Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Farmer's Tan, Indeed


When we posted about the unpaid butchery internship at Marlow and Daughters, we suspiciously got 30 hits. Somebody's been checking their Google Alerts! In the name of getting lots of pageviews, we've got to pass along another great volunteering opportunity. The Brooklyn Grange, a for-profit profit making enterprise, is located on a rooftop in Queens and would like you to shovel some synthetic dirt around for exactly zero compensation:
Hello all,

We're excited to announce that we're headed into the second phase of construction this week!
Brooklyn Grange will once again commence work on the roof of 37-18 Northern Boulevard tomorrow, Thursday, May 20th, at 6:30am.

Fun With Numerical Methods in LaPlace Space

We've all solved partial diffential equations (PDE's) by the LaPlace transform method -- right? You apply the LaPlace transform to the PDE and boundary conditions by looking them up on LaPlace transform tables. After applying the transformed initial condition, you're left with an ODE that can usually be solved analytically without too much difficulty. But then comes the moment of truth -- can you invert your solution back to real space using inverse LaPlace transform tables? In a graduate-level transport class you probably won't be given a PDE that can't by inverted back with the tables, but in real-life these situations can and do arise. Plus, in real-life you usually have some data that you want to fit with your LaPlace-space model. What do you do then? Well, if you really must know...

Monday, May 3, 2010

Saturday, May 1, 2010

Minions and Minionmasters, revisited

Sure, we've already covered that contemporary youth-oriented social networks are hierarchical and dichotomous. Minionmasters only do awesome shit, and minions aspire to receive their approval. But lately we've been noticing sub-par minion recruiting techniques done onto ourselves and others by some mid-level minionmasters. These minionmastering techniques have come off so transparent that we wonder, are we getting old and wise enough to percieve them in real-time or are these minionmasters we're encountering just bad at what they do? It's a little of both.