Quotes from ENGG 405 Engineering Business and Society, Winter Semester 2007

• I don’t endorse any of this, but I’ll admit that I do turn my head.
• If you’re going to drink with people, Newfoundland is the place to be, those people really know how to get along and have a good time.
• Anybody who plans to live on CPP will at some point ponder the question “Is dog food edible?”
• In 1964 there was 1 female chemical engineering student in my class, I dated her. She dropped out, but that’s completely unrelated.
• Human Vision has evolved to detect the smallest movements at the largest distance. Now that’s not very useful for reading and engineering textbook!
• If you have a riot in the US you end up with a lot of dead people; if you have a riot in France noone dies but alot of cars get burned.

Quotes from PHYS 381 Electrodynamics Winter Semester 2007

• If there is a bomb here, I am going to run there, along a radius.
• Engineers are working very hard to make our lives easier, they are not always successful but what can we do.
• There are 24 letters in the alphabet! maybe we should use the Chinese alphabet then we’d have 6000 letters to choose from? No? well then let’s learn it, use it, and be happy
• You need to tell the solvee how things behave on the boundary.
• You need to know something if the “wild guess” method is going to work.
• The “wild guess” or “lucky guess” better sometimes work, this isn’t lotto 649
• Remember the laws! you’re not allowed to visualize incorrectly.
• I lied! I just made two functions look different, it was like writing sin² + cos² and pretending that it didn’t equal 1.
• The Laplace equation gives nice and cozy solutions.

LOOK’s new fork and headset setup for their track bikes has bled into the triathlon market (the 496). Luke Bell has been riding it for a while and I always wondered a bit about it. It’s been kicking around for a number of months/years but I saw it for the first time being ridden by a an amateur (Well someone who wasn’t obviously sponsored) in a photo taken just a month ago (end of January 2007). It had been making appearances here and there as a prototype since Athens in 2004 but I hadn’t seen anybody riding one except for sponsored athletes. I know they did a 2006 model of it but who knows exactly when that started distribution, apparently their 2007 version is different paint on the 2006 frame. That indicates to me that it was likely a “second half” of 2006 release.

Take a look at the photo, the front fork doesn’t connect to the frame via a standard headset as every other bike on the planet does. The fork stem come up in front of the frame instead of going through it. My guess is that this might make the bike a bit squirrelly to handle especially considering riding any bike with a shorter wheelbase and steeper seat-tube is that way already. For a track bike I guessed it was a decent trade off for aerodynamics, but couldn’t imagine (and still can’t) that it was going to make a big splash in bike construction.

I checked out the Look website and got no really clue as to when they started actual distribution of this bike to the real world paying customer market but in my travels did read that it claims the headset design improves stability. Now that sounds kinda bogus to me. If this headset design solves the problem of instability in the aero position shouldn’t every manufacturer of tri bikes have started building this? we’ve seen it since August 2004. Isn’t it a bit odd to believe that a company like LOOK which sells a traditional geometry frame (486) as a triathlon bike would be the company to figure out how to solve a problem that no-one else has solved? Companies like Kuota, Cervelo and Orbea are building superb tri geometry but all are still using the traditional headset configuration.

Look makes great $4000 frames that work superbly for draft legal ITU-triathletes, but to imagine that they fix the stability problem on one of their first attempts into steep seat triathlon geometry is a bit suspect to me. My guess is that this probably does allow you to cut weight and it may even improve lateral stiffness but its not going to make your bike ride rock solid when you’re splayed out on the aero bars. It’s not the lack of stiffness of the fork that makes your adrenaline rush when things get crazy it’s the geometry of the setup.

Rewrote a big chunk of code for the Marda Loop Justice Film Festival website this evening that gets rid of the images I was using for buttons and frame borders. It renders the equivalent using CSS. check it out: www.justicefilmfestival.ca

I guess it’s a bit faster, but that wasn’t really the point. I wanted it to load without having to do the chunky shake thing that a browser does when it loads things into a table. I kept 1 table because I was lazy but fixed the problematic one.

In the summer of 2006, the Canadian government took steps to promote public transit as a climate change solution by offering a tax credit to public transit users. Promoting Public transit is one big solution to commuter caused pollution, promoting cycling as a substitute to the automobile is another. Promotion of public transit as a replacement for commuting can cut down on one source of automobile use, but it makes a smaller impact on day to day errands and trips.

The answer? pedestrians and cyclists! In addition to curbing emissions active promotion of active lifestyles combats X syndrome. According to the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute:
Current estimates place the cost of physical inactivity in Canada at $5.3 billion. If the government is going to promote public transit they need to promote cycling as well.

What can you do? well, start by sending your monthly letter to an MP in for February on this issue! or if you’ve got some lame excuse for not doing that Sign this petition.

I just wrapped up reading “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond as part of ENGG 405 (Management for Engineers). If you’re interested in getting a copy of the book so that you don’t have to go and dig one up before the deadline of March 30, feel free to drop me an email

It was a rather well thought out discussion of the physical variables that have played a major role in how History played out. As an effort to answer the question “Why did Europeans gain the upper hand technologically over the course of history”. It’s not obvious why the Mayan culture didn’t get rolling and invade Europe, they aren’t any stupider of people. Diamond makes an effort to describe that nature provided a big advantage to let people near the Mediterranean quit their hunter-gatherer existence prior to, or more completely than, people elsewhere in the world. It’s worth a read if you’ve got time to read lots of books, not worth your while if you’ve only got the commitment to read a couple books per year.

LATEX has a command for pretty much every useless symbol known to man, but it doesn’t have one for something I would consider pretty much essential… The degree symbol

You can write a circle in suberscript using math mode: ^\circ

The obvious thing to do is to define a command that writes a degree symbol when used with \degree as it should be. Just add before the document starts this line…

\newcommand{\degree}{\ensuremath{^\circ}}

This can be used in math mode as well as outside of it.

What do you call 3 EnPhys in a fume hood?

Here’s the question as I’ve most recently seen it posed: “I’m interested in hearing thoughts about benefits/detriments of caffeine on a triathlete. I know for a fact that peter Reid would abstain for a month before Kona to maximize the effect that day. Normann Stadler ate like 17 2Xcaffine Powergel’s at IM world championships in 2006.”

Here’s the summary of my reading on the topic.

Caffiene creates positive feedback in a fat metabolism cycle. caffeine can essentially increase your blood fat levels if you surprise your body with it. (If you remember high school biology there are 2 kinds of feedback, positive feedback and negative feedback Homeostasis (body regulation functions) is generally a setup of a whole slew of negative feedback.)

If your body always has caffiene in it you aren’t going to see any effect because your body always operates in this zone. Don’t think that you can lose fat tissue by doing this, your body’s negative feedback systems will get ahold of your blood fatty acid levels and this effect is negated.

Therefore use of caffeine can have a real plus on race day for an endurance event. Your glycogen stores will last longer because your body will be able to metabolize a higher proportion of fat. The average 15-17 hour IM athlete ends their day in this region because they put such a tax on their body but for them their glycogen needs to get really depleted before this happens.

So, should you try hyping yourself up on caffeine on race day? Yes and No. If you haven’t done it in training please don’t be a dumbass and try something new when it comes time to perform at your best. (If you haven’t already heard that advice a million times you should do some reading) The other things to keep in mind are:

• caffeine *IS* a diuretic, this means you’re going to lose more fluids in your pee. you might think twice about how much time you can gain by biking a bit faster but taking 10 washroom break (there are ways around this apparently, they’re just never shown on the NBC Kona broadcast)
• Caffeine does give you a mental buzz. getting a mental buzz puts you at a higher risk for a mental crash. It doesn’t mean you’re going to completely drain yourself by getting up on a buzz, but it does mean you need to know that it’s a buzz and keep eating/drinking while you’re on it. You won’t come off the buzz as hard if you’re keeping yourself well nourished/hydrated, but it’s harder to remember to do so when you feel good.
• Caffeine increases cellular Calcium ion levels, this in turn leads to increased interstitial Potassium ion levels, (this means potassium moves out of cells into the juice between them) For your skeletal muscle and nerves this means that the contraction (or firing of the nerve) is going to be slightly retarded.

What do you make of these other effects on your body? well do a bit of thinking and decide for yourself. My opinion on the the ion concentration stuff is as follows:

This might be a good thing if you want your muscle to pull really really hard (once) but generally this isn’t a great idea for a triathlete. If your muscle fiber is going to pull harder or longer on each rep it’s going to get tired faster. As we all know a slow twitch muscle fiber has been built during training to work at low-med intensity for (insert big number here) repetitions. If you’re a triathlete who is training smart this is the kind of muscle you’ve got.

Whether or not this effect of caffeine is going to hurt your probably depends on whether or not you’re going to let it. If you’re well trained and well disciplined to cycle at a certain cadence or run with a certain turnover this isn’t going to be of much detriment to you (in fact the increased fatty acid levels will be net benefit) If you’re not disciplined while racing you may feel like pushing a higher gear and loving the speed. This can pretty quickly increase your power output, but you’re not helping yourself out here. Your muscles are going to get tired faster than they should.

If you’re going to be really smart on this topic you might think about using sports legs to counteract this effect of the caffeine and reap the benefits of caffeine while not incurring this effect but I doubt it’ll work as nicely as you theoretically might think it would. I doubt anyone is going to ever try this in a study because it’s just to dang complicated.

So the natural thing to ask I guess is whether or not I do it? Yes, I have done so and plan on doing so again this coming season.

I’ve been sitting in an ETLC computer lab for quite a few hours here trying to write a computer simulation of the phys 397 lab that Rob Joseph and I have been working on for the last month. What should have ended up being a “straight line” passing through a nice series of 60 data points is actually a straight line passing through a jungle of randonimity. What I believe turned out to be our problem was that when we approximated our “filter function” (the transmission spectrum of the IR filters being used) we just used e as the base of the exponent. Assuming that a bell curve is accurately described by a gaussian distribution is something that loads of people probably do every day. I mean we did it every day for a month in Statistical Mechanics when we use the Stirlings approximation of large factorials. There are situations, and unfortunately our lab turns out to be one of them where a Gaussian just doesn’t describe a bell curve very well at all.

Indeed it’s the difference between something being gaussian and something being a bit wider up top or more triangular that throws our data for a loop. When performing the numerical integration right near the peak of the blackbody curve the filter is much narrower than the peak of the spectrum. This means that the variation from one filter to another across this regions is not
extremly pronounced. When the filter funtion is poorly approximated it makes a big difference!

What really needs to be done is to replicate the bell curve of the filter using a numerically exact model. Since I don’t have any means to do this I’m going to have to switch my beautiful 60 data point set into 10 data sets (ten filters) with only 6 data points each.

I was also going to pursue a reverse derivation of the plank curve using a 3D curve fit of my data array, that would have made my lab something close to a manifestation of sheer beauty on paper. But with these results I think it’s not going to be
worth the effort, I know that the answer will be poor.

I’m not all that worried about poor data, If I can write a blog at 12:50 am on a Friday night about the intricacies of a Gaussian Distribution, I’m not going to have any trouble filling 5 pages in Latex on the topic.