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FINALLY the Low Altitude Temperature Profile page is finished, and includes all the details of the project. The Electric Kart page should be up soon.

Tested the rocket today for the big event tomorrow… let’s just say that thing went downhill after the rocket entered the trees at about 300 MPH. I think I’ll be able to get the kinks worked out for tomorrow…

Let me start by saying that this is easily the largest undertaking I’ve yet done.
I’m working on an experiment to make a mathematical model of the temperature at low altitudes, and how it changes as the sun warms the earth. I’m basing the model around the heat equation.
I plan to launch around 6 rockets, starting […]

Ever since my introduction to computational fluid dynamics last year, I’ve been reading several calc books and tutorials to learn Partial Differential Equations. By no stretch of the imagination am I a master, but last night I finally succeded in solving the Heat Equation.
Not only do I now understand initial and boundary conditions, but I […]

I’ve been working on a code in C to solve the Travelling Salesman Problem using Genetic Algorithms. In the past this problem has been attacked using brute force, simply trying every possible passage. Yet as the size of a dataset rises, the computation time increases exponentially with this method, such that a thousand points can […]

Every year the ESP program at MIT hosts classes for highschool students. Splash is held in the fall, at a time generally assumed to be thanksgiving break. I’ve attended the last 3 years, and loved it. This year however, I’m teaching a class with a friend entitled “The Calculus of Physics”. It will be awsome, […]

After a few nights of work, I had a hovercraft I was proud of. Beautifully crafted from plywood, a 2×4, and Visqueen, I was certain it would provide hours of hovering enjoyment.
Hah.
My test versions worked perfectly. I figured that the physics would scale up, and all would be great. Turns out, propellers don’t scale up. […]

I recently whipped up some drawings for a easy-to-build two person hovercraft. I’m now in the buildling stage, and it’s nearing completion! I should be able to ferry 350 pounds around, using a 24″ propeller and a tractor starter motor for thrust.

I installed a ball valve to make it easier to spray in the AquaNet. My friend Mike either did a crazy fluid computation in his head or accidentally came up with an amazing method for spraying and loading the potato cannon. With the new method, we hit 386 feet!

The potato launcher video is up! Look under “Projects”.

Take a look at the rocket-launching location. (I should be able to write up the rockets soon…) The arial photo is very nice!

Today I spent some time fixing and editing several articles that had been haphazardly strewn about for the past few months. Also, I finally got around to writing up a few projects the had not been present. Be sure to check out the new links under “Projects”, as well as some of the old ones […]

I finally broke. I had somewhere near 18 computers, and in general they worked, but since they were old I was always swapping dead disks and power supplies. Plus, managing that many computers when I only have a few hours a day got to taking so much time that I could only manage the cluster, […]

I finally got around to dusting off all my extra comps (save the box of laptops) and clustering it all up. Time was still an issue, so I simply used the bootable CD distribuation “BCCD” (bootable cluster CD). It’s quite handy. After booting, I had 7 working nodes, 1 desktop, 1 file server, 1 RAID […]

I’ve got the code to a point of semi-completion. I’ll write it up soon, but in the mean time take a look at a (somewhat scary) funny video that came out after a messed-up run: Blowup.wmv