Next up: Avian Influenza

To start off with, I would like to thank everyone who sent me Valentines. The Reese's’ heart lasted maybe half an hour and, as soon as I find some tape, the beautiful rose card is getting hung on the wall; my first wall decoration, by the bye. (I really need to do something about the white spans of the walls…)

I am sure by now that you have heard about the Peter-Pan-Peanut-Butter-Salmonella Outbreak. All I have to say is: THAT IS MY PEANUT BUTTER!!! (Please look to the right. That is my jar of peanut butter. Seriously.) I get sent this wonderful jar of peanut butter last week. And now I find out that I really ought not to eat any more of it. That makes me very very sad. I now have to wait for another jar to be sent from my mother, if she can find a jar in Bannerpole that does not start with the product code 2111 (as mine does). Though it might be interesting if she could not, because that would mean that the grocers have not taken it off the shelves. In which case, we could sue. Which might be, as I said, interesting.

So now, within the last week, I have found out that I have had a close call with Salmonella poisoning, as well as Consumption. (How a person can go for three (yes, three) months, with contagious TB without thinking of going to the doctor is beyond me. Especially when this person is a mechanical engineer, so supposedly he has some sort of brain in there—unless it has been rotted away by excessive Halo playing… but that is a whole other issue, and, since I have no idea who this kid is, except that I had a class with him last semester, I will not venture further into his mental capacity.) I now ask this question: What will it be next week? h5n1?
Or maybe the black plague. Which ever, I will be sure to tell you about it.

Also, last week was Fashion Week in New York City and this week was Fashion Week in London (on to Paris next week and Milan after that). Now, tell me, is this at all attractive? Feel free to zoom in on her face... try really really scary. Not to mention what-ever-it-is that she is wearing. A walking skeleton in an oddly shaped dress made out of some one's old bomber jacket.

On a completely different topic I would like to quote to you from Aircraft Design: A Conceptual Approach Third Edition by Daniel P. Raymer, pages 364 and 377, respectively:

“All real wings operate somewhere between 100 and 0% leading edge suction.” Really? That is a quite interesting statement, I had no idea that you could have more than one hundred percent or less than zero percent of anything. Oh well, maybe this is some thing that I have not learned yet, since I am but a mere undergraduate engineering student and not the Writer Of An AIAA Textbook. Who, by the way, dedicated his tome to ‘all who taught’ him. Which includes C. T. Sun of Structural Analysis fame. I will not say more, other than that he was probably one of the worst professors that I have ever had, but, since I was only taking Structural Analysis I, he was not inclined to think us intelligent enough for his condescension.

Continuing with a comment Mr. Raymer made about the necessities of making a grid for a panel method CFD code: “Rather than a brick wall appearance, the unstructured grid looks like the work of a demented spider attempting to capture your aircraft!” (One of many exclamations in this book. Completely unnecessary for a technical text.) Let us just say that, for the most part, engineers should stick to being engineers and writing boring engineering manuals and leave the riveting writing to their more scintillating, non-technical counterparts. This is a book on Aircraft Design, not a novel.