Saturday, December 18, 2010

One great use of words...

My holiday present to you: Christmas carols played entirely on iPads and iPods from the iBand.  And if you prefer your music to be accompanied by marching, enjoy this marching band kickoff.

I love when meshes show up in the art world.  This sculpture of a tetrahedral volume mesh has a certain aesthetic appeal despite the fact that from a CFD standpoint it's an awful mesh.

It's time for Fun with Words, Episode 25, in which we debunk word myths like the one that says using Xmas instead of Christmas is a way to take Christ out of the holiday.  What you may not know is that the X in Xmas is really the Greek letter chi, the first letter in the word Χριστός which means Christ.

And now Fun with Letters: an animated monogram of the alphabet

The data is over a decade old but the result is still disturbing: half of U.S. adults are virtually illiterate.  (Don't forget what they say: statistics are like a bikini - what they reveal is interesting, but they conceal what's most important.)

Woman delivers baby in MRI.

More fun art from etherbrian: sweet bacon dreams, a bacon-themed icon set.

  • Crunchyard (a great name for a rock band, to steal from Dave Barry) offers "engineering software simulation service over the internet on a pay per use basis" including OpenFOAM. (At least they didn't overuse "in the cloud.")
  • Or if you prefer your OpenFOAM to be GPU accelerated, look at the SpeedIT toolkit.
  • Apollo 13 astronaut James Lovell and flight director Gene Kranz will headline SolidWorks World to be held 24-26 January 2011 in San Antonio.
  • Caedium can now create high quality movies of your CFD simulation results.
  • Enjoy CFdesign's 2010 holiday video.
  • The Linux Foundation
  • Symscape's December 2010 newsletter is now online.
  • CFdesign folks share their thoughts on CAD-integrated or CAD-embedded CFD.

Posterous' new group feature makes it a nice collaboration tool for small business. (Posterous is a blogging by email tool.  I'm gonna have to make me an account now.)  LinkedIn provides a list of the top 10 overused phrases on resumes.  #2 Innovative.  I suppose if you were truly innovative you'd document that in other ways.  IMO the main point of this list is to stay away from subjective, qualitative language.  (Now going to check my resume.)  Need some fun Twitter-looking icons?  Look no further than Tweetle.  From the "because you can" department: vmail, a vim interface to Gmail.   How to test your web site's content and how to prevent confusion on your contact page.

The must-see site of the week: the MPM Liquid Demo.  Try to stop playing with it, I dare you. 

Marketing success of the week: the makers of Hot Tamales and other candy sent their sales team to Fargo, North Dakota instead of Hawaii when they didn't make their sales quota.  The result was a huge amount of national publicity for their brand.

This list of the top 50 industrial engineering blogs doesn't have the narrow focus the name implies because it includes project management and PLM.  I think I follow 5 of the 50.  Sage is open source mathematics software with a mission to create a free alternative to Matlab and others.  Gizmodo's list of the most popular free Windows downloads of 2010 includes CCleaner which is the only one I've ever used (or even heard of).  Explania is the home of animated explanations of topics ranging from "How to avoid a stomach ache" to "What is Twitter?"

Believe it or not, these works of art were created by students in a CAD system.

Not your usual year-end article about the CAD business: 2010-2011 in CAD Technology.  When asked what format should be used for long-term storage of CAD data, Deelip always replies 3D PDF or 3DMDezignstuff presents their top 10 posts of 2010.

Just starting a company? Here are 21 really practical tips for startups.  These are things you should do right away to establish your online presence.

Before you spend those Christmas gift cards on new clothes, know that Honeysuckle (bright red-pink) is the color of 2011.  I knew saving all my shirts from 1977 was a good idea.

Just when you thought urinating couldn't be any more fun, along comes Toirettsu, a urinal-based game from Sega where the controls are activated by your stream.  Makes me wonder what it would cost to have one of these installed at home.


Six of the top 20 worst childrens' book covers have something to do with poop, not counting the one about Bill O'Reilly.

Check your pocket change right now because if you have a 1969-S penny with a doubled die mark it could be worth $35,000.  Of the 10 valuable coins, 8 of them feature some sort of die error.

So close but yet so far.  Dudes who can't seem to touch girls while being photographed are featured in Hover Hands.

Desktop Engineering looks at the Evolution of Analysis since 1995 and predicts "In the next decade, increased automation will be the dominating factor as CFD analyses move deeply into the design world."  Back in the day, "customers didn’t like spending extensive time on three necessary tasks outside of the solver: CAD data “cleanup,” meshing the model in proper detail and post-processing steps such as report generation."  Guess what?  They still don't like meshing. 


From Russia comes this infographic of Rockets of the World.

Let's call this "Duck & Cover 2.0" - there's a new strategy for how citizens should deal with a nuclear detonation.  Do away with your Cold War fatalism because a nuke is more survivable than you think.  If you like watching things blow up, check out this test of the projectile that would be launched by a rail gun.  Kinetic energy is a wonderful thing.  Aircraft are cool but so are their houses.  Here are 7 cool aircraft hangars.

 Mr. ET pities the fool who doesn't phone home.

Do not click this link if you're offended by underwear, but what got my attention is Sacfree which is exactly what it sounds like.

What's next?  Advanced Technology Bomber made from Legos?  Air Force builds supercomputer from Playstations.


...is to hide our thoughts.  ~Voltaire

7 comments:

Jim said...

Of the Windows utilities, I've used ccleaner and utorrent (for large downloads - linux distributions that take too long to download at work). Were I to use Windows at home - other than virtual booting for a specific application - several of the other ones would be very useful.

Thanks for the startup links. They'll come in handy.

John said...

Jim:

I'm glad someone is more familiar with those Windows downloads. I tend to use Windows and Office more out of the box.

Chris said...

"Desktop Engineering looks at the Evolution of Analysis since 1995 ..."

Someone has to put a stop or write rebuttals to the gibberish these people effuse.

In an article essentially about the history of CAE, the only CFD they could mention was CD-adpaco and Flow-3D ... I mean common on!

They're written like they're objective articles but they're clearly not and I wish they would make note of that fact.

John said...

Chris:

Welcome to the party! I think this is your first comment on this blog.

A rebuttal implies that what was written was inaccurate. I have the entire magazine right here with me and while I have not read it in detail, I didn't see anything that was false.

Yes, omission of certain facts can skew the impression an uninformed reader takes from the article.

So let me ask you - what's your short list of things that are missing? I am certain you'll cite Fluent as one.

Chris said...

Inaccurate ... maybe not ... misleading ... definitely.

But I think we're splitting hairs here as both have the same - negative - consequence: FUD.

At at bare minimum Fluent should be mentioned. Love it or hate, it arguably had the single largest impact on the CFD from a practical standpoint.

Francis Shivone said...

As always, great content. Thanks.

John said...

Fran, by "great" I assume you mean "I really enjoyed Senor Caca."

It should concern you that my stream of consciousness brain dump seems great.