No Bombs or Submarines

There is a fairly mysterious logo on New Jersey Transit trains:
I figure it means "no bombs," but a friend suggested that, looked at sideways, it means "no submarines."

Any other ideas?

...

Ok, ok. I know it means "don't 'activate' the emergency cord," but really - does that look like an emergency cord to you?

Aero Antics

Over winter break me and some friends went to DC for two days. In two days we toured two air and space museums, fun. Did I mention we are all members of the AIAA club at Rutgers.

The group I went with, (left to right) Mysterious Black Rectangle (The person in question requested that no picture or name be posted on the internet) Jared, Me, Curran, Pasha, Jimmy, Sergey, Andrew

Pasha and Me with Space Ship One.
The Soviet moon suit design.
The life support system on the Soviet moon suit, notice the piece of wood.

This is me taking a picture of the Capitol building and friends, it just happened that Pasha was taking a picture of the Washington monument. As luck would have it he got this picture.

The year cannot be before 1753

The year that your degree was or will be issued cannot be before 1753. Way to leave out such qualified applicants to the Claremont Graduate University as Leonhard Euler and Isaac Newton!


I have no idea what this year came from, but it seems pretty random to me. Any ideas???

Ladder Safety

Today's ladder safety tip is... Don't do this:

Back to School

Well to all of you university students out there welcome back to school. For all you other people , well you have been back to school or work for at least two weeks, so whatever. My first day started with a bang, well actually it started with the professor not coming to class "weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee." This of course resulted in me not having anything to do for 5 hours, but I managed to entertain myself. Now come the piece de' resistance, Aerospace Propulsion. The entire lecture basically talked about what we where going to be doing all semester, the list is 24 items long, it contains scary sounding things like nuclear, specific impulse, diffusers, combusters, compressors, afterburner Brayton cycles, multistage compression, and elementary reaction kinetics. Sounds like fun; well mabey only for people like me but what the heck thats all that matters because I am the one taking it.

Vegetarians Have it Wrong!

Animals are eaten dead, Vegetables are cruelly eaten entirely alive! I personally am not generally a vegetable sympathizer but I felt a few pangs of guilt eating this tenacious head of lettuce. Locked in at the bottom of a cold dark fridge, rather then give up hope, it reached its photosynthetic arms up towards the small light at the top which occasionally blinked on.



In one swoop, I destroyed a month of its brave skyward effort. I then slowly crushed it limb by limb, with my teeth. Those green arms so strongly angled towards the light one minute, a mangled tragedy in my mouth the next. A mass of cells, many dead, some injured, but most face the stomach acid entirely alive! The base of the lettuce, I did not eat nor kill, it whimpers now from the depths of our trash bin, using its last reserves of energy to send out a new leaf or a root before its inevitable, suffocating demise.

The last chicken I ate had its neck cut through instantly, the blood gone, its muscles were dead within an hour. A day later and not a feather moved on its body. This chicken was not in prison on death row like my potatoes carrots and onions, this chicken never saw the light at the end of the fridge.

Going Postal

In case you were wondering how to get on every government watch list in one easy step:

And yes, it worked.

Day on the Range

This past Sunday me and some friends went shooting. When I say shooting, you think I going to post some pictures of me shooting and AK-47 or an AR-15. In fact I don't have a single picture of me shooting., because I am shooting a 22. But, its no wimpy 22 in fact its an olympic standard competition rifle, that is around double the weight of a normal rifle (so around 12 lb). Basicly, you have a sling around your bicep it then raps around your forarm and straps to the gun. So you are on the ground prone holding a rifle, then you aim and shoot. The picture I have posted is the best target I shot, its at 50 ft, bascily the center targets are to get you set up and to adjust the sights. The bottom center is me getting the sights in line, then the upper center is after that, then I just march around the outside one shot per target. The markings indicate how much you subtract from the largest possible score.

Broken Toilet

I told Aryeh that the toilet in our apartment broke and he asked "how long before you fix it with a hangar"
It was only a few days, but it really wasn't that broken anyway.


Aesthetics Post-Fix


The guts, where you can see whats broken

Toilets, parking, elevators and airplane wings

Stacy and I just got back from a trip to Israel. I'm busy applying for another graduate school fellowship, so this will be a short post.
First of all, the required funny foreign toilet picture. Check out the strange flushing mechanism:

Gotta love how Israelis park:

Also, I always find it frustrating how elevator floors are labeled in the US. "L," "G," etc. Although there's sometimes a star or something, you never really know which floor to get out at if you want to leave the building. Compare this to this elevator in Israel:

Finally, a really cool picture that I took as we were taking off to come back to NY:

Crazy Contact Lense Solution

With my contact lense solution, you need to wait overnight for the rock inside the case to neutralize the hydrogyen peroxide before putting it in your eye (so you don't roast it).
Apparently this concept is difficult for most people to grasp so over time you can see the warning lables become more and more absurdly obvious.

What's the frequency?

I noticed this while teaching a lab. What's the frequency of oscillation?


Also, Happy Anniversary to our parents!

Happy New Years

First post of 2008 and we shall start it with a New Years Observation:

You know you are an engineer when…

Instead of laughing at you parents old yearbooks, you laugh at there old textbooks.

Instead of staying up all night smoking pot and drinking, you attempt to get on the roofs of the tallest buildings on campus at 3 AM (without any drinking being involved)

Instead of spending your time going around all the museums in DC, you plan on spending two full days in the aerospace museums, and the last day split between the others.

Feel free to add your own “You know you are a ______ when…”