Update on Classes

Now that I have entered my third week of classes, I have a somewhat better grasp on what they will actually teach me.

I have dropped the machine tools class. I could not negotiate the final exam time, and it would have meant either staying a week longer in Germany or taking a test jet-lagged at my house.

Multibody Dynamics is proving highly...messy. That really shouldn't surprise me. We are going over kinematics right now, which has partial derivatives, matrices, and sinusoidal functions out the wazoo. If I did not have access to the slides I would never manage to scribble down all the equations in real time.

Basics of Machine and Structure Dynamics seems like MBD's baby brother. It establishes...well...the basics. Creating simplified models, oscillation differential equation set up, etc. I did get to finally scratch a mental itch I've had for years. I was always told that the damping term represented friction and was proportional to velocity. However, dynamic friction between two dry surfaces is constant, not velocity dependent. It turns out that the velocity proportional term represents viscious damping like pneumatic pistons on doors while dry friction requires a different differential equation and creates a different behavior. The world makes slightly more sense to me now!

Electromechanical Drive Systems may be my favorite technical class this semester. I cannot say how many times I have needed/wanted to determine the dimensions of connecting components to produce a specific motion. Now I have some tools in my arsenal to replace the guess-and-check and pseudo-geometry I'd been using.

Technical Textiles intimidates me much less now than it did due to finally getting the script. I love having a text to refer to. Otherwise, my notes are filled with question marks and ellipses that I cannot resolve. Better yet, the professor brought in a whole bunch of example fibers and wires last Friday. I got to break off a piece of gold wire and find out what woven basalt feels like.

Discourse Ethics is going well-ish. I fell into the minority group that actually did the reading for class last week, and the first section made sense for the most part. The second section however...let's just say that the guy's dating profile could read :

"I like long walks on the beach, which it should be noted do not necessarily include sand, nor can sand be excluded, which one might quantify in reference to the lengths of my, or my sources, sentences, meaning that a long walks is validated as long when in the course of the walking and speaking at an ordinary, or more accurately average, speed, I am able to utter all of five sentences, though of course..."

In Intro to Philosophy, we have gone over a few citation rules and then dug into attacking the text we'd read in class. I do so love to poke holes in arguments. Far easier than actually making them..

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