RyeBlog

I’ve decided to start a new column on my blog that I will run every week and update on Saturday. The title of the “column” is “Ask a Physics Major” and the way you participate is by asking me a physics question. It can be anything related to physics. If it is an extremely difficult question, you might get a really short answer that wont make you really happy- but for the most part I plan on giving you the best answer from a physics standpoint.

Good questions would be something that can be calculated. Since this is a new column, I will let you first throw me out some questions and then we can tweak what questions are good and what questions are not as good as we go along. If it is a question that I can answer using MatLab, Maple, Mathematica, or any combination of those programs - chances are I will enjoy it because it will give me a chance to throw up some cool looking graphs for all of you to enjoy.

The question:

“A piston of radius a is mounted so as to radiate on one side of an infinite baffle into air. The piston is driven at a frequency such that lambda = Pi*a. Compute and plot the relative axial intensities produced by the piston from its surface to a distance of r=3*a. Over what range of distances is the divergence approximately spherical?”

might not be the most interesting, but I could sure give you a cool graph.

If this series is fun - maybe I can enlist the help of a certain Electrical Engineer I know to run a column called “Ask an Electrical Engineering PhD student”, and a certain other plant geneticist to run a column called “Ask a Plant Geneticist” (or whatever title she actually has)

The Washington Post is running a story about the difficulty that the Baghdad embassy is having finding good employees from the local Iraqis. They refer to their locally engaged staff a “LES.”

two of our LES employees have been gunned down in execution-style murders, and two others barely escaped a similar fate in August. Our LES employees live in fear of being identified with the Embassy of the U.S.

I hope conditions are better with Sears or Microsoft.

[Via Washington Post]

If you think that I have too much time on my hands sometimes - check out this guys website. He has created a very detailed assembly line of a ton of stick people moving arounds blue balls. As a whole it just looks like chaos, but if you look at individual areas - you will notice some kind of funny processes going on.

It’s like “Where’s Waldo” meats the industrial revolution - minus the guy in the red had, and minus that level of graphic detail.

Check out Blue Ball Machine

Today was a really long day for me. Four hours in the testing center, a few hours working on a lab, and a few classes I had to attend. In Job-hunt related news, I did receive an offer today from Sears (although the email congratulating me on my offer arrived a few hours before the actual offer did, which I thought was kind of funny.) I have until November 28th to respond.

I found out last night that I was accepted for an interview with Microsoft - so I’m interviewing with them on Friday. The position with Microsoft would be a program manager. I would be working wiht a team of programmers to get certain tasks done by certain deadlines…etc. Based on the job description, I’m a perfect fit.

I can’t wait to have my employment issues settled so I can actually get back to focusing on school work.