The Crank File

"Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning." -Benjamin Disraeli

I like that quote, thanks Benji. That second pillar has been firmly lodged up my ass for weeks and as a result I seem to have not posted for over a month. Most unfortunate. A month is a long time. What'd I miss?

Well Barry Soetoro is president again, I don't have a bedroom anymore and I can now legally marry either of you fine bitches in your respective states of residence and yes that was a proposal.

My Uncle and cousin from Michigan have moved into my bedroom since Tim is disabled (legs/hands don't work) due to the swine flu. His mom wanted to put him in a home of some kind and my Uncle said hell no and took him back to Maine. Bad news is I don't have a room. Good news is my Uncle is an engineering minded kind hearted dude who has every intention of working with Trevor and I to get the 196_ Jeep Pickup that is buried in the ground in our back yard back in working order. The biggest problem is my brother and I smashed the back window with a rock when we were young and the interior is completely rotted out as result. Also it is literally buried, like sunk probably a foot into the dirt. My Uncle Lee left it there years before I was born and the hope is to get it working again, don't tell him, drive it to the next family gathering. Trevor now works at the Ford dealer in town cleaning the cars so he has access to spare parts apparently. Point is, I've got a Christmas break project and I'm excited. Well a project on top of applying to grad school. My current list contains 23 schools, that is going to get cleaved in half the next time I have a chance to look it over. Probably gonna cut it in half again after that.

Also I learned an interesting perk about having a Physics PhD the other day. Dr. Loucks walked into class with a letter that he wanted to share with us. It was from the Florida State Penitentiary from a gentlemen who had developed a hydrodynamics theory to better society as a whole. It had some nice drawings of fish on it. He put it in the crank file with the other 2-3 crazy letters a semester they receive. One of the best was a large box of scrap metal and all it said on it was "For Your Space Program". They scanned it with a Geiger counter before getting too close.

Finally a formal apology for skipping out on every Google Hangout ever. I am quite literally fighting for my academic life down here, but Christmas break is coming and will be followed by next semester which will be much easier. The future is going to be okay.

Black Friday Trippin'

Figured I'd make a quick post about some adventures from break. Got home to find my sister's cat had climbed a tree to avoid being chased by Carmen (dog). The cat then fell about 25 ft on his back hitting a picnic table thing. He hit pretty hard but after a trip to the vet, it was confirmed that he was alright. He just bit his lip and was bleeding from it a bit. 8 lives left big guy...

Anyways, did the Thanksgiving thing. Ate till I couldn't eat anymore, napped, etc, etc. Here are some photos from our trip to Oxbow Brewery in Newcastle, ME.

Oxbow Kegs

Thanksgiving Feast!

Brewery Tour

Apparently you can only get Oxbow in Maine and in part of DC. Strange coincidence because that is how my sister knows about Oxbow. Anyways, we did a sampling of there stuff and it was all pretty good. I would recommend freestyle #11 if you ever get the chance but getting ahold of the stuff is about as seldom as puberty at this point. Hopefully they'll take off and get more distributers, the whole place is a 7 man operation right now which is pretty cool.

In other news, I finally got around to sandblasting my second set of VW bus heads to bring to the machine shop. The first set were cracked, so hopefully these ones work out. Cleaning heads is very labor intensive. I literally soaked them in gasoline for weeks, wire brushed them, threw every type of solvent we had at them, pressure washed them and then sandblasted them. When I took them to the machine shop the machinist said they still weren't THAT clean. Yeah this guy is a little anal but that is the type of machinist you want. Anyways, hopefully that works out and we'll start assembling the lower end of the engine over christmas break. Basically that means the case will be bolted together and piston rods will be poking out, beyond that we need the cylinder heads to be complete which they probably won't be by then. I also e-mailed a dude about rebuilding my carbs.

Oh, I'm also planning on accepting a job offer from Pika Energy this week. That probably deserves more introduction but long story short, we're gonna kick the shit out of the small wind industry. So, I guess I'll be moving to the Portland area after graduation.... The future is going to be more than O.K.

Sorry I Got Consumed by Senior Project

So I will hopefully be checked off for "C grade" on Thursday for Senior project. If we do this, then we will be sure to pass senior project and graduate on time. No pressure. I've basically been putting ridiculous hours into this thing and spending massive amounts of time troubleshooting/head scratching. Tonight we essentially are meeting all of our specs. If we can manage not to detonate the project before Thursday, then we should be able to get a check off. Like I said... no pressure.

Throughout this senior project experience, we've had some pretty hilarious times. One of the MOSFETs that is currently on the project released some smoke the other day.... but is still working just fine. I was just impressed. Our motor controller is quite possibly the most terrifying and terrible motor controller ever slammed together to meet hilarious specifications. This is how senior project has worked for years and will continue to work.... students pull specs out of their butts about something they know little to nothing about, professors say "yeah.... sure... that sounds doable" and then it's not. Due to this fact, our motor controller is hilariously bad but does meet the outlined specs and the kids next to us are making gigantic square waves instead of a functional inverter. Some other group spec'd a project that sounded challenging and then proceeded to use an off the shelf servo motor, send it a PWM and watch it move to a different angle. The project range from an awesome coil gun that is controlled via an android app to a lead acid battery charger that was essentially a circuit found online.

Project difficulty variations aside, I have been learning a bunch by doing this project which has been sweet even though it has kind of consumed my everything. Here is a picture from yesterday of our solder board for C grade... we added a couple BAMF diodes (technical term) today.

Check out our awesome photo-tachometer that I picked up at Harbor Freight in NH. Why was I in NH you may ask? Great question.... more on that soon. More rant about senior project.

Our motor controller is hilariously bad and good at the same time. It draws essentially full current at all RPM.... yes.... that means full power all of the time. For those of you not well versed in the land of brushless motors, it makes things a lot simpler. We essentially vary the frequency (and kind of the magnitude) of the 3-phase voltages applied to the motor using PWM and sine wave lookup table to control rotor speed. There is no REAL control algorithm, it is running open loop but the great thing about brushless motors is that when they are under load, the back EMF decreases which means it draws more current.... which means it produces more torque.... which means it essentially tries to maintain the same speed it is being driven at by its self (within reason). Basically, brushless motors are complicated and badass. If I could do this project again I'd do it much differently but it has been cool. We will probably be making a PCB for it which will be sweet. 

Anyways, so last thursday night I drove down to Wilmington, MA for an interview with Analog Devices. I stayed in this hotel that was right across the street from Raytheon. We were (still are) right in the thick of senior project so it was hard for me to pull myself away to go just because we had so much to do but I went. I was thinking it wouldn't be that cool but I was basically very wrong. They gave us a kind of drink the Kool-aid speech at the beginning which was kind of interesting but the folks I interviewed with just seemed very nice. I got a tour of the lab and test facility and I was pretty blown away by the stuff that they do honestly. The group I interviewed with makes analog to digital converters for various things, many are for high precision applications. Some of the layers on the chips are separated by 5 atoms..... Yes. 5. Atoms........ Atoms. If they miss one atom it is a 20% error. I was pretty blown away honestly and very impressed with the work being done there. The interviews (all 5 of them) went pretty well though so maybe I will hear from them in the next couple of weeks. I don't know much about ADCs, but I could be willing to learn... it was pretty amazing stuff. 

Also on the "What the heck is Tony doing after graduation front", I was given a sort of informal job offer from the guys at Pika Energy this week. Pretty relevant timing, with the whole Analog interview and all. Still haven't taken the GRE..... or registered for it.... Not sure about grad school. Just not sure. I may have to make some pretty big decisions on all of this stuff in the next couple weeks. I guess this is what adults do?..... 

Oh, I also got a new (to me) car! 2005 Subaru Forester with 105k miles on it in pretty good shape. The check engine light came on the other day though and the cruise control stopped working...... I also have a tail light out suddenly. Hey, still better than my old car! This one has heat AND a radio!

Wow I wrote a lot.... Google hangout soon to help me figure out what to do with my life! 

Sailplanes and Cake in a Mug

This weekend I went up to Arlington to finally learn to fly gliders.  I was hanging out on the flightline all day.  I only got one flight in, but learned plenty about their ground operation as well.  We basically operate out of the grass between the runway and the ramp.  The towplanes tow you up, our practice area is the to the East of the airport, and then you come in on a 45 degree angle to the runway and land, where you get retrieved by a guy in a golfcart and you drag the glider up to the takeoff point.  A great bunch of very nice knowledgeable people!  It is a little chilly though, I will need warmer socks for next weekend.

I went back today, but do to crappy weather there was no flying.  We did do some ground school stuff though.

Tonight on the internets I discovered mug cake.  I had the stuff to make it, so I tried it.  Turns out that stuff is delicious.  It does expand quite a bit as it cooks though, so I opened the microwave door to a leaning tower of cake.  Frosted with Nutella it is even tastier.

Nate Silver is Probably a Witch

At this point in the election cycle, there is no way you haven't heard about FiveThirtyEight.  Tyler probably followed it religiously, Tony I assume saw it occasionally.  As a huge statistics dork, I have been a long time fan of FiveThirtyEight and Nate Silver.  This time around he got all but one senate race and every single state for president.

I read his book The Signal and the Noise just after it came out, and it was incredible!  While a little on the Freakonomics side (ie a lot of conjecture without hard math to back it up), Nate stayed much truer to cold hard facts.  The most interesting part of the book was the paradigm shift in the way he encouraged people to think about predictions.  The moral of the story was essentially to be extremely skeptical of predictors, because mostly they aren't that good.  The grand irony of course is that he is a predictor and gets things right.

Honestly for me the most important part of this election cycle is that more people will read that book.

He also put a great deal of emphasis on his own success by tackling challenges with low bars -- which is a viewpoint I particularly like.  Nate rose to statistical fame by writing PETCOTA, a sabermetric when he was bored at his day job as an actuary.  He then played online poker, and by his own admission he won hundreds of thousands of dollars not because he was good -- but because everyone else was so bad.  When the online poker craze died down, he stopped winning and stopped playing.

When it looked like online poker was going to get banned (and he was still making money at it), Nate got interested in politics.  He found that the actual analysis of the underlying mechanics of politics was so bad, that he could probably start a blog about it.  And he did.  And now he is selling a crapton of books and drove 20%(!!) of NYT traffic during election day.

Also his models runs using STATA, a piece of software I used in my econometrics class.  Which is pretty cool.

Not only is he a smart son of a gun, he's a rich one now too.

Is Nate Silver a Witch?

That Time I Went to NY and Had a Hurricane

So, last weekend I went to RPI for Halloween.  A good time was had by all.  Many bars were hung out at, lots of people were seen including Sam & Casey.  Due to Hurricane Sandy I had to spend an extra 3 days there, costing me 3 days of vacation.  But worth it.  Also while we there we built a gas powered airplane.

Epoxy Centrifuge because there wasn't much left.

.049 cubic inch engine.  Isn't it cute?

Finished airplane hanging in state.

Retrieving it from a test flight

I don't have the video of the test flight, but I do have a video of the test glide.