Hello hello!
I’m starting to run out of creative ways to start these entries. So let’s just dive right in, shall we?
Because I can.
Midterm season is upon us, and I’m pretty sure I escaped the first round unscathed. I had three exams in two days last week: Astronomy, Spaceflight Dynamics, and of course my open-everything Thermodynamics midterm. Which was pretty cool. Any exam that lets me google the answers on my cell phone is a winner in my book (in my defense, I knew the material and didn’t actually google anything.) For my astronomy exam I made 158 flashcards and studied like mad – it was weird for me to have an exam where you just had to know things and not do math. Haven’t had one of those for a while. Though my Software Engineering process exam on Monday will be like that – 12 essay questions, 3 hour midterm. Gotta love grad school….
A plot showing altitude above sea level and the corresponding vertical wind speed. This is for a location in the Andes Mountains, at 31.8ยบ S latitude.
Enough about all that stuff, I have way more exciting things to talk about, such as my mastery of MATLAB’s mapping toolbox. Guys… I made Mars. I didn’t think it was even possible, but I actually got it to work! (Which is especially impressive considering I did so without access to any NASA databases – #penny4nasa) I managed to generate a full-world topographic plot of the Martian surface. I also finished a model which takes surface topography (mountains, etc.) and calculates the vertical wind forcing based on horizontal wind. It works on Earth, so now it’s time to see if we can get a plot for the area over Olympus Mons! This data is useful because vertical wind forcing generates gravity waves, if you remember that information from my first couple entries.
So as you can see I’ve been pretty busy (and successful, I might add) in classes and SPRL lately. Which is great – I will likely get to be a second author on a published paper! For my vertical wind forcing model; I’m super excited, and glad that I’m starting to make headway into real research.
MATLAB plot of Mars Topography! And no, the blue isn’t water – it’s just colorized based on altitude. Green is approx. sea level, blue is lower, and yellow is higher.
My boyfriend and I with The Pretty Reckless at the VIP meet and greet. Doing our best rock concert faces. (We are the two on the ends)
Besides doing awesome physics stuff and making bajillions of flashcards, I’ve been doing some fun stuff too. I got to go to another rock concert (it’s been a really good year, all my favorite bands are touring!) The band is called The Pretty Reckless, and if you haven’t heard of them I suggest you go check them out. They played at a little club in downtown Orlando called The Social, which was really great because it was such a small venue, I could literally reach out and grab the guy’s guitar if I had wanted to. And we had VIP passes so we got to do a meet and greet afterwards with the band!
The openers were great too, the first was Louna, and they are a band from Russia. In fact this is the first time in 20 years that a full Russian rock band is touring in the US. The second band was Heaven’s Basement from the UK; they were crazy. At one point the singer tried to do the thing where they walk out on the fans’ hands, and the security guy yelled and ran over and tried to pull him back by the ankles. Then he ran into the pit, grabbed him, threw him over his shoulder, and brought him back on stage. There was like a tug of war of this guy between the guard and the fans. I guess that club doesn’t allow crowd-walking. The singer was just in awe, it was hilarious.
Doing my #RLShrimpStache for Endless Shrimp. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m kinda crazy.
Other than that everything is about the same as it was last time I wrote. Still working my way though Breaking Bad (and trying to avoid spoilers!), enjoying my Pumpkin Pecan Waffles candle, and eating lots of shrimp at Red Lobster – we made sure to hit up Endless Shrimp one last time on Sunday (its last day). I’ve also been doing some scrapbooking… I’ll post some photos next week after I buy more photo corners.
Another cool thing to mention is that I was invited to join Tau Beta Pi, which is the National Engineering Honor Society. As a physics student and a member of the College of Arts and Sciences rather than College of Engineering, I didn’t think they would want me, but I suppose having “engineering” in the name of my major was good enough!
For my closing statement, I’m going to mention that I’m super bummed about NASA being all closed and stuff. So let’s hope the government gets rolling again so that they can get back to work! I’m really hoping their MAVEN mission to Mars doesn’t get affected too much. That launch is scheduled for November 18th and the window extends until December 7th – if they miss it, they can’t launch again for over two years! It’s really a bummer when the sciences get caught up in politics.
That’s all folks – until next time!
-Lynsey
