Solid Wood Jumbling House

Some of you may be familiar with the game "Solid Wood Jumbling Tower":In this game, not to be confused with a similar Hasbro game, you build a tower of these solid wood blocks, and pull them out, one by one, replacing the piece at the top. Until the solid wood tower jumbles.

Well, remember Hamilton Grange? This is how they managed to move the house over the bit of church (photos taken about a week apart):
School was winding down, and I was afraid that I'd miss the actual move, but I was back on Tuesday to hand in a paper:The people who run the company, Wolfe House & Building Movers, are not Amish; they are Old German Baptists.

And they take site safety very seriously:

Flying

Over the past two years I have talked about the AIAA and the planes we built for it. Well we have finally finished our first plane. It is a year late, but it is the first plane the current members of the club ever designed. I worked on the construction and design of ever element of the plane except for the wings, and now I am proud to say it has flow.

Back Sparkle

I’m flying to Israel today, currently blogging this during a 9 hour layover in Toronto. I’ll be spending the summer there doing research at The Weizmann Institute.

By the way, a neat trick I routinely employ for getting a bottle of water inside airport security- bring in an empty bottle, then fill it with a cold water fountain water once you've past them.

Below is a picture I just took this morning flying out of Newark. It looks pretty dull in this version (which isn't really edited much) so open the full sized version to see the neat stuff. The sparkles that you see appear in the anti solar point. (This is the same point where the aformentioned "Glory" effect occurs). Basically its all the various manmade objects out there (mostly on roads) which reflect light in the direction that it came from (roadsigns, highway lane markers, cars reflectors next to headlights . . . ).

The zoomed in version

And the zoomed out version, only that spot has the sparkles

then- when the plane and the sun and this reflective spot on the ground are all in a line- then you see a sparkle from the sunlight reflected directly back at you (not scattered back like the usual). Notice the square green sparkle (in full size version) is a normal interstate roadsign.

By the way, I gave a “Tech Talk” at Google NYC last week. I’ll be blogging about it once the youtube video is up so you all can see it.

Goody Bag

This summer I will be working at Unilever R&D, which should be fun (except for the commute). Earlier this week I got a package from them. It was a corporate goody bag! Hooray!

Stadium Construction

For those of you who don't know Rutgers University is building a controversial 116 million dollar expansion onto their stadium. However, this does let a Lansey brother post pictures of said construction (the gate happened to be open so I figured what the hey).


I know it isn't very exciting yet, but I will add photos as I aquire them. For now just enjoy these pictures of a baby rabbit that was outside the engineering building during exams. DWEEEE!

Fun With View Cameras

In my photography class I had the privilege of using a "view camera," the first of camera designs ever, it has some nifty functions that today's fancy point and shoots can't even imagine. Wikipedia, as usual, has an excellent article describing them, with a section talking about the tilt or swing technique I used in the photo below of my classmates in NJIT's Eberhard Hall.
Notice what is in focus, and what is not in focus.



Yes, the entire plane of the wall is in focus (both near and far), but everything else is not. It was achieved by angling the film plane and the lens plane so their extensions intersect the wall on a line.


Above is an ironically completely blurry photo of the setup..

See dynamics in the image below, it was taken from this website explaining them.

I am here

Remember when I joked about me appearing on Google Maps? Well, now I am on Google Maps' Street View!


View Larger Map

I was walking to shul on Yom Kippur, wearing my village idiot costume tallit and kittel, and I saw a Google Street View car drive by. I didn't react quick enough to wave, but you can tell I'm looking at the car. I'm famous now!
Here's a screen shot, because some people can't see Street View.

Yes, I am a Rocket Scientist

Well unless you have been living under a rock for a while you will have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while (if you have been living under a rock, my condolence for the loss of your sanity). This of course was primarily due to school, either being there all day or simply working on stuff for it all day (I have a habit of staying late on Tuesday nights). However I feel it is only appropriate you bring you in on the great joyous wonders of what I have been doing for the past month.

To start aerospace propulsion, as I have my exam tomorrow and I am expecting an A in the class because I am approximately 15-25 points above the average on every exam and HW (even though I am a junior in a senior class), I can honestly say that “Yes, I am a rocket scientists.” I will let you in on the cool stuff I did for this class, including solving for the speed of a single stage rocket, a two stage rocket, a three stage rocket and an infinite stage rocket (yes I know its not possible but it tells you the theoretical maximum final velocity for the rocket). Additionally, I solved for the temperatures in the oxygen pre-burner and the hydrogen pre-burner in the Space Shuttles Main Engines. Also, I found the thrust coefficient for a twisted propeller (unfortunaly I cant find the really cool graph).

For my Design of Mechanical Components class I wrote a 400 line program designed to completely automate my final project design. The project consisted of a stepped shaft with two gears on it held by two bearings. I had the computer solve for the system even having it work in the fact that the parts had to have an infinite life. At the end I had it tell me which configuration had the smallest weight and wala a perfectly designed shaft.

As I am finished all my exams this week hopefully next weeks post wont involve my classes, and on the off chance you made it this far, thank you and congratulations.

I'm stuck

As I've mentioned before, Hamilton Grange is being moved. However, if you take a look at how the house is situated, it seems like they might have a slight problem:
As you can see, it's flush against an apartment building on the left and on the right it's blocked by a large bit of church. Typically, when houses are moved they're jacked a few feet off their foundation, put on wheels and pulled to their new location. But that won't help in this case - there's a building in the way!
I asked a guy working on the site how they plan to move it out, and it should be really impressive. So stay tuned!
(Feel free to suggest your own methods in the comments.)

Visual Braille

Check out this sign on the door to a bathroom in City College:
Here, I'll zoom in for you:
In case you can't read it, the handwriting says "Nice visual Braile [sic]." I kind of want to make those photocopied bumps bumpy, but I'm not quite sure how. Any ideas from the peanut gallery?