There is nothing more unequal...

This IBM article on why engineers should be worried about color reminds me of Tufte's work, and indeed he is referenced. The University of Iowa develops IA-FEMesh, a free software toolkit for generating hex meshes for anatomic models. Here are some downloads for FEAST's preprocessors, Grid3D and DiViSoR. KUBRIX, the CAE mesh generator, is available as a Rhino plug-in. The release notes for modeFrontier v4.1.2.

Avert your eyes or prepare to be offended by This is Photobomb. Mashups from Aggro1. Surchur claims to be able to show you what's popular right now. Or if you're just interested in finding out about yourself, try Personas from the MIT Media Lab. Here's me (I have no idea what it means).


Plan to be in Chicago next summer for the High Lift Prediction Workshop (HiLift). Should I or shouldn't I? Beer glasses from Sam Adams. Concept Flow specialises in the simulation of fluid flow, particle dynamics, droplet dynamics and heat and mass transfer for healthcare and pharmaceutical applications. ANSYS was ranked #33 on the Fortune 100 fastest growing companies list. Senergy Thermal offers ActiveCFD, a way to keep your data center cool by continually running CFD to see how cool your data center is.

Bacon. Fried. Ramen.

...than the equal treatment of unequal people. -- Thomas Jefferson

Being married is not about compatibility...

First they saved the earth from Gargoyle and now Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot are on Facebook. Find experimental data for validating your CFD at the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, IIHR. (Here's a report from folks who have already used some of it.) NVIDIA released CUDA Toolkit and SDK 2.3 for those of you who like to compute using your GPU. More benchmark problems for CFD from FreeCASE. Seth Godin explains why marketing is too important to be left to the Marketing Department. 47 Hats is a blog for startups and microISVs.

One of the most complex animated GIFs I have ever seen: Evolution. Give it an image and ColorSuckr creates a color scheme. Mr. Breakfast brings you all there is to know about Lucky Charms and more at the Cereal Project. Got a cloud of points? Pointools may have the software you need. A battery to power your home? I'd just like one that will power my mouse for longer than 3 weeks. Why drop the price of your CAD software from $999 to $99? Volume! The Center for CFD at George Mason University. GMU's Rainald Lohner presents computational sciences as the third pillar of empirical sciences.

Got a design that will change the world? Enter Desktop Engineering magazine's contest. Three companies with software products for computer-aided geometry design and modeling: IntegrityWare, HarmonyWare, and Solid Modeling Solutions. TrueGrid is a mesh generator and pre-processor for CFD and FEA analysis. Integrated Engineering Software writes CAE software for electromagnetics.

A simple tutorial for Pro/E. Engineering management pearls from Mackie Assoc. The official web site of ELP founding member, one-time King Crimson lead singer, and solo artist Greg Lake.

Time to update your calendar.

• 6th International Conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics, 12-16 Jul 2010, St. Petersburg, Russia

...as much as it's about dealing with incompatibility. -- Leo Tolstoy

Underwear is like humility...

Why bother working out when all it takes to get ripped is to Get Ript? First there were underpants for your hands (Handerpants), now there are panties for your feet (Footundeez). Where might this profusion of undergarments end? Something this blog needs: George Washington's rules of civility. ("#7. Do not off your cloths in presence of others." Is it OK to blog while wearing only Handerpants and Footundeez?)

Mentor Graphics' David Tatchell blogs about 40 years in the CFD business. Be sure to visit the Museum Place development in Fort Worth's Cultural District for dining, shopping, and entertainment. See how folks are building user interfaces on this page about Qt in Aerospace. CastNet is a is a modeling and meshing environment for OpenFOAM and other software. Discretizer is a free mesh program for CFD.

My next Linux will be Hannah Montana. Not only are there plans for a Alien prequel, Ridley Scott is set to direct. How to make your scientific poster stand out from the socializing, free food, and free drink. Mind numbing in its machine gun banality, PingWire is a live feed of every photo posted to Twitter. Dassault Systemes announced that 3DVIA.com is now going to post models in 3DXML and COLLADA formats.

For your event calendar:

• 20th Annual HP CAE Symposium, 01 Oct 2009, Detroit
• Open Source CFD International Conference, 12-13 Nov 2009, Barcelona
• 2010 Parallel CFD Conference, 17-21 May 2010, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
• 5th Int'l Symposium on Computational Wind Engineering, 23 May 2010, Chapel Hill, NC
  
• Conference on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES), 15-18 Apr 2010, Scottsdale

Know where your ships are at all times with live ship maps from MarineTraffic.com. More for the map-obsessed: find all the surviving SR-71 Blackbirds. Tips on web usability. Here's a PDF cheat sheet for HTML 5. Country codes got you confused when dialing internationally? No worries, help is here. 100,000 icons all in one place for your graphics pleasure.

How well do you think a new taco joint with a logo combining elements of Texas Tech and UT is going to do in College Station (actually, Bryan)? Good luck Rockin' Taco. Touchable holography and other cool interface technologies from SIGGRAPH. The folks at Cactus Code present their CFD toolkit.

...essential, but indecent if shown.

The only reason for time...

Roman Lygin blogs about programming and geometry modeling at Open CASCADE notes. Ever forget why you bookmarked a site? That's how it is with me and AIM@SHAPE. The folks who write MiniCAD have started creating their own versions of Gridgen's tutorials. That's a good thing. Here's a site all about the high performance finite element software FEATFLOW. All the benchmark cases for CFL3D. OpenFOAM v1.6 was released. It is now possible to calculate with reasonable precision the exact location of flow separation in certain conditions and to visualize the geometry of its introduction into free flow as a 3D isosurface.

...is so everything doesn't happen all at once. -- Albert Einstein

But sometimes it still does.

Only when the clock stops...

If you like OpenFOAM but wish it was more portable, maybe FreeFOAM is for you. Texas A&M became the first public university in the country to offer phone applications via TAMUmobile. I am tempted to say that only someone from Japan would combine fine art with the sophomoric photocopying of the buttocks to produce the iBum. Speaking of Fine art (pun intended), this limited edition, signed print of the Three Stooges can be yours for only $175.

Tools for safe computing: KRC's anti-spyware tutorial, about the Firefox search redirect, and some advice from 247fixes.com. Want to be a programmer? Here's how. If you're a web developer, some of these online presentations on AJAX, PHP, design, and other topics may interest you. Ever wonder what all those things are on the back of your computer? Let the mystery be revealed.

Your bacon is in my chocolate! Want your own personal clean-air zone? Check out the Humanair Air Purifier. Syfy. Syfy? Really? Is rebranding really gonna catapult them to the top of the basic cable charts? Seems to me that job #1 would be not showing movies that suck, like Mega Snake. The Marfa Lights are a ghostly paranormal phenomenon or headlights. Are you hungry? Have some bacon.

Stylus magazine offers this look back at Brian Eno's Ambient Series (1978-1982) , music as ignorable as interesting. A Twitter expose. Twitillating. Are your interns WINterns? Our are, at Little Debbie's InternHero.com. Got CAD you want to exchange? Try the aptly named CAD Exchanger. Generate your own custom Scrabble layout. The Enabling Technology Lab at the Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham has some interesting software projects underway including MiniCAD and MEGG3D. Concepts NREC provides a lot of CFD software for turbomachinery.

From the calendar...

• International Conference on Applied Modeling & Information Security Systems, Birmingham, AL, 08-10 Oct 2009
• Open Source CFD International Conference, Barcelona, Spain, 12-13 Nov 2009

Sure, why not. Jump on the Sprouts bandwagon. Simmetrix has released new parallel meshing software. Arcos provides interactive marketing services. Folks at Rutgers generate grids using gridpak. From the good news, bad news department: Good news, there's a blog about grid generation. Bad news, it hasn't been updated since Nov. 2006.

More proof that all the good ideas have been taken: Handerpants.

...does time come to life. -- William Faulkner

Women speak two languages...

As we all know, ladies love a guy with awesome kitchen appliances (think banana hanger). However, I'm not sure these appliances will add to your mojo (although the banana handle is awesome). Please no comments on the banana motif. As Freud said, sometimes a banana is just a banana.

As an admitted anal-retentive, I am fascinated with time and clocks. Here's my latest find: timedrain. Fall fashions are now hitting the runway; don't get caught hiding your nuts in last years duds: squirrel fashion.

Evernote helps you capture and remember everything. And it's free. But I still can't figure out what it is. Hopefully you're running Firefox 3.5 by now which means that web sites you visit can use @font-face to enhance typography on the web. Neil Davidson has a blog.

Event calendar:

• 16th annual Tcl/Tk Conference, 30 Sep - 02 Oct 2009, Portland
• NUMECA's Worldwide User Meeting, 17-18 Nov 2009, Brussels

Celebrate the 40th anniversary of the lunar landing with We Choose the Moon, a real-time interactive recreation of the Apollo 11 mission. Or if you're an ignorant, freaked-out whack job you can wallow in these conspiracy theories.

A new journal for computational fluid dynamics: CFD Letters. Optimal Solutions joined Altair's Hyperworks Community. Via Slashdot we find this story about OpenBSD's release process and why it's good. A lot of airplanes have engines hanging below the wings but true innovation is putting the engine inside the wing, as the folks at Propulsive Wing have done.

The internet knows why you're afraid: DOOMWATCH. Hard working interns of America - go from intern to WINtern with Little Debbie.

...one of which is verbal. --William Shakespeare

Now is the winter of our discontent...

How could you not like beers named Double Dead Guy and Arrogant Bastard? MSC.Software agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm. The question is, now what? A little company in California is taking on Seattle giant Microsoft with a new computer operating system called Chrome OS. Who do they think they are? The butter bell ain't no musical instrument; it's validation. Did I really graduate from RRHS 30 years ago? Someone's list of favorite freeware.

If you have never seen Al Pacino's award-winning film Looking for Richard, I highly recommend it.

...made glorious summer by this son of York. -- William Shakespeare, Richard the Third