27 May 2008

#11 -- Think I wasn't an Engineer

It's been a long time since I came to the conclusion that I was definitely an engineer. Back in high school, things were a bit hazy. Didn't really know what I wanted to do or be when I grew up. My chemistry teacher (regular and AP...yes, I was in AP chemistry...geek) suggested that because I "liked" chemistry and math I should be a Chemical Engineer. So, when my college apps came around, I signed on as such and never looked back once.

Today, we had a visiting lecturer at school, and so I went to his seminar; part to listen, part to show my face, and part for the donuts afterwards. the lecturer graduated from my school a few years ago with his MS in ChemEng, has done some industry work, and is now, apparently, a possible candidate for one of the open faculty positions here. Anyhow, I just got back from the lecture, and I'm still a little dazed. Not from the presentation; that was fine, nothing very "over-my-head" there. The oddity came with two comments that were made. One by the presenter, and the other by another guy in the crowd.

So at the end of this guy's presentation (which was about modeling efforts and their applicability to controlling industrial processes) he mentioned that his brother had put together a contest for his family. The brother lives in Utah, and he built an eight-foot snowman in his front yard near the beginning of the year, and had everyone in the family guess how long it would last before it became just a scattering of coal/carrot/sticks upon the grassy ground.

When the proposed contest was announced, this guy said to himself (paraphrased), "Okay, I'm an engineer. I have some basic understanding of the principles at work here and a bunch of school/work books. I should be able to come up with a quasi-accurate model and predict how long this process will take with a decent degree of precision. (Convection, radiation, historical temperature cycles, etc) " So, he broke out the books, stayed up late for a few hours, and put together a semi-coherent model that he felt would give a good approximation of "Frosty's" demise time. His answer: June 6th.

Well to say the least, it's not even June 6th yet, and as part of his presentation, he had posted already a picture of the scattered remains of the snowman in question. The winner was apparently the brother that made up the challenge. He guessed March 13th and was spot on. Now, the guess isn't the thing that got me. What got me was the fact that this guy actually spent a number of hours working up an engineering model to predict the time to melt a snowman. Not really something that I'd do. At that time, I shrugged it off as just one of the oddities, and not something that would come up again any time soon.

I mean, I had heard a number of people mention things like this before. One guy that I had some undergraduate classes with had a dad that would make his own lip balm. By hand. Then there's that whole Project Euler thing on the internet. They're all over, sure. I know that there are definitely people out there that like to do things like this on their free time. I just never thought that I'd personally come across two of them in the same month, let alone the same hour.

So, after a few questions and meandering answers, this guy in the audience raises his hands and makes a comment about said "snowman competition" and how it reminded him of something he had done once. He said that he watched a "Mythbusters" episode (which is a great show that I'd recommend heartily to just about anyone, almost as much as I'd recommend "Dirty Jobs", which is probably the best show on cable tv nowadays) where they set out to prove that you couldn't light a Christmas tree on fire using only strings of Christmas tree lights. He said that they came to the conclusion that someone couldn't light a tree on fire with only a string of lights.

Well, this guy didn't like their conclusion obviously (he'd been told that Christmas trees do this more often than zero times in a trillion) and so what does he do? He busts out his engineering books and builds a model to try and disprove Mythbusters. Numerous hours of tedium ensue.

Now, like I said earlier, I've considered myself to be an engineer for some time now. I enjoy the process of solving problems, I've enjoyed math and science since I was a kid, I grew up considering myself to be part of the "geek" crowd. So why not? Why not, you say? Well, let me tell you why not. I don't think that I'd ever in a million years decide to break out my old engineering books and try to build a model of anything during my spare time. There's too much else that I'd rather be doing. And so, for the first time in a LONG while, I found myself wondering:

Am I really an engineer?

I don't know if I've answered it yet.

23 May 2008

#10 -- See my "geek genes" in action

Okay, so, I'm a geek. I will freely admit to it. I'm studying chemical engineering, working on a doctorate degree in fact in the field of rocket propellant combustion. Yeah, uber-geek. I love science-fiction and fantasy. There are very few times when I'm in public that I don't have my nose stuck in a book; I even take my book to the grocery store to read whilst I would otherwise be "wasting" time standing in line. I enjoy video games (despite the fact that they are probably rotting my brain...), loved the LotR movies, and even wore glasses for most of my up and coming years as a child.

And yet, I think, that there are also parts of me that belie my apparent nerdiness. For instance, I love to participate in sports; I sincerely enjoy being in the kitchen, slaving away at some culinary masterpiece (anyone that watches food network can vouch for the fact that geniuses like Emeril Legasse and Alton Brown are anything but nerds...okay, well maybe Alton Brown is, but he sure is fun to watch); I'm fairly outspoken (when I choose to be) and take on responsibility with a decent amount of competence.

So, I'm not all geek.

Just mostly. :)

And that's why the most recent trip my family took to the library was so impactful for me. My wife had told me at dinner that the library had a few books on hold she needed to pick up. We needed to drop off a few movies that the kids had gotten a while before anyhow, and so after finishing with the grub, we piled the kids into the car and took off for the Provo City Library.

The trip was much the same as many others have been. After my wife grabbed her two books, we proceeded to chase the kids around the Library trying to keep them from screeching too loudly, or from pulling "too many" books from the shelves. I wandered the aisles with my boy and we found a few pirate books that he seemed interested in at the time. Getting more movies for the kids was a fiasco, with our youngest grabbing one movie after another and throwing them onto the carpeting behind her. We explained to our two oldest for the umpteenth time, that the library only allows two entertainment dvds and two educational dvds to go home with us, and that each of them could take one a piece. Lots going on; near parental overload.

Along the way, whilst my wife was looking for a small chapter book for our oldest daughter, our youngest daughter wandered off. I asked my wife where she had gone and she responded that she had just gone around the corner. Being the incredibly paranoid parent that I am, I immediately went looking for her. Down the main aisle, one...two...three...boy, I could have sworn that my wife had said "just" stepped around the corner. Maybe she had gone the other direction? Four...five...by this time I was nearing the end of possible rows of books, when lo and behold said lost child toddles around the corner of the last row of books (yeah, she's going to run track in high school) with a book and a large grin.

I chuckle because she's obviously having fun, and she turns away giggling with her book. I grabbed her and then took the book that she was holding, turning to the shelves to find where she had taken it from. As I did so, I happened to notice the title of the book:

Star Wars: Jedi Order

:) Ah, could a parent be any more proud.

On the flip side, this revelation will probably worry my wife to no end. Sorry, babes. But, what can we do?

Just love em. Just love em.

15 May 2008

#9 -- Put glue on my nose

Well, at least on purpose. I guess I've had lots of opportunity to have glue on my nose in the past: all the way from playing with those nasty honey-looking glue bottles as a kindergartner, all the way up to accidental transfer when trying to seal the cracks in the foundation of my condo with Liquid Nails. But no, this time I actually, purposefully, gleefully, put glue on my nose. It was the traditional white kind, what most people call Elmer's glue.

You remember that stuff don't you? In third grade the kids used to put it on their hands and rub it around, then let it dry and peel it off like dead skin. They all thought it was so cool. And our teachers, obviously, thought that it was a complete waste of school resources. Plenty of my friends got after-school detention for wasting the good-old Elmer's glue in that fashion.

I don't think that my third grade teachers would have been any more impressed by my use of the glue in this case.

So, a few weeks ago, my wife told me that she read on the internet that if you put Elmer's glue on your nose and let it dry that it would act like a Biore strip and pull the black heads out of your skin. Don't think that this was the first time that I had heard of this substitution, but I thought, great! My nose is the one part of my body that totally grosses me out because of the sheer capacity of volume that it contains for housing blackheads. She did the whole glue-on-the-nose thing for a couple of nights, and so I figured that I might as well try it out as well.

Thus, I found myself rubbing a generous portion of white Elmer's glue onto my nose and then sitting down to watch a new episode of Lost. That hour flew by, and afterwards I got up and retired to the bathroom to pull the dried glue "skin" off of my nose and see the results.

Well, I have to say that it looked like the glue-facial did do something. I couldn't tell though if it actually pulled any blackheads out of the skin or if it just pulled all of the hair out. It definitely DID do the latter, but the former was never clear. I think that in order to make an actual determination I'd have to repeat the experiment.

As such, during my last visit to Wal-mart I picked up a small box of Biore strips. I figured it was all in the way of science, so dishing out nearly seven dollars for the eight (six--with two for free!!) strips was somewhat justified despite my continuing status as a "poor college student." I was definitely not disappointed with the real deal.

The two "free" strips that I found in the box were Mandarin-something scented and so I grabbed one of those, followed the instructions, and slapped it onto my nose. Unfortunately, I guess my nose is somewhat longer than the average nose because the strip only extended part of the way down to the tip. A minor annoyance in that the tip of my nose could be construed as being the biggest collector of blackheads. Ah well. Despite this fact, after applying the strip, I sat down at the table and transfered all of the story ideas that I had gotten over the past week (written on random pieces of paper and shoved into the pockets of my shorts up until that time) to my official "Story-idea Notebook." I was very proud of my work, and afterward removed the Biore strip from my nose, which didn't come off as easy as the glue, let me tell you. Ouch.

The strip took even more of the hair from my nose (miniscule, white, and nearly invisible unless they are sticking out from a hardened Biore strip), hair which I didn't even know that I had up until that point. BUT, it also took out an amazing amount of the smaller blackheads that had before been littering my nose with their general existence. This was quite obvious. Ha, ha! Alas, the big ones remained. I figure I'll try a few more strips and see if any difference is made with repetition.

In the end, I think that I decided that the glue-on-the-nose thing doesn't really work except as a cheap "wax-job." The real Biore strips seem to do a decent job. And yet, after all of this, I'm still left with the big, ugly, blackhead riddled nose of my yesterdays. Now, my wife has bought some fancy exfoliating skin treatment stuff from Mary Kay and has suggested that I try that. I don't know if I'd go so far as to actually put Mary Kay stuff on my face. I am a man after all. And I might just get laughed out of the Man Club for thinking such a thing. Blackheads it is then.

Edit(10 Aug 2010): I noted today--with some hilarity--this comic and realized that I wasn't alone. http://xkcd.com/777/