The quality of mercy is not strained...

"A man doesn't grow a beard, a beard grows a man" and other pearls from The Beardley. NEi Software is celebrating 15 years of supporting Femap, finite element pre- and post-processing software. Finally, science is put to good use to quantity the negative olfactory sensations caused by flatulence.

The bacon dress is truly high fashion, but I recommend against wearing it outdoors on sunny days. The newest way to waste time on the internet is Assembler, a physics-based game about stacking stuff. Tired of having every tweet update your Facebook status? Try Selective Twitter. Stuff about speeches from American Rhetoric.

101 uses for bacon (I'm certain there are more - many, many more.) Read all about the Center for CFD Research at Japan's National Maritime Research Institute. Build sales through referrals with help from the No More Cold Calling blog. Not too far from here, Armadillo Aerospace is trying to win the 2009 X-Prize Lunar Lander Challenge.

The United Steaks of America. From the man who brought you How to Dance Properly, zefrank presents craymachine. Talking to an attractive woman can make a man lose his mind. (Duh.) Ever wonder what's in a TETIN file? SimCosm is a CAE software consultancy. Somebody send this to Brendan.

National Bacon Day was 05 September. (Sorry for the lack of advance notice.) Do not click here. TotalSim is a CFD consultancy. CentaurSoft provides CFD meshing software. See how CFD provides design guidance in this article from Desktop Engineering. The latest pictures from the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope are awesome. Speaking of space, these negative space illustrations are kinda interesting too.

For your calendar:

• ECCOMAS CFD 2010, 14-17 June 2010, Lisbon

FreeFOAM is a fork of OpenFOAM that provides portability to other operating systems. I'm not sure how if at all it's related to CentFOAM. Desktop Engineering provides this analysis of the partnership between ANSYS and SpaceClaim. This video is a cool way to look at Beethoven's 5th. Eight things your dreams may be telling you.


...it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. --William Shakespeare

Nature abhors a vacuum...

The dullest blog in the world. (No comparisons, please.) Daat Research released Coolit v.9. In Mexico? Try Cavendish CFD. In Russia? Try Grid CFD. Learn more about ANSYS Workbench or read ANSYS Advantage magazine. ANSYS announced a new immersed boundary capability. The folks at Moceon claim to have made the first all-hex mesh with 52 million cells for a Formula-1 car using their cheetahSTC technology.

Odes to cured pork: Bacon Haikus. Taitech is developing the Dragon Grid software. Donald Hawken has some grid pictures on his site. The Ocean Modeling Group at Rutgers develops a lot of software including gridpak for orthogonal structured grids. Why shouldn't engineers learn to program in C? Five places to see things blown up real good.

The bacon explosion just sounds delicious. (I mean it sounds like it would taste delicious. I'm sure it just sounds like sizzling meat.) The official web site of marketing guru David Meerman Scott. Cartoon Modern is Amid Amidi's blog about animation in the 50s. Find out what your friends (and enemies) are up to on the interwebs using Spokeo. The official blog of Duarte Design. Interesting speakers often visit Google, now they can visit you too on YouTube's Talks@Google channel.

Will there be bacon in the future? Yes! Panda's Cloud Antivirus is free and uses the cloud for its work so your computer hardly knows it's running. Protovis is a visualization toolkit for JavaScript using SVG. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have developed a really fast, building block approach to fluid dynamics called Modular Bases.

Ever wonder what a molecule looks like up close? Do not read this. CFD for aircraft. CGAL is a computational geometry algorithm library. Can't remember exactly what Followerlap does with Twitter accounts. Hopefully, none of your pictures have been posted to Awkward Family Photos.

Get your next super computer from PSSC Labs. The folks at Social Media Today claim to be the best thinkers on social media. From their Best Practices for Corporate Twittering, "Only 20% or so of your tweets should be related to your company or include a marketing or ‘advertising’ message." With a name like HootSuite, can they really still claim to be the professional Twitter client? The Antikythera mechanism and other unexplained artifacts.

The State Fair of Texas brings us fried butter. Either Stuff White People Like is totally wrong or I am not white because I do not like any of their recent topics (camping, Where The Wild Things Are, Vespa Scooters, Bob Marley, hating people who wear Ed Hardy, Mad Men, moleskin notebooks, and funny tattoos). However, I will give SWPL props for turning me on to doga.

...but we should avoid the temptation to fill the voids with crap.

Truth is like a football...

Teh interwebs was made for stuff like this: a collection of dice. Proof that it doesn't matter how you say it: the preamble to the Constitution done with license plates. Head cheese and other delicacies. Get your Orange on (no, not burnt orange). Cool pictures of airplanes in flight.

Stone Brewing: visit the site, read the blog, drink the beer.

Here's a blast of related product marketing blogs and sites: ProductMarketing.com, Launch Clinic, Buyer Persona, Tuned In (retired), and Web Ink Now. Get on the squirrel bandwagon with the Squirrelizer. Entrepreneur.com offers tips to make you Web Smart. Sign of the apocalypse #38: there's a Twitter conference.

This video shows how to use CFDesign for design (hence the name). SmartFish is an airplane (go figure). CADspan is software from creating 3D printable files from CAD data. You may have to read this a couple times to believe it. The folks at Winkers customize jeans so they wink while you walk. The folks at Gum Alert review Bacon Gumballs.

KFC has introduced the Double Down, a sandwich without bread. (I thought this whole sandwich thing was a solved problem.) It's very fitting that the Humanure Handbook is in the downloads folder. Volcanoes are awesome when seen from space, but be careful while you're looking so one of these lightning jets doesn't shoot up and hit you in the eye.

Usually there's nothing better than monkey actors, but the mouth animations just ain't right. Lancelot Link didn't need no CGI. Why are the number of immaculate innings (3 strike outs on 9 pitches) ballooning this decade? (Not to be confused with 3 pitch innings.) Go the state fair and try some chicken fried bacon and other fried fare.

Super Mario Bros. for the Wii. Hirsute t-shirts. Visualization Library is a C++ middleware for high-performance 2D and 3D graphics applications based on the industry standard OpenGL 2.1, designed to develop portable applications for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X operating systems. They want to demolish the Langley Full Scale Wind Tunnel.

See some of the world's largest foods. (Bigger is better, right?) My favorite is the 288 meter long stuffed cabbage, although I'm certain it's not a good as my grandmother's. Ever wonder how a sewing machine works? Sorry I missed Go Topless Day on 23 August. Odd stuff abounds on the Bits & Pieces blog. The Math Book, 250 milestones in the history of mathematics.

...you can kick it around all day, but in the end it's still round and full. -- Mark Twain

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.