Monthly Archive for May, 2006
Page 2 of 4
Today is the big day. In a few minutes I'll don my cap, gown, and stole, and then it all commences. In a few hours, I will no longer be an engineering student, I will be an engineer. Instead of standing at the sidelines watching others go past in amusing medieval garb, I'll be processing with them. (It would, therefore, be fantastic, if the rain stops.) It feels, for the moment, like everything is coming to an end, though I know it isn't. That's why they call it Commencement.
It seems that I spoke too soon about Myst. It turns out that all I needed were a few little hints to get started, and now, now the puzzles are starting to get addictive. It feels surprisingly like my last graduate homework assignment. It took a little while for me to catch on, but once I did, it was pretty smooth sailing and it didn't feel much like work. That same impulse to figure things out has hit with the game.
In other news, Mark was awesome enough to get me Civilization III Complete. I've resisted the urge to install it so far--I still have a bit more research-related stuff to finish and then there's that whole packing thing--but I did start reading the manual. And I predict that, not only will I love this game, but I'm certain that my little sister will want to play it, too. She's too much of a history geek (and possibly a meglomaniac like her sister?) not to love it.
In honor of one of the projects I just completed--the design of an orbiter for a mission to Saturn's moon Titan--I give you videos of the Huygens probe's descent through Titan's atmosphere. First, a small video with narration (10 MB) and, secondly, a higher resolution version (91 MB) without narration. (Via Wohba.)
I find it interesting that Cassini-Huygens appears to have flown directly to Titan rather than doing a fly-by of Saturn first. Granted, this route would probably have been a better one for our mission (PDF file!) to take in terms of fuel consumption, but with the limited tools that we had, I don't know how well we would have been able to handle a crash course with Titan from that perspective. Still, it makes me wonder how many improvements we could have made...
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