Introducing...

Oh hurrah!
I am in rhapsodies right now!
Something absolutely delightful exists and now I know about it.


I am a fickle woman truly.
Last semester is was h.
Several semesters before that is was Re.
NOW it is...



del.

Oh del is so neat! It looks like an upside delta triangle.
And it is both a vector and a derivative operator at the same time!
And you can do super cool things with it like cross products and dot products and it takes the derivative of the other vectors at the same time!



Okay. You may all go back to your normal lives and not worry about del at all. But I shall go and enjoy the thrills I get every time I think that such a thing exists.

When Nuts Meet Each Other...

They get up extremely early to go running.

How early is "extremely early"?
Try four in the morning.

That was the meeting time.
Most of us got up at 3:30 to get ready.

Twelve nuts met at four on a Saturday morning to run around a track.
Only three of them were ROTCs. The rest of us ranged from a track coach to an unfit asthmatic. Or actually, a number of out-of-shape people and several asthmatics.

But we all ran or jogged or walked around the track.
And ate muffins afterward.

Then we all went to bed again.


Why?

I don't know.

It was an idea mentioned in jest by someone and picked up with enthusiasm by the others Friday evening at a gathering of returning students.

Muffins?

After the idea became a reality, I invited several people over to my apartment to make muffins. We made forty-eight.

Would you do it again?

Not sure...maybe at five instead of four...

Data Crunchies

We are dorks. But at least we freely admit that we are such.
Therefore you should not be surprised when I tell you of a great cookie idea we thought up.
They are called "data crunchies".
Ideally, they should be made with some sort of alphabet cereal of something.

The reason for this cookie?
I've been crunching data (i.e. sitting crunched up in front of my computer moving pieces of data around on spreadsheets) at the lab.
And data crunching reminds one of...well, crunching and chewing on something.
Most likely...data.

So my roommate (who also works in the lab) declared we had to make "data crunchies" because they seemed to her to sound like a tasty cookie.

We have not made these cookies yet, but we propose to do so soon.

Provision

My roommate and I had a number of girl friends over last night to watch all six hours of Pride and Prejudice. And we are having other persons over for dinner tomorrow night.

But, in anticipation of being tired today, we decided to not invite anyone over tonight (shocking, I know, to those to know us).

As it turns out, today is looking to be a long day full of data collecting and figuring out. So it was a good thing we decided to do nothing.

Yesterday, a friend stopped by and dropped off some lasagna for us for a dinner. Now we do not even have to worry about dinner this evening. It has already been provided for us. After a longish day of data, we can come home and just eat dinner.

And so God provides for us, though we had not even expected it. Nor were we thinking about dinner for tonight at all until our friend brought it over. So the fact that God thought we needed dinner and gave it to us is most wonderful to us.

The Two Competing Men in My Life

You thought I didn't have competing men in my life? Well, that is not true. I have two of them.
Garimella and Thome (pronounced toe-mae or something like that).

Who are these men, you ask?
Ah, they are article writers.


Garimella has written some of the most useful work on condensation heat transfer in microtubes. He is referenced all over the place. He uses fluid-to-fluid heat exchangers which give one at best about 40% uncertainies. But he's gotten the best uncertainties out of them than most other people.

Thome writes about boiling heat transfer and bubbles. I actually found an article of his about condensation too. But it was mostly about bubbles. Bubbles in the microchannels as the refrigerant he is studying condenses or boils. I read his work too to learn more about watching fluids flow through tubes.

Garimella has also done some fluid flow visualization (fancy words for taking pictures of a fluid running through a glass or other see-through tube). Thome uses microchannels in silicon or other things like that with pieces of pyrex (type of glass) so he can see the fluid flow. Garimella uses long tubes of glass with very small diameters so he can see the fluid flow. Actually, Garimella uses glass tubes inside plastic or acrylic tubes. It keeps the glass tube from breaking when the fluid flowing through has a high pressure.

Hum, I don't know which I like best though. And this why they are the two competing men in my life.

The mushrooms

I love mushrooms. But not to eat. I mean, I like reading about them and looking at pictures of them or even looking at live ones.
If you are like me, then you will enjoy this picture:











They grew up over night in our bathroom. My roommate felt it was an affront to her personally because she had recently washed the floor.

But I was sensible. I took pictures of the beauteous occasion to treasure it in my memory forever, even after my roommate swiped them away with a paper towel and vigoriously cleansed the area they had sat as though they had carried the plague.

Break-in

My roommate's sister was married this past Saturday. As you can imagine, it was a day full of joy and fun and stress.
But she was successfully married and went off on her honeymoon with her dear husband.

And left my roommate the keys.
To put the gifts in the apartment of course.

Except, she has a bunch of very sneaky friends (and a sister)...

What do you get when you have a tubful of playpen balls?










A boxful of penguins?










And a bunch of glow-in-the-dark ducks?










A happy family of Linux users










And a surprise in the night (above their bed).

For those who are wondering, we were referencing the xkcd webcomic concerning playpen balls and the fact that the happy couple are computer geeks.

Cookie within a cookie

I found pictures of a cookie I made several months ago.
They were very tasty cookies. They were a regular chocolate chip cookie recipe but with crushed up sandwich cookies instead of chocolate chips.



Here are the sandwich cookies I crushed. As you can see, they are chocolate.










This is the cookie dough. The dark splotches are the crushed up chocolate cookies.










See them all sitting in a nice row on the baking sheet?










Here they are! All done and tasty.