cereal and tents
Houston, we have achieved breakfast cereal.
It's the kind that comes in a plastic bag and has exactly one ingredient: puffed rice. With the addition of rice milk, which did have an oil added to it, it exceeded all expectations. One of my friends had told me it was good, but sometimes we aren't that picky, and besides, my only experience with puffed rice was rice cakes, which people tend to compare to styrofoam. This was nothing like styrofoam.
Also, from a single attempt to drink from a styrofoam cup during this illness I learned that styrofoam is so evil that not even rice cakes deserve the comparison, so we should really think up something else to compare them to.
In other news, we started designing a three-pole dome tent. Instead of measuring an existing tent or anything sensible, we bought three poles last year and are building the tent to fit the poles. So far we've approximated the pole shape with a parabola and remembered how to do a line integral so we can relate a z-coordinate to a distance from the center of the tent. Then we can do that for the centers of the sides as well and figure out what shape a tent side should be. However, preliminary studies indicate that the closer you put the ends of a pole, the less parabolic it is, so it occurred to us that we could model the poles by figuring out how much force a little piece of the pole exerts on the next little piece of the pole and integrating that to get the exact shape. I got stalled before that happened because I figured as long as I'd had rice milk, I could have some fake ice cream made by the same company, but it has a few more ingredients and comes in a cardboard package, so you frequent readers can guess how that went.
Ok, so it's pretty obvious that if we just build the top part of the tent using the parabolas we've calculated and leave extra fabric at the bottom, we can just sew the bottom of the tent onto the top so it'll fit the poles. That would save us some calculus, but then we wouldn't get the entertainment factor from waking up brain cells we'd forgotten about.
I knew we were nerds before, but this is like finding out you have a third arm, and it's good for stuff.
It's the kind that comes in a plastic bag and has exactly one ingredient: puffed rice. With the addition of rice milk, which did have an oil added to it, it exceeded all expectations. One of my friends had told me it was good, but sometimes we aren't that picky, and besides, my only experience with puffed rice was rice cakes, which people tend to compare to styrofoam. This was nothing like styrofoam.
Also, from a single attempt to drink from a styrofoam cup during this illness I learned that styrofoam is so evil that not even rice cakes deserve the comparison, so we should really think up something else to compare them to.
In other news, we started designing a three-pole dome tent. Instead of measuring an existing tent or anything sensible, we bought three poles last year and are building the tent to fit the poles. So far we've approximated the pole shape with a parabola and remembered how to do a line integral so we can relate a z-coordinate to a distance from the center of the tent. Then we can do that for the centers of the sides as well and figure out what shape a tent side should be. However, preliminary studies indicate that the closer you put the ends of a pole, the less parabolic it is, so it occurred to us that we could model the poles by figuring out how much force a little piece of the pole exerts on the next little piece of the pole and integrating that to get the exact shape. I got stalled before that happened because I figured as long as I'd had rice milk, I could have some fake ice cream made by the same company, but it has a few more ingredients and comes in a cardboard package, so you frequent readers can guess how that went.
Ok, so it's pretty obvious that if we just build the top part of the tent using the parabolas we've calculated and leave extra fabric at the bottom, we can just sew the bottom of the tent onto the top so it'll fit the poles. That would save us some calculus, but then we wouldn't get the entertainment factor from waking up brain cells we'd forgotten about.
I knew we were nerds before, but this is like finding out you have a third arm, and it's good for stuff.
posted by missmolly at 7:17 PM
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