Sometimes, when I'm here alone in my kitchen, I start to cry. I just start crying, spontaneously.

Or maybe it's the onions that I'm chopping that does it.

Hmmm. Yes, it seems correlated with chopping onions.

Then I feel like I want to pour crude oil all over myself and slink across a table.

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So perhaps you have heard of Mr. Prandtl, giant among men in the field of fluid mechanics. Apparently back in the day, he had formulated his theories about laminar (laminar = not turbulent) flow around a cylinder and he had a bunch of equations that seemed extremely mathematically sound. This was before anyone even thought about turbulent flow, you see.

Pleased with his results, he took on a graduate student named Munch. Munch's project was to build a water tunnel and a cylinder, and then to take pictures of the flow going around it in order to prove experimentally his advisor's theoretical results.

So Munch built the flume, and he ran water through it, and sure enough, he found that the flow was completely different than his advisor had predicted. Like, COMPLETELY different. He took his results to his advisor, who, like all advisors in such situations, decided that his calculations were still right and that Munch had built the flume wrong. He told him to go back and rebuild it and make sure that the surface of the cylinder was extremely smooth, and the walls of the tunnel were extremely smooth, thus ensuring that the boundary conditions would match what Prandtl had proscribed.

For two years, Munch worked to make the walls of the tunnel smooth and the cylinder smooth, and to make the experiment exactly match Prandtl's specifications. But each time he ran the experiment he saw the same kind of flow and the cylinder would start vibrating when he turned up the velocity too high.

By this time, his office mate, VonKarman, had come back from the War. (Apparently he'd been in the Austrian Army or something). He resumed his studies and his place in Munch's office, and when he saw the experiments that Munch was running, he surmised that in fact the experiments were totally correct, and Prandtl was wrong (assumedly Prandtl was not VonKarman's advisor). So he went and made a theoretical model of what he thought was happening... that is- TURBULENCE! He decided that instead of sticking to the side of the cylinder as the flow bent around it, it would become separated from the cylinder, causing flow separation and the creation of alternating vorticies, which caused the cylinder to start vibrating. (Just like the singing islands or telephone wires that I've talked about in the past!)

So VonKarman published a paper about this, and now we have VonKarman vorticies, and we have a Prandtl Number, and do we have anything about Munch?

Perhaps only a scream of utter despair.

Moral of the story?

Don't go to graduate school.

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O thou whose face hath felt the winter's wind
Whose eye has seen the snow clouds hung in mist,
And the black elm-tops 'mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.

O thou whose only book has been the light
of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night, when Phoebus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.

-John Keats

ps- I added "Mitternacht" to the playlist. How could I resist! It's just so catchy!

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So I'm sick. Something hideous. But that's not even the worst part. I'm bored. I'd rather look at pictures of Mars than just lying around here watching movies and doing nothing. What did I just say? AHH! They've brainwashed me!! I'm finished! Luckily, by watching Total Recall, I can combine both activities into one.

Typing would be easier if my cat weren't sitting on my hands right now.

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To say he woke up would imply that he had ever been asleep, which would be quite a generous overstatement of the truth. Like every other night since they had landed on the sea of Oobleck, his rising was more akin to giving up on sleep than rousing from it. He was no engineer, but the landing vehicle could have done with a significant amount of redesign. He nearly lost his balance when, in his exhausted state, he forgot to continue walking with the landing vehicle as it continued its steady rolling over the Oobleck outside.
He glanced up at his fellow astronaut. She had devised a kind of cocoon that left her hanging horizontally in the center of the hollow sphere, attached to its walls by tight ropes and bungee cords. This worked out fairly well so long as the sphere continued to roll orthogonal to her body, rolling her over and over as if she were rolling over in her sleep. What he couldn't handle about this system was when the ball decided to change direction, rolling the person in the cocoon head over foot. Even constantly rolling about on the floor was preferable to that for him.

He always naturally ended up somewhere near the bottom of the sphere despite the slightly reduced gravity. He climbed up the wall a slight bit to reach the control panel and re-aligned the spin of the sphere with his running track, a thin swatch of rubberized floor that ran all the way around the inside of the module. He noticed that his fellow astronaut had chosen this direction as her preferred rolling direction, probably so that she could sleep through his workout. She had a lot of ingenuity, he had to admit, but almost all of it was used in the service of laziness. He started off running, adding energy to the ambient movement of the ball and speeding its movement across the Oobleck. As long as he was running he could keep the spin from drifting off axis. Ever since before he had left for space exercise had become a central theme in his life. He had been very eager to go adventuring on faraway planets, but he always intended to return to the Earth. If he wanted to return to Earth after such a long time in reduced gravity, he had to keep his heart and bones in excellent shape. Otherwise, upon his return, his heart would be unable to pump his blood against the pull of Earth's gravity, and his weakened bones wouldn't be able to withstand the weight of his own body. He wondered if his colleague ever intended to return to Earth: she had been slacking on her exercise regime since the beginning. Did she want to die here, on this endless ocean of Oobleck? He could imagine her doing it- running one day out over the surface of the Oobleck, then stopping there and looking back at him while the green Oobleck sucked her down.

Like any non-newtonian liquid, Oobleck's viscosity changes depending on how fast you are straining it. If you run quickly, Oobleck is a solid. If you run too slowly, it is a suffocating liquid- you sink slowly and any sharp movements cause you to be trapped in a solid cast of strain-hardened Oobleck.

That was the reason for the design of the spacecraft --any stationary craft would have long ago sunk into the Oobleck-- this hamster ball of a landing module avoided this peril by staying constantly in motion and spreading its weight out on the submerged part of the hemisphere. There must have been some way to design a part of the module that didn't rotate with the spaceship, offering some modicum of peace and stillness.

Then again, they'd never meant for humans to occupy this module for this long, either.

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Well I'm back from the Great Beyond (aka Texas).

I'm hoping the inter-personal relationships of my co-workers will quietly return to status quo ante conference, but we can't always get what we want.


HGIR: I am from Berlin
Me: Oh, I love Berlin!
HGIR: Why do you love Berlin?
Me: Oh, there's so much history there!!
HGIR, morosely: Yes... I know...
Me, in an effort to recoup: You know, like Fredrick the Great!

Sam: I'm always taking pictures of [the Welshman].
The Welshman: Yes, he's always taking pictures of me, especially when I'm in the shower.
Distinguished British Professor who we didn't know was listening: Oh my.

on a teleconference
Mercury Researcher 1: We found another crater with a pit in the middle that looks like a telephone
Mercury Researcher 2: You found another telephone crater?
Mercury Researcher 3: What are they doing there?
Mercury Researcher 4: Maybe they're calling each other.

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