Please, No Field Work in January

...at least, not in the northeast corner of America.

I had suspected this would be a bad idea from the first, given that below-freezing temperatures and diving into waves tend to combine badly. My personal history with cold weather and the Great Outdoors is mixed at best: one memorable winter in undergrad, I went caving in a relatively "easy" cave with just a couple of dunks under water between the entrance and exit and managed to lose literally all feeling in my arms and legs about halfway through. Quick thinking by my trip leader and a helping hand from one of the stronger people in the group got me out safely, but I maintain a healthy respect for winter outdoor activities since.

I also tend to get cold after a couple of minutes in the ocean during the summer, so I was fairly certain that winter-plus-water-plus-wind-chill would be a recipe for disaster. Or at least a mild bout of hypothermia.

But what's the point of ingrained fears of the natural world if you can't use them as excuses to get out and test your theories?

That was precisely my intention yesterday, when I corralled a large group of lab mates and one undergrad freshmen into accompanying me to my study site, Norton Point on Martha's Vineyard, to take video for educational and research purposes in the middle of January.

The weather was actually the best we've had all month. There were minimal clouds, temperatures above freezing, and relatively low wind chill. The lab crew and I were optimistic that we would be able to take some good footage of the area and have a good time outside on the beach watching some really cool physics at work.

The beach was indeed really awesome, and it was amazing to see how far the Point had moved since I had last been out in late August. The waves on the ocean side were magnificent -- larger than I had seen in the summer and outlined crisply against the horizon.

We parked the lab truck as far down the Point as we could, then walked the rest of the (roughly) 2.5 miles to the end of the sand spit. Hats were worn, gloves were on, coats were buttoned as far up as they could be. The wind was at our backs for the trip down, so we felt confident enough to set up a couple of shots of the area and spend some time filming for an educational video the undergrad and I are working on (more on that later, I hope!!).

When we started getting further out to the point, however, the wind picked up. We were right on the ocean, with nothing (not even convenient dunes) between us and the breeze charging in from the Atlantic. Any video we got at the Point (which looked amazing! Maybe only 25 meters to go before closing) was overshadowed by the wind whipping at our backs.

 
And then it came time for the trek in the opposite direction. By now, the wind was going full tilt at our faces. You think it is hard to walk on sand on a normal day for a couple of miles? Try it with freezing wind impeding your every step, making your nose run to warmer climates, and solidifying any extremities unfortunate enough to have only one layer of cover.

That was miserable. And we were just walking. On a nice day. Imagine trying to carry sensors and tools through that wind in the same location. In the rain. Or snow. Imagine if you get the sensors into the beach, and then have to leave them for a month in the winter. I guarantee you are going to get ice, at best. Which means hapless grad students like myself will probably be tasked with returning at regular intervals during the month to scrape off the ice and check the sensors. Probably to bring a couple back for a nice burial. In the rain. Or snow. Or just plain ol' wind.

Now you know my opinion on winter field work. And why this kind of work is inherently difficult to do year round.

But. Then again. As I said in the beginning, there is no point to having an irrational fear of the natural world if you can't use it as an excuse to get out and do some science.

So, yes, in the end I might be that hapless grad student, freezing on the beach in January while trying to maintain enough dexterity in my fingers to put a sensor back in working order. Because science. And if it were easy, it wouldn't be nearly as much fun.

Writing Style

I have determined that I need to read more Terry Pratchett (of Discworld fame) before writing these blog posts.

About one book per post should be reasonable.

This occurred to me after skimming some of my earliest posts, notably "In the Beginning". I rather enjoy the irreverent, vaguely rambling style that occasionally sneaks into my writing after reading some good ol' English satire It tends to fade as I try to write more "proper" scientific prose, worthy of journals and newsletters, which is a shame (I really wish that this irreverent style could make it into the hallowed halls of Nature or Science. I think this would say something rather positive about humanity on the whole). 

Because, let's face it, science should be able to look at itself and laugh. Or at least giggle. You see, as scientists, or engineers (for those of us who think we get our hands dirty enough), we attempt to write the rules to something (rather, everything) which may not follow any rules at all.

We pretend to understand, and further our understanding, of a particular discipline, all the while waiting for that next clever upstart to turn our worlds upside-down.

I personally look forward to whomever takes the position of paradigm-shifter in my lifetime. Makes life a hell of a lot more interesting.

In the meantime, we scientists get along with the daily grind, focused on the microcosm that is our discipline while rarely picking our heads up long enough to really see the world we are trying to autopsy. I move along (hopefully) in the understanding of inlet migration and sediment transport, throwing out phrases like "current profiler" and "coupled model runs" as if they will lead me to a discovery that will hold water (har, get it?) in a centuries' time.

So it does us good to laugh once and a while. At ourselves, at our endeavors, and at what we know about what we do not know.

I will try to make future project-related entries as irreverent as possible, in the spirit of scientific discovery and, more accurately, scientific honesty.

Hence my desire to read lots of Pratchett in the near future. Elements of fantasy writing, I believe, can only assist the dissemination of science.

Measuring in a Continuum

How do I begin to explain the field work that goes on in my lab?

In essence, our goals are to characterize the physics of surf zone and nearshore processes. We hypothesize that waves have a large impact on both. For that matter, so do currents. And the interactions between waves and currents. Which mean tides become important in many cases. And don't even get me started on what happens when you throw silt-laden water into the mix...

I guess I should begin as simply as possible. So this post is going to focus on how we go about measuring some basic flow conditions in a nearshore environment. We are going to ignore sediment, bathymetry (i.e. water depth, mapping the sea floor), silt-laden water, significant changes in salinity and temperature, and anything else that goes beyond good ol' waves and currents meeting in shallow water.

This still leaves us with a lot to cover. So let's get to it.

In the last post, I gave the short version of my graduate project. I mentioned that my lab conducts field experiments to gather (as) accurate (as instruments will allow) data to understand how storms, waves and currents cause an inlet to migrate. I also mentioned that I use this data to validate a numerical model which also tracks how the inlet migrates.

Why do I need both data and model?

In an ideal world, field data would give us all of the answers. Because it is, in fact, as close to real life as you can get, field work can best approximate what happens when every variable imaginable impacts our system and moves the inlet. A model, by necessity of computation and limitations in our physical understanding, has to simplify a lot of the dynamics to calculate what is happening (or has happened, or might happen...more on that later). Fieldwork, in essence, extracts measurements directly from what we want to study. It is the only experimental tool we have to capture real world phenomena which keep every good fluid mechanist and climate scientist up at night.

The problem is that fieldwork is hard. And really expensive. So you're not likely to get anywhere near as much data as you need to answer some of Life's big fluid physics questions.

Let's give an example to drive the point home.

We use a variety of instruments to measure currents. One typical instrument is an ADCP, or Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler. The name alone gives a sense of what this does: it uses sound waves to measure velocities in the water over a range of depths. It looks something like this:

Mmmm, standard Nortek brochure images of three ADCP configurations.

Now, out of the water these instruments are not going to do very much. If you put them somewhere in water and point the acoustic receivers (black circles in the above picture) the right way, you can get measurements of how fast the current is flowing.

If you simply toss one of these in the ocean, however, you probably will never see it again. The currents it is measuring will sweep it right along and make your PI very sad, having just lost a couple grand in instrument funds.

If, on the other hand, you put this thing on a large, weighted plate at the seafloor, or mount it on a long pole which you then jam into the seafloor (the pole, not the ADCP), you have a good chance at being able to come back and find the thing again when you want the data. Or when it runs out of batteries.

The fact that the instrument remains in one place at all times means that it is an Eulerian measurement device. It can only monitor the water right above it, so you get a single depth profile at a point in space over your deployment time.

If you want to know what the current fields look like over a larger area (say, the entire inlet system), you need to deploy multiple ADCPs at different locations and pray that nothing exciting is happening anywhere you have not placed an instrument. The issue is that if something exciting is happening somewhere you are not measuring, you will probably never know.

Another issue, often overlooked in typical physical oceanography classes, is the deployment of said instruments. How do these things get jammed into the bottom of the seafloor?

Divers. Yup.

In my lab, people take the instruments down to 7 meters (~21 feet) or so depth, and then wrestle them into whatever sediment has decided to act the part of the seafloor for that day (and, yes, this can change). Of course, when you are throwing people overboard with an expensive instrument, you want to make sure that both they (primarily) and the instrument (secondarily) come out unharmed. This limits your deployment sites. A really interesting place with high currents is hazardous.

Katama, thankfully, has a fairly predictable tidal schedule. In fact, last summer our divers had all of 15 minutes of slack tide to get things in the water before 2 m/s currents swept them out to sea.

And you thought your work had strict deadlines.

The field team members who hang out with the grad students in my lab are (thankfully) incredibly competent at their job. They are divers, technicians, tenacious, and very dependable to get things done in a safe manner. I am fairly certain I would be too frightened to attempt some of the deployment techniques they come up with to get my instruments in the water. The best I can do is make sure I do not put them in a particularly dangerous spot, and to make sure that they have all of the equipment they need to get the job done safely.

Speaking of equipment, there is more where the ADCPs came from.

Boat which can carry an assortment of instruments, divers, slackers, and occasionally one dog.

We have several different instruments which measure, in addition to currents

PAROS, or pressure gages which measure the depth of water above the sea floor

Another stock photo, alas -- I do not seem to have many of these in action. AWAC (Acoustic Wave and Current profiler)

The trifecta of waves, currents, and pressure provide a thorough picture of what is happening at any given location in the Katama system. Locations like these:

Yes, this is how we plan field deployments. With large maps and pumpkin stickers.

We choose different locations each year based on results from the previous year and what the model suggests might be interesting spots. I've had the luxury of returning to the same area again and again to reconfigure instrument locations for maximum spacial coverage. Not many scientists get this option, which is another hitch when it comes to getting useful field measurements.

In essence, fieldwork boils down to safety, funding, a great field crew, and competent decisions made by the scientists running the deployment. All of these need to come together to gather a useful data set, but even when they do there is no guarantee everything will go as planned.

Despite the difficulties, fieldwork can be incredibly rewarding. Three years of deploying instruments in and around Katama Bay have yielded a fascinatingly complex picture of how the system works. My model helps to fill in some of the spacial and temporal gaps in our data, but the measurements alone give a sense of how this system behaves.

More on that...later. I need to go an finish a paper first. And I have not even begun to explain what you can do with field techniques that move, instead of staying in one place like all of the instruments mentioned above.

Indeed, it gets more interesting. I see I have a lot to cover in the near future on this thing.

Where has all the beach gone?

It's been a while, hasn't it.

I have excuses! Qualifying exams (passed!), thesis proposal (also passed!), life (grade pending)...but none of these seem quite appropriate. I've been busy, yes, but so have most people. And I realized today, at the end of the semester, that I've actually been doing research worth sharing.

It's time to finally tell you what I do for a living (if, indeed, grad students are allowed this "living" thing).

I study coastal processes, specifically how waves and currents influence sediment transport. To get a sense of what that means, I give you the following illustration:

Hurricane Sandy occurred in Fall 2012. It hit the eastern coast of the United States with surprising force, severely damaging the shorelines, beaches, and accompanying properties of many states. The picture above shows one instance of damage along the New Jersey coastline, in which a large chunk of sand was removed by the storm, along with it any house unfortunate enough to be built there.

How did one storm move that much sand? Where did all of that sand go, and is it ever coming back? My research works to answer, in a slightly tangential manner, both of these questions.

Sandy, the Aerial View.

Hurricanes are to be reckoned with -- mainly because they enhance natural forces already present in a given water environment. With a hurricane comes bigger waves, stronger winds, faster currents, storm surge (think a wall of water piling up on the coast)...when they combine in just the right way, as they did in Sandy, they can generate enough energy to loosen and transport a whole lot of sand away from its bed.

Currents and waves move sediment on their own, also, typically over longer time scales than a couple of days (more like decades, or even centuries). They've been slowly changing the shape of our coastlines for all of human memory, and yet exactly how they do this remains a mystery. The science behind sediment transport in general, actually, is still a problem society needs to grapple with. We know waves and currents move sand, but we don't know enough to be able to predict their effect.

That is where I come in.

My lab works to monitor the flow conditions (waves, currents) in the surf zone. If you've ever been to a beach, you know what the surf zone looks like -- it's the place closest to the dry part of the beach where all of the waves are breaking. If you've ever had a wave crash on you, you know that breaking waves carry a lot of energy (that stuff can hurt!). That energy gets transferred to the mean flow in the surf zone, which in turn can do all sorts of delightful things like move sand (which is why water in the surf is often brown-colored), generate alongshore currents, stir the water, and basically make a mess of things.

The Surf Zone: where the white stuff begins

This "mess" is one of the reasons the surf is an exciting place to work. Unfortunately, I am not quite that shallow yet in my research. See, I take my lab's data and use it to validate numerical models which help me study the forcings behind sediment transport, both in the surf and in slightly deeper water. The surf is such a complicated area that I cannot be confident yet in my model's ability to capture it.

Instead, I'm looking at about 2-7 m water depth for my current research. My "lab's data" is also a poor choice of words to describe how I figure out how things should behave in the real world. This "lab" is actually more my lab group, which includes a wonderful field crew of divers, technicians, and grad students. The "data" is actually more measurements that we make using a number of different instruments, usually stuck to the bottom of the surf zone and left to ping in the water for a couple of months.

The Lab, exhausted after a day in the field.

The field site I am interested in at the moment is located in Martha's Vineyard, MA (not a bad place to get to during the summer, I have to admit). Though my lab group could have chosen numerous environments to study waves-currents-sediment transport, such as the places in New Jersey devastated by Sandy, we picked this particular site because of one particular interesting feature:

The Island of Martha's Vineyard, with key locations outlined in orange and black.

The body of water on the eastern side of the island (right in the picture above) connects the Vineyard Sound in the north (top) to the Atlantic Ocean in the south (bottom). Most of the time. Most of the time. As you can see from the series of images outlined in black, the connection between the Bay and the Ocean is not always present. Nor is it always the same size, or even in the same position.

In fact, this transient inlet is what makes the Martha's Vineyard site so interesting to study. The inlet breaches every couple of decades or so when a large storm system comes through (hello hurricanes!). The breach then spends the next 10-15 years migrating to the east, closing again once it reaches the eastern bank of Katama Bay.

This migration cycle is ideal for sediment transport study in part because it occurs on relatively short time scales, and in part because it is such a strong transport signal that you can begin to quantify it from Google Earth images alone. One of the largest barriers in sediment transport field research is obtaining accurate measurements with sufficient spacial and temporal resolution to actually say something useful about how sand is moving. It is my hope that by looking at a relatively obvious signal, and combining some remote observations/some gritty in-the-field measurements of whatever we can get our hands on with a numerical model, I can use this field site to understand large scale sediment transport better.

How do we get these field measurements? Why can't the model just do everything alone? How feasible is this project, really?

And, most importantly:

When a hurricane next hits the East Coast, how is the shoreline going to change? Where is the sand going, and where is it coming from?

All this and more as I (hopefully) continue with more frequent updates.

DUCKLINGS (or: TA-ing undergrad fluid mechanics)

I was signed up to take a teaching seminar this past semester, of the "read papers on teaching theory and discuss" variety. Within the first week, I dropped it.

Why, you ask? Well, it might have been a useful class. But there is nothing like learning from experience. And this past semester, I was given the chance to TA for one of the best professors I had as an undergraduate. There was no way I was turning down this offer.

Not to say I was not hesitant to take on this responsibility. The TA before me was essentially a superstar, which meant I had a lot to live up to. I was also still taking my own classes and trying to make progress on my research in the same semester. Your typical, daunting semester in grad school, right?

But I digress.

This blog post is going up now, of all times, for two reasons.

One: subject evaluations just came out, and apparently my ducklings appreciated my efforts to help them learn regardless of how dubious those efforts seemed to me.

Two: I am finally in a position to reflect on the semester. The class is over, my other classes are over, and my research requires a couple of long simulations that leave me thumb-twiddling for at least ten minutes at a time.

A caution, however. As I said, I chose the practical instead of the theoretical when it came to teaching students this past semester. My experience is, well, mine, and may not match popular wisdom about education these days. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

So what is an undergrad fluid mechanics course, and what exactly does a TA do for this class?

My responsibilities were clear from the beginning. I was in charge of constructing the problem sets, checking the work of the problem set graders, holding office hours for the students, and leading two 2hr recitations a week. I was also expected to be at every lecture.

I expanded on this list based on my experience in this class as an undergrad. I gave the students my email and promised to answer any questions they had about the course as quickly as possible. I occasionally held extra office hours on weekends if I thought the students needed it. I also was available to meet with students one-on-one if they had conflicts with my office hours.

The structure for the class, on top of all of this, was straightforward: three 1hr lectures a week, two 2hr recitations at the end of the week, and two midday office hours before the recitations.

And the students learned fluid mechanics. I'm not going to tell you exactly what about fluid mechanics they learned, because I'd need about three months worth of a blog post. And I am done with this whole teaching thing for the foreseeable future. I can recommend textbooks if you are interested, though. Just ask!

In the meantime, the important stuff.





What did I learn from teaching students?

0) They are ducklings, not students. It's an endearing term a friend of mine began using for his mechanical engineering students, and it definitely makes these guys easier to deal with.

1) I am a nice TA. An unusually nice TA. Apparently offering extra weekend office hours and being incredibly communicable by email is not standard. At the time, I did not think I was overly available to my students; I had my own classes and research to take care of. However, I made an effort to act like the TA I would want to have. I'd like to think I have an understanding of the anxieties that can be spawned by this particular class; I worked to minimize them for my ducklings.

They definitely appreciated this. A lot of the comments I got on my evaluations appreciated my quick response to emails and willingness to meet outside of class.

Why isn't this a universal practice? There is definitely a limit to how available a TA should be, but why aren't more TA's responsive with email? It is the age of internet communication; office hours alone are not sufficient to answer all student's questions.

2) Office hours during the day are useless. I only had mine scheduled as such at the behest of my professor. But no one comes to office hours during lunch. I wish I could have changed them. Evening or weekends would be much better.(If you are a grad student reading this, don't even pretend you have a life which would make this kind of scheduling hard. You are a grad student. Get a life after you finish your PhD).

3) I am very empathetic with my students. Oftentimes this meant my professor had to reign me in -- I tried to self-regulate my availability and my willingness to do whatever I could for them to help them learn, but occasionally my professor had to flat-out forbid me from going overboard.

I probably should have self-scheduled time for individual meetings with students. Regular time, unchanged from week to week. It would have kept me a bit more reasonable with the whole "meet with me whenever" business.

4) Students are ducklings, but not children. They can think for themselves, and they have to put significant effort into the class to get anything out of it.

This should be made as clear as possible from the beginning. Those who do not get the message...actually, this is a tough one for me. I was never clear how to treat the students who blatantly did not try to understand the class material. I wanted to shake them back and forth, as if this would impart to them that they needed to give something to get something out of the class. But I had the oddest feeling that this would have been inappropriate. Just a little.

Any thoughts on this would be most appreciated--the "lazy duckling" is something I struggled with all semester.

5) Do not allow laptops in lecture. Ever. They just distract students.

6) Traditional lecture format can be fine, but it needs to be kept short. Do not go over time every damn lecture. My professor did this a lot, and you could just see the ducklings' switch off the second the clock struck noon and they had to be at their next class.

7) The absolutely most helpful thing a TA can do for their students is act like a translator for the professor. Pare the lectures down to the bare essentials, give students a framework for the concepts learned in class. This was the goal of my recitations, and according to my ducklings it worked well.

One duckling commented that they would have appreciated it if I had typed up the frameworks presented in recitation, but I figured that this was the benefit of actually coming to recitation. If you were fine with the material, you could skip the recitation. If you were not, you got something extra out of it.

And that is it. The entire semester, boiled down into seven key lessons. No psycho-analysis here, no suggestions on the best teaching style. Just an idea of what a TA should be doing. My personal teaching style, mind you, is something I have never carefully examined (no one has ever filmed me giving a recitation, for instance). I should probably do that sometime soon. But the general approach, I think, is to be genial and friendly with the students during class. Speak loudly and clearly, have your talk organized, toss in a couple of jokes to wake people up, do not be afraid to cold-call, and write legibly on the board.

I will miss my ducklings. They were all wonderfully intelligent and hard-working (well, for the most part ^^). I am glad I got the chance to teach them this semester, and I hope they got something from it.

Steel Bridges -- the weird way

I am working on two things at the moment. One is a coastal wave model that often makes me feel like a blind astronomer. When it works, it is wonderful, but when it doesn't I spend weeks poking around trying to figure out why it is hiccupping. Akin to sticking your hand in a black box of spagetti, trying to ferret out the one strand of angel hair pasta.

The other is something I do in my spare time, when it exists. It has absolutely nothing to do with waves and fluid mechanics, so I don't think it will be featured in this blog just yet. I need to be more comfortable with my progress on it, anyway.

However, seeing as it is pasta-black-box time in my research once again, I think I will take this opportunity to write about something else completely unrelated to coastal research--a finished project I constructed in my senior year.

I built a steel-chain compression walking bridge.

It was one of those school projects which could have been made to meet spec with some 2x4's and a couple of screws, easy. But my senior design class was all about making things harder for no good reason.

So, yes, we could have made an arch bridge out of wood. And it would have worked just fine, spanning 10 feet and being over 3 ft off the ground with ease. But why do that when you can do something completely crazy, and build an arch bridge out of traditional tension elements?

Because learning to weld. And making crazy mechanisms to avoid as many calculations as possible.

In short, because fun.

Prototyping. With paperclips.

Basically, the original idea was to hang the chain and weld it into place, capturing a natural and perfect arch shape.

Compression testing for different link sizes.

Turns out hanging over ten feet of chain in the lab and leaving it until we felt like welding was not going to be an option. So we decided to weld individual segments straight and then piece them together. 

Our janky weld set-up. But, hey, behind the appropriate screen!

 

Partly welded chain, partly not. We left one link free for each straight segment, so we could...

 

Hang the chain length between a ladder and a doorframe and weld each joint together? Not planned at the last minute. Nope.

 

Securing the ladder. Steel chain is heavy, man.

 

This actually was not overkill. By a long shot.

At some point we had to deal with the deck. Unlike the chain arch, this took all of two hours. I am really comfortable working with wood thanks to non-academic projects in undergrad.

 

The two completed arches! Now to put everything together...

 

 

We needed to support the endload somehow. So we were lazy -- well, mainly pressed for time -- an basically tacked on some 4x4's on the ends

Which made the arch structure completely useless. See? I said at the beginning that the design specs could be met with nothing more than some wood and screws. 

Having proved that to ourselves, we decided we might as well be all in or nothing. So we went back to weld eight more compressive elements for the ends of the bridge and to brace the joints of each arch.It meant several more hours in lab, and lots of time readjusting the design and angles of every new element, but it was worth it.

Testing day. We definitely had the easiest set-up. Just planted the thing on the ground.

Loading the bridge with concrete blocks. The goal was 2000 lbs without failure.

 And, almost there...it passed the 2000 lb distributed load test with ease. Less than an 1/8'' deflection. Barely measurable.

Also, as it turns out, holds five point loads quite nicely. 

I think the bridge is currently the desk of some civil engineering professor. Rather fitting.

The bridge testing day was by far one of the best days my senior year. Building something is an accomplishment. I realized that day that all of the hard work, backtracking, and flexibility needed to complete a project well was worth the trouble. You cannot schedule everything ahead of time, for certain (as much as I would like to pretend otherwise).

Also, I realize that mechanical engineering majors must have all of the fun all of the time, if they get to build things their entire undergraduate career. I take small satisfaction in the thought that they will not be building bridges, though--and certainly not ones that have no business existing.

Yup, I'm still alive

If anyone has been reading this, you may have noticed that I stopped updating early last semester (I'm a grad student, I think in terms of academic years).

This is not by accident. Semesters eat my life, just in general. It is difficult to justify doing "frivolous" things that my advisor or professors will never see. Heck, I'm still shocked /you/ are reading this.

However, that is no excuse for my failure to update during winter break, or even before classes in January. So, the way I see it, you are owed at least two more entries to this thing before summer begins.

Before I officially begin either of those entries, however, I wanted to explain the real reason I have not been keeping up with this blog, especially during the winter. Last semester, a lot of things changed for me. I stayed in roughly the same geographic location, but I became a new kind of student with different responsibilities and a wildly different living situation.

My world basically flipped upside down without my approval. Adjusting takes time, and doing good work while adjusting is completely possible (especially if you are as stubborn as I am), but takes a nontrivial amount of effort. Occasionally this means ignoring things. Occasionally it means sacrificing things. But it had to happen, and I am hopefully close to righting my world (or reorienting what I consider to be "up"...metaphorical gravity is a funny thing).

Additionally, I realized that I did not feel like chronicaling old projects in detail on this thing. It is a good exercise, sure, but that's why I have a lab notebook. I find it dull, and I can only imagine how a reader feels about it.

Therefore, I plan to revive this blog during the spring semester in a tentatively new direction. Excrutiatingly detailed projects, written like a science paper, just won't cut it anymore. Instead, I have a couple of new topics I hope to get in written form in the near future--/concise/ written form, mind you.

The candidates are:

- welded chain steel bridge (chain as a compressive element! The one project my senior year I felt proud of)

- how to choose an advisor (part II! With nuts!)

- waxing eloquently about the oceans (I gave two talks last semester about this, and only further realized my passion for keeping our world in some semblance of working order)

- Teaching (fluid mechanics, what else? I have ducklings now!)

- Grad projects (?? Let us be honest, I have no idea how much of what I currently do can be published casually in a blog. Name of the game in science).

So. Hold me to at least two of the above topics and I will consider myself to have made up for December and January.

In the meantime. Things change. Hence the title of this blog ("fluid" archive. Get it? Get it? Poke.) I'll try to keep this at least moderately active depsite all of the craziness of real life.