the geek humor with the LARPing and D&D culture, WaiterRant for the brutal hilarity that ensues in the restaurants of America, and finally TokyoMango for the quirky insights of Japan, reminding me of Taiwan which seems to be caught between the two cultures of America and Japan.



Saw on TokyoMango, the Japanese take on the middle east, Afganisu-tan (and friends), now as everyone knows the Japanese can take anything on earth and turn it into something unbelievably cute, and this is no exception. Imagine taking one of the longest running conflicts in the world, and turning all the countries into cute manga characters and you got yourself this comic.








Just got back from watching 21, one of those "based on true story" movies, although there are huge flaws in some of the logic, it is an awesome movie, it is a movie that you need to just sit back and enjoy, cause if you try to take it apart - it will not hold up for long, especially during the parts were the directors probably think majority of the audience is not going to understand - so as a tech guy and an engineer I had to ignore the fact that the technical parts, one of which was used as a reason for a dramatic argument between nerds, was implausible - I decided that I just needed to enjoy and stop analyzing. Still I seem to be down on this movie too much, however Kevin Spacey shines as always, even though the Mace Windu thing doesn't work in Las Vegas; this movie always has you cheering on the protagonists in the movie. Finally it leaves you with a smile and really at the end of the day it is hard to top that.

EWB Seattle 2008

Just got back from a four day adventure called the Engineers Without Borders USA, International Conference, Sustainable Engineering and Global Health, some interesting speakers included William H Gates, from the Gates Foundation, NASA Astronaut and Engineer Bonnie Dunbar, and Bernard Amadei the founder of Engineers Without Borders. This conference has been alot of fun, but also exhausting with around 5 hours of sleep each day just to make all the events. Starting on Thursday, with Gates Sr. with a speech about the Gates Foundation and it's goal of Global Health. Later in the evening at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar, Ph. D gave an inspirational speech that got a standing ovation from the crowd. The many presentations and seminars were not only interesting but they were extremely helpful, it was a great networking opportunity and a great chance to make friends, on Thursday while by myself because the rest of the team had not arrived, I met Lauren and Maria, who were from Clemson University in Greenville, South Carolina, we hit it off well.



So on Friday my friend David and I, gave our newly made friends a bite size tour of Seattle, we parked at the Seattle Center, and took pictures at the Space Needle, then took the monorail to Westlake Center, and then walked down to Pike Place Market to see the sights and shop, afterwards we walked down to the docks and stopped for a bite to eat at Ivar's and tried their famous clam chowder. After getting back to the UW campus we continued our seminar hopping and continued listening and learning, not to mention getting to talk to some of the groups that presented and asking detailed technical questions about their projects one on one. In the projects management seminar I even met an Engineer from Vanderbilt University, [ the team that beat Washington State last year in the NCAA basketball tournament, grrr...lol] who had a OLPC or One Laptop Per Child project, laptop and I got to chat in depth with him about the laptop, it was awesome being about to check out the laptop in person and being about to chat with an Engineer about what he thought about the Laptop. Saturday night there was an event that was labeled ferry cruse and since Lauren and Maria, were both on their last day, needing to skip Monday due to flight schedules, I came along, unfortunately it turned out to be just the Bremerton ferry down and back in the rain and dark and not much to see, it needed to be during the day, to be able to be enjoyed fully.

Finally On Sunday after sleeping over at my friend mike, his friend's place at Seattle Pacific University [SPU] we found out that the direct bus did not run so we hopped onto one that took us a few blocks, the driver told us to catch another bus and he gave us the number, then the next driver told us which bus after that to transfer to, unfortunately it turned out that the driver forgot to mention that at 8 am, the transfer she told us about did not start until 11 past so after consulting the information board, so we decided to just start walking, we caught a trail and walked about a mile or so around Lake Washington and got to the University of Washington campus, we even came just in time for the seminar and didn't miss anything except the morning welcome. The day was great and again even more information to digest and process, in total I took 17 pages of notes from start to finish, it well worth the registration price, I can't wait for next year. EWB-USA at Chicago April 3-5, 2009!!