=(

Going to have to really study to get good grades this semester. I hate studying with a passion!

From the Mechanical Point of View: Fume Hoods

I was thinking about FUME HOODS walking back from class today because my friend Jina is interviewing for some fume hood inspection position over at UCSF. (Fume hoods: the thing you put chemicals in so you don't die from the fumes) I think it's pretty interesting! Fume hoods deal with the fumes of some pretty dangerous stuff. You totally do NOT want to be smelling the stuff that chem/bio majors deal with, right? right?! (Conlo,danny?) So you gotta get that shit out of there otherwise you'll pass out/lab will explode.

So what I thought up! (Figured I'd put all these ideas down in case I ever find myself needing to think about fume hoods while in industry) My thought process:

Air has density (depending on pressure, temperature) and viscosity. Moving air requires moving a mass over a distance = work. Work gives power requirement of fan.

Fume hood is basically the beginning of a large duct. Going to have no-slip conditions (air doesn't move RIGHT at the interface of air/wall... the air right on the surface of the fume hood will not be moving. try washing your car with just water, no scrubbing). No-slip condition creates a boundary layer (A small film of air along the sides that isn't moving quite as fast as all the air in the center of the duct). Should the chemicals get trapped inside this boundary layer, they would stay in the fume hood!

Need laminar flow, that way we know where the fumes are heading (in turbulent flow, we have no idea where the fumes are going, and chemicals could be deposited on everything! dangerous) Need a certain rate of mass transfer to maintain safe operating levels (Don't want to suck out the fumes too slowly... choke!)

If the fume hood door is fully shut, the fume hood can't operate unless it has some other inlet for air. If the fume hood door is somewhere between open and closed, or it is being changed during operation, this causes changes in streamlines inside the fume hood. Another boundary layer on the edge of the fume hood door, possibly causing turbulence/vortices inside the hood, creating chemical deposition?

Need a control system that takes into account minimum operating levels for safety? And then from how this control system works on, i have no idea. Gosh. That's a toughy. Fume hoods are pretty complex.

Side-Story

On another note, I've been thinking about a lot of things. I seem to have a knack for heat transfer, and I'm probably going to bank my future career as a Mech E. on it. I could probably turn my textbook into an analytical solutions manual for any problem I ever encounter, but then that might make me rely on my textbook too much. Then I thought about it, don't most scholarly people have libraries? I have no need for all this heat transfer information jumbling around in my head. I might as well carefully tab it out in this book. But that means I'll have to buy several copies of the book, to create back ups. The book is my livelihood and if I lose it, I can't just start from scratch lol

read my philosophies on life below if you're bored!

THE SEARCH FOR THE GUT FEELING

**THE SEARCH FOR THE GUT FEELING**
By Alvin Chen

Introduction -
Let me take this short time to philosophize about life. Over the past couple years, I feel like I've grown a lot, experiencing lots of things. And now it's time to pull it all together. Every couple of months, maybe every couple of weeks, I want to take time and make sense of all of my experiences. Every day is different, and I'm always changing, so I want to develop a Grand Unified Theory of LIFE! (Not the GUT of physics, whose name I will deliberately steal for my own selfish purposes) This way I can trust my GUT when I come across challenges and decisions, without having to worry about consequences or risks. Of course, I'm still just started running around my track of life. Right now I see life from the College POV, as a guy who has done just a little bit of martial arts, engineering, and partying, but also as a guy who appreciates the little things.

What is the GUT feeling meant to be? In my opinion, the best philosophy is the one grounded in science. Science is the study of nature. Maybe philosophy is also the study of nature: human nature, ethics, culture, and a whole mess of other things. Even though I am exploring an abstract topic, I cannot ignore my scientific nature. Just maybe, if I can understand how morality, emotions, and ambitions affect the human experience, along with environmental factors, I can really begin to see why I'm here on this planet, and what I was meant to do.


So you're thinking, "What you were meant to do? Well that sounds crazy!" My life has been so ridiculously lucky that I can't ignore that there is some kind of overarching power in this universe. While I'm not acknowledging the existence of a god, I do believe that life has patterns and truths, which I will attempt to put down in this blog (continuously rehashed over time)

THE GRAND UNIFIED THEORY

1. Life is broken into periods and cycles
I give credit for this line of thinking to my dad. He told me this a couple of years ago, when I was just a freshman, still unknowing and reckless. His view is that in adult life, people work through stages. Education, career, family. The relationships with your wife, children, and friends all have a certain time period to grow, always happening around the same time for most people. I'm in my education phase, here at school, learning everything I can. But education cannot be limited to just school.

Postulate #1
Don't let school get in the way of your education -- Professor Gronsky

So this is why I begin my search for my GUT feeling now. Let's take a look at the periods and cycles I can make sense of by drawing together ideas from psychology and my experiences.

**The Environment**
Take today for example: Hot... Hot... Hot... but windy. That's very different than yesterday, which was just Hot Hot HOTT!! Before that? It was windy and cold, and before that it was just plain cold. Rainy too! These two periods of Cold and Hot separated only by the winds of change. It's true! The winds do mean change: Wind is generated when a high pressure system meets a low pressure system, and the systems have their own unique traits. Without going too much into how this happens (Because that would require me to read a couple pages of Wikipedia and explain them there), let's just draw that there are constantly periods of hot and cold on our planet, constantly cycling between the extremes! So, cycles in nature - plausible.

**The Mind**
--Something about how the mind reacts to the environment. To be written later--

2. Life and the theory (Conclusion)
Of course, Life is in the application, not the theory. I have come to realize that NOTHING is as good as it could be or as it should be. That is where engineers and civil servants find their places in life. Take theory and make it applicable, because if we don't dumb it down, nothing good will ever come of it. For example, I want to clean water for the rest of my life. Yes, everyone should have access to clean water. Water should be free of all pathogens, heavy metals, and other risks, but not yet. Crystal clear water, perfect, tasty, but not yet. Nothing happens in a day, nothing happens in a month. Nothing happens in a year or a decade.

Whole lifetimes can be spent on projects, and generations of great people must work in sequence to bring about significant change. Some of the great things to be accomplished on this planet will be above the individual, greater than the ambitions of one man. This is why it is so important to be organized in your work and work in stages. This way, when you pass on, you have left behind the groundwork for something much more important than yourself...

To be continued
_________________________

I enjoy philosophizing, so please let me know what you think. The extent of my theory might end up being only the experiences that I feel as an individual. But if you can explain your experiences to me, I might see life from your shoes, and it will definitely be different. Please share

Dude!

I just got this very shady email! From "Sheila P. Caguiat"

Hi All,

Today's mail will be distributed after lunch.

Thank you,
--
*/Sheila P. Caguiat
Mechanical Engineering Dept

Sent to: MEstaff@me.berkeley.edu
mefaculty@me.berkeley.edu
megrad@me.berkeley.edu
mEungrads@me.berkeley.edu

So they sent this list to... the staff, the faculty, the graduate students and the under graduate students. I don't know how many undergrads get mail through the ME department, but WTF?! Does everyone really need to know when the mail will come?

Scary

The plan

(age) Plan

(20) Work and save 10k
(21) Graduate
(22) Work and save 90k
(25) Figure out who I am and who I would like to be
(27) Invest (possibly in you)
(28) Peace Corps or Engineers without borders
(30) Be somebody, be me, in the truest sense of "me"

Animoes

Take a look at this video below! It's about two guys who raised a lion cub, and the lion still remembers them years after being reintroduced to the wild!



I wonder, have humans always had these kinds of meaningful relationships with animals? Can any animal build this kind of bond with something of a different species? We should capitalize on this! Maybe we can teach animals that humans are here to help and we'd have a much easier time taking care of them! It'd be tight if we someday taught dogs and cats how to work space ship instrument panels, and then we could make a noah's ark of sorts to different planets. TIIIIIGGHHHTTTT

What if we built an animal training school, so we could teach animals to do smart things! Like in this video...

Smart Animals - The funniest videos are a click away

P.S. - The government prohibiting marijuana is like a father trying to keep guys away from his slutty-ass daughter. He can spend his whole life protecting her, but she's gonna get some dick somehow or another.

The hardest question to answer

Writing is a pretty important thing, huh? Without it, we wouldn't be able to present our ideas to anyone without being there to gesticulate wildly. People would just read a paper and be confused and go like. WUHHH??? So I'm going to try and improve my writing skills over the course of my life (Or at least until I lose interest or I feel I've reached an adequate level of writing) so that people can get what I'm saying without me funking it up.

Today, I began the first draft of the most important letter of my life: the letter to my dad, suggesting that smoking marijuana is the safest thing he can do in his later years. Obviously, his first question is going to be the hardest to answer. Why am I suggesting this? But the follow up questions, like pros and cons, will be easier to answer. I believe the evidence supporting marijuana use for the elderly is irrefutable: it prevents Alzheimer's disease better than any medicine on the market. The active ingredients of marijuana also present a new way to prevent cancer. There's also a whole shizzleload of things that marijuana treats that you can take a look at here (There is a reason why people have been smoking marijuana since the dawn of time). My dad has complained for some time about losing focus and not being able to enjoy the things he likes anymore. I hope that I will be able to write a convincing enough letter so that he might try new things in this last leg of his life.

Your attention, please

Have you guys been reading the news lately? I'm worried about the future. Take a look at these articles.

Some time ago: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090405/ap_on_re_us/binghamton_shootings

April 2: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/city/collin/frisco/stories
/DN-jitrial_02met.ART.Central.Edition1.4a6eb7a.html

April 2: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/03/30/state/n094543D46.DTL&tsp=1

April 5: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090405/ap_on_re_us/pittsburgh_shooting

April 5: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090405/ap_on_re_us/children_slain