Paul's Blog (October 2003)

• Sunday, October 26, 2003
  Yesterday four other guys in my Christian group and I went in the morning to work on a church that is being built and stayed till the middle of the afternoon. Being unskilled labor, I got to seal ducts and duct insulation using (yep, that's what it's for) duct tape. Each section of duct was only about 3 feet long, so then two would join together and would have to be taped around the connection to prevent air leaks. It was kind of interesting because I never knew that that had to be done, but it was kind of hard on the fingers, and I now have numerous small cuts and scratches on my thumbs.

  Last week I had an engineering test and an aerospace test, both of which seemed to go well. The aerospace test especially was easy, since it was open book and open notes. It was basically just a little algebra and plugging in numbers. The engineering test was a little harder, but I got the results already and I did pretty well.

• Tuesday, October 21, 2003
  This last weekend was very busy. In my aerospace class, 10-page team reports are due tomorrow, but my team hadn't even started as of Saturday morning. We hadn't started because we couldn't find some necessary information, so we were just looking for it. But then we got together Saturday afternoon, started researching other aircraft, and found one that had all the required information. We then spent the next several hours solving equations to compute various performance characteristics (which generally didn't agree with the reported characteristics). Then on Sunday afternoon we spent several more hours actually writing everything up and putting it together. Our final document actually has 14 pages. Although I think our paper is good, next time we really ought to start working on it sooner.

• Tuesday, October 14, 2003
  Well, I have had an interesting extended weekend. On my way to Chicago, via Amtrak, the train stopped for half an hour after the first half hour because the crew had just finished 12 straight hours and were required not to work more than than, so we waited for another crew to come. Then, my first night, I was awakened by sirens. Forgetting I was back in Chicago, I was momentarily puzzled. Upon remembering I was in Chicago, I forgot about the sirens until I smelled smoke: a garage just up the street was burning to the ground (it is now a pile of rubble). On Monday, Dad and I stained our new back fence, in the process of which I also stained myself and my clothes. But the chlorine water I played a water polo game in later that afternoon seemed to get rid of most of it. I just got back tonight, after walking a mile through the rain towing a suitcase and carrying a backpack just about as heavy as the suitcase.

• Thursday, October 9, 2003
  This has been a very busy week. I have a math test tomorrow, and a whole lot of math homework that is due today (which I have mostly finished). I have also been working on revising my team's Engineering paper a fair amount, and of course I also have an aerospace homework due tomorrow that's only half done. But I should be able to finish that.

  For the engineering homework that is also due tomorrow, I had to calculate the size of a parking lot required to hold the estimated 200 million vehicles in the US. In order to determine the size of a parking lot required to hold all the cars in the U.S., I researched the size of parking spaces. According to Alameda County, CA, laws, a parking space must be at least 180 square feet, with a width of at least 9 feet and a length of at least 18 feet. (1) Using 180 square feet as the size for a parking space, 200 million cars would take up 36 billion square feet. This is equal to 1,291 square miles, or roughly two-thirds the size of the state of Delaware (2). And this doesn't even include the throughways to access the parking spaces. If the parking spaces are perpendicular to the flow of traffic, the aisles must be at least 12 feet wide for one-way traffic. If this theoretical parking lot were square and the parking spaces were 10 ft x 18 ft to make the each 180 square feet, there would be 21,909 cars parked side-by-side in each of 9,129 rows, with each row including half of an aisle. The new size would be (18ft+6ft)(9129) x (10ft)(21909) = 48 billion square feet, or 1,722 square miles, 88% of the size of Delaware.

• Wednesday, October 1, 2003
  I got the adapter so I can plug my bass guitar into my computer a couple days ago, so I have started practicing again. I found that by tweaking various settings in the sound program I'm using I can get the sound to primarily come out of the subwoofer, so it sounds quite good. Otherwise, it sounds really staticky and noisy.

  I have now gotten back assignments in all my classes. I got a good score on my aerospace homework, and about average on the others. But now I know what I need to do (at least for the most part), so hopefully the rest of my scores will be better. Unfortunately for the math homework I got back, only four out of 20 or so problems were graded, and one of those graded was the main one I had trouble with (a complicated anti-derivative), so that's why I didn't do too well. But I think I pretty much understood the stuff for the second homework.

paul@viscerallogic.com