DarthTofu

Question 4, part c of my Physics III final: What is direction of the induced current in the ring, given that the current is given by B0*sin(omega*t), and is perpendicular to the plane of the conducting loop? Answer: The coin landed heads-up (see diagram), therefor the current is in the clockwise direction. QED.

Casino Royal was kind enough to be mostly plausible. Bond at least sweated and bled, unlike other movies where he was all but invincible, and phased by nothing. Quantum of Solace was something of a different tale...

So I just watched Serenity. Spoilers follow, if you haven't seen it before: I can't believe they killed Sheppard Book, Wash, and the guy from Numb3rs! Whyyyyyyyyy? Wash was such a great character; I can't believe that they killed him! He was so great, and Sheppard Book was one of my favorite characters, too! Plus- hey, it was Charlie, from Numb3rs. All in all, I can't complain that much about it, I guess, but I still am so sad that they stopped the show, and that they closed themselves off to a continuation of it eventually. That show deserved to do much, much better than it did.

Heh- I had a Differential Equations test that involved James Bond jumping into the water and being shot at. If I hadn't seen my Mythbusters, I would've been much more doubtful of my answer that James only had to dive down about a foot underwater for the bullets to be moving at an insufficient speed to kill him.

.... so remember when I was all like "I'm gonna limit myself to two episodes per day?" Yeah, didn't happen. I just finished Out of Gas, which I think may be my favorite episode so far. Jaynetown was pretty good, too. Gotta say- my favorite two characters are Jayne and Kaylee. The two are polar opposites, but freaking awesome. ... and River correcting Pastor's Bible was pretty epic, too.

Because Fox isn't particularly bright; they aired the show with the eleventh episode first, then proceeded to display them all in a hodge-podge, uncollected mess of episodes. The series has to be seen in sequence, or it makes little to no sense. Well, the first three episodes kinda do, at any rate.

Nice costume, Mad. So I just recently started watching Firefly. Yeah, it's freaking awesome. I'm trying to limit myself to just watching two episodes for today, but I kinda want to watch a third, now...

True; I've stayed pretty much 'Straight Edge' since I got to college, but all the same- that picture still haunts my nightmares.

There is not enough beer, vodka, everclear, etc. on the planet, sir.

Contains swearing. At Tech school we're told not to be picky about women, because they're so rare. Screw that; I'll maintain some freaking standards!

Differential equations aren't that bad; I'm in Diff Eq 1 right now, and it's an easy A for me, assuming I don't miss another day of class (I've slept through all of one class, ten minutes of another class, and all but the last ten minutes of a third.... forgot to set my alarm for those days. ) So far as circuits go, next quarter is when it gets to be a bit tougher- I'm in Diff Eq 2, which will still deal with some circuitry (LRC circuits, in particular; I'm pretty sure I've gotten those down at this point, though), and I'm taking my Electrical Systems class, which shan't be too pleasant, though from what I hear the labs are at least quickish, and I don't have to do ****ing error propagation (my least favorite part of any lab). At any rate, that's all of the electrical systems I'll have classes dealing with- I'm majoring in Mechanical and Civil Engineering (yes, it was entirely necessary that those be capitalized), so I don't do a whole lot with electricity beyond, "This motor can exert this much force for this much power- go!"

Foreign film time: I watched two recently. The first is a Chinese film, To Live, written and directed by the same guy who did the Chinese Olympics. While not bad, it wasn't exactly what I'd call a great film. It's sort of like a Chinese Forest Gump, except that the main character stays in the same province of China for pretty much the entire movie. It covers from the Communist Revolution into some of Mao Ze Dong's programs, including the Great Leap Forward, and the 100 Flowers Movement. It portrays communism negatively at times, and for that it was apparently banned in mainland China, despite the overall positive outlook on communism. The second film is Korean, called Welcome to Dongmakgol. I think this may be my favorite foreign film ever. Even watching it with subtitles, I found myself moved and stirred by it all over the place. It takes place in the 50s, during the Korean War, and follows three North Korean soldiers, two South Korean soldiers, and a US Airman who was shot down. All three groups come to a small village, Dongmakgol, which has never known war, or much of the outside world at all. It's a happy, innocent place, and it manages to infect them all, to the point where they put aside all of their differences. There's a heck of a lot more to it than that, but it really does get pretty serious and wonderful; I'd compare it a bit to Crash, in those high tension moments followed by moments where you just feel such joy for the characters.

Three calls in a row from high school students asking me how to add and subtract fractions; not too bad. My "toughest" two questions were questions that other people sent me. Question one (which was really, really easy): A bullet with a given mass is fired at a block of wood, which also has a given mass. The two stick together, and the bullet falls off of a table of a given height, and strikes the ground a given distance from the edge of the table. How fast was the bullet traveling? (Use kinematics to determine the blocks initial velocity in the x direction, then use law of conservation of momentum to determine the bullet's speed). Question two (which had more to it): Determine how many electrons are going through a certain resistor per second for a circuit consisting of two resistors, with a 10 V battery. (Find current and divide by the elemental charge- 1.6*10^-19) It's pretty easy, yeah. It particularly helps that I've got a deal going with a Chem E- she'll take all of my chemistry calls, no complaints or questions asked, and I'll take all of her physics calls.

Impressive! I'd like to have that guy on my team if I ever actually go drinking! Quote of the day from my job as a tutor: "Oh, I see- you just divide by zero, and then you get i (square root of negative one)! It all makes perfect sense, now!" That comes in just ahead of me borking up a transferred call, where the kid who was transferred to me sounded exactly like the tutor who transferred the call. I spent five minutes thinking that the call hadn't been transferred successfully. D'oh!

Sadly, my dark lord of the Sith just wasn't going to take well to his "eyebrows." Try though I might, they never looked right, and I abandoned the idea. I tried to render the helmet shiny-like, and that didn't work either. The project is due today (Wednesday), so I'm just going with what I have as of 2 AM (thank God I don't have to wake up early tomorrow). Anyway, here's the final image that I'm submitting: http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/VaderMkV.jpg Should this one be selected, it will be rapid-prototyped, which is a fancy way of saying that it will be made into a small, plastic model in real life based on my data from my construction. Wish me luck. Also- what ever happened with Krytos's Lurt?

Carl Sagan... with autotune.

Really? Odd, I always thought that they did. Must have been something someone managed to plant in my head with no verification somehow, almost without my noticing it...

As an I. Unfortunately artistic brain-block, an innability to figure out how the hell to get this thing into the "rendering" area of Solid Edge, and some differential equations/introduction to east asian history/physics III homework assignments/tests/concepts are all collaborating to keep me from working on it.

Update time- http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/VaderIV.jpg Eh? Eh? It's coming together. All that I have left are the "eyebrow" features. That doesn't seem like it'll be fun, because I have no clue how I'm going to do them, beyond revolutions. They're freaking curved in every direction... that's going to suck, and then the worst part is that I have to do it twice! Also- apparently someone else has undertaken the same project as me. Unbeknown to me, the kid sitting next to me on one side in class is constructing the Millennium Falcon, while the kid on my other side is making a large winged skull. I'm amused that both are vaguely related to mine, unintentionally.

Rob and SOCL haven't been in for a while, either. SOCL longer than Rob, obviously, but Rob hasn't been on in a long time.

Solid Edge is based primarily around straight lines. In the "sketch" feature, you can draw out whatever you'd like to extrude, and then you can jump out of that, and turn your 2D sketch into a 3D feature, with twoof the faces of that extrusion being the original sketch. For example, to make a 4x4x4 block, you would first sketch a 4x4 square in the sketch feature using straight lines, then extrude it to an extent of 4 units. Say you wanted to cut a circle out of that. Using the "cutout" tool, you can sketch a circle on one of the faces of the new solid, then carve out to whatever extent you want. Making something that tapers or curves is a bit more difficult. There are tools for these sorts of things, but they get touchy when you work on something as complex as the mask, and sporadically claim that the face has zero thickness, or something like that. For what it's worth, the whole thing isn't just in a bunch of pieces; it's actually (going to be) one piece when I'm done. Like I already said, I still need to do some extruding to make the complete face.

D-d-d-double post! Anyway, I have another update (yeah, I know, I'm going back to my old spamming ways) and now my Vader head is actually looking decent, so I figured I'd do a brag post. http://i11.photobucket.com/albums/a169/DarthTofu/VaderMK3.jpg Things left to do: 1) must give Vader something to fill that space between mask and helmet. That may or may not be a pain. 2) Work a bit more on the eyes. Right now the "lids" are too straight; they need some curvature. I think I know how to do that, but we'll see if Solid Edge wants to cooperate. 3) Put "eyelids" on the helmet. Going to be a pain. 4) Work on the bottom, so that everything tapers down to a neck. I need to get a common ground down there, then just do a tapered protrusion. Shouldn't be too hard. 5) Little detail; I have to make those little swept cylinder deals on the sides of Vader's mouth. That ought to be a five minute deal.

I tried that and... well, the "half-sphere" bit just doesn't look right to me. I'm thinking it's actually a small segment of a larger circle revolved. IE, rather than a half sphere, it's something like 45% of a circle revolved around a point in the center of the head. I've tried a fair number of revolutions, and I'm okay with the one that I've got now, though I'm not thrilled with it. Hopefully the "back" portion of the helmet will be easier, though. I'll get to that once I finish this ****ing DE/read my Physics III textbook until I understand what the hell my prof was talking about regarding optics today.

I think my program is a bit too different from yours for me to do that. We never went over anything involving an edited mesh, though we do have planes that you can place wherever, though I'm not sure how that would help you so much. I need to do some revolutions for the eyes, and I finally got them working alright. I've got the nose bridged, and now I just need to get a bit more curvature to those eyeballs and I'm golden. Pretty sure I can manage the curvature part; then my mask portion should be almost home free. The helmet will be my next big task to tackle.

Not pictures, per se. I have a small Vader head out of a Happy Meal from back when Revenge of the Sith came out, and I've been going off of that; I don't have any dimensions, so I'm winging everything. I fixed up my cheekbones to where I like them, and now I'm wrestling with the eyes. Those little bits that go over the eyes are curved six ways to Sunday, and I can't get that curve to work.