Of The Deadly Perils of Minesweeper

Minesweeper.
The name sends thrills through your spine right down to your finger tips.
This fatal game, a mind trap, a chewer of time!

You have a paper due, and of course you must take some time to think about it.
But it is no good staring at a blank Word Document.
NO.
You must stare at a little box full of squares.
Carefully you make your first click on a square, hoping desperately for a number of the squares to clear with it. But it might not. It might be a mine and explode the whole box on you.
Or, even worse, show a single clear square with a number in it.
Then you are forced to click around it till you have enough numbered squares that you can start marking the mines.
But where were we again?
Oh yes.
There was a paper due.
But we might actually find all the mines this time and thus win the game...

Twenty minutes later...
You realize you also had some calculus homework to work on, besides that paper.
You haven't one a game yet, but squares are beginning to dance before your eyes.
So you leave the computer to take a break.

And the paper isn't written until eleven in the night.

That is only one of the possible consequences of this perilous game.


Um, right, what was I writing about again? I got sort of distracted, playing games and stuff, you know.
Oh yes! The deadly perils of minesweeper.
Besides wasting your time, you might get carpel tunnel or break the buttons on your mouse.
I am really not kidding! My aunt got the carpel tunnel and a friend broke his mouse.
Both from playing minesweeper.
So...
stay away from this horrible game, this brain drain, this robber of sleep, minesweeper!

Still Job Hunting

It is almost fun hunting for jobs. Everyone finds one they think you will be interested in, but of course you aren't, or they tell you they wish they could help but they know of no openings. Then you yourself look out for signs on stores and in stores and in newspapers. And it is amazing how many places are looking for people to hire. But actually finding a good job is a little more difficult.

However, I am set for Fridays. I am working for a professor on Fridays. There are three other students in his lab on Fridays. One is tall and quiet. I do not know what he is working on. I think he would prefer to work alone but that is impossible in such a tiny crowded lab. Another is pioneering in some study of nanoparticles. He has been working on his project for at least two summers now. He likes to talk and patronizes the two newcomers, myself and a short round guy. The short round guy is working on a similar project as myself, so we share many of the same materials and give each other advice. We work with some nasty chemicals which ought to be used under a fume hood except there isn't enough room for us there.
My mum got slightly worried after I described this situation, so I think she is glad I go there only once a week.

Perhaps you are wondering what a fume hood is? It is a tall box thing in a lab that has counter on which you put things and a great big hood over the top of it like a cabinet that is hollow and opens underneath. There are ventilation holes all around it and I believe it pulls the fumes up and out. There is a picture of a fume hood on Wikipedia.

Uncertain Summers

Tomorrow, I will be seeing the professor who works on nanoparticles. We will be going over schedules and projects. Definitely interesting.
Now I'm waiting to hear back about a job I applied for. If they like my application, I get to be an assistant teacher at a child care center. Otherwise I'm working at Target or Hannaford or one of those large shopping stores.
It is all in God's hands.

Nanoparticles

Do you know what nanoparticles are? They are tiny pieces of some kind of metal like gold or silver. They are a little larger than molecules.
I hope to do some research with nanoparticles this summer. They are very interesting.

Suppy and Demand

This is a picture of supply and demand curves. Supply and demand are two terms talked about in economics a great deal.

"Demand" refers to how much of a product do people want to buy. As you can see, the horizontal axis (the line with "quantity" under it) tells how much of some product people want to buy. The vertical axis (the line with "price" above it) tells what the price of the product is.
If the price is very high, people buy less of the product, but if it is cheap, people buy lots of it.

"Supply" refers to how much of a product the people selling it want to make. When the price of some product is high, people selling want to sell as much as they can of it, so there is a lot of the product supplied. But if the price is cheap, people do not want to sell that product, so the there is less supply of the product.

On the graph, there is a place where the two curves meet. That is called equilibrium. It is the price of the product where the sellers want to sell the same amount of the product as the buyers want to buy. It is generally the best price for the product.

Non-thinker

I should change the name of my blog. Instead of "The Young Thinker", it should be "The Non-Thinker" because most of my posts lately have been ones that required very little of my brain to be used, maybe .001% of it or something like that.
Anyway, I wish I could change that, but it's been rather difficult and my brain has been tired every time I actually get on to post something.

Today I would like to talk about the differences between compressible and incompressible flow. In case you are wondering, flow refers to the movement to some sort of fluid (water, gas, air, etc...) around some object.
There are a number of things one can talk about when discussing flows. There is the velocity of the flow and the pressure of the flow and the density of the flow, and so on. But each of those things I just mentioned change depending on where you are in the flow. So we have a bunch of equations to help us figure out what some of those things are in the place we are looking at.
Now compressible flow is a flow that the density changes from point to point. Density, by the way the the amount of mass of object or fluid that has a particular volume or basically how much stuff is in a space. So that is compressible flow.
Incompressible flow does not exist really. We just pretend it does. In this kind of flow, we say the density does not change from point to point. We pretend that slow moving flows are incompressible because we can use some really nice simple equations to find things then. They are fun equations and much easier to use than those for compressible flow.

Finally

Finally, all classes are over. Just finals left.

I am so happy!
God has been so good to me these past two semesters. It has been amazing.
To Him be all glory!