Much Ado about Nothing

Please pardon my lack of posting as of late - life has been somewhat hectic with everyday things, so while there is not much to post about in the very near past, there has been plenty to keep me from posting. Quite ironic, isn't it?

Well, since last post, many moons ago, a few events have occurred, from which I have been prevented from posting about due to the busyness of, you guessed it...

School!

I'm feeling totally blessed again this year. Even though I had to switch classes (I am not only taking classes with "my" senior classmates, but also some Juniors), I've found some great Christian guys to work with in those classes that have just come up from Clark College. I have a lot of classes (15 credits worth, that is), but nonetheless have managed to keep my head above water... so far.

But that's what's been keeping me from posting. Now, what's happened...

Family Camp! I promise to scrounge up some photos from my sisters or other photographers that were there, because, being the un-photographer type that I am, I didn't get any. It was a great time though - we had some neat visitors from California and Arizona, sang hymns quartet-style (even though there were 5 of us), round-the-campfire-style, and in-a-very-echoey-gym-style. We played volleyball, basketball (ok, I was more of a bystander that happened to be standing on the court for that one), Settlers of Catan, pinochle, and so much more. Had some great speakers (on the big screen) that talked about dealing with bitterness, among other things. I always love Family Camp - even though it was a smaller group than years past, we still had a great time!

Next post - Campfires and Candlelight! What I was doing back in the 1840's last Saturday.

WSU-V photo - http://www.salem-news.com/articles/april112007/vet_grant-41107.php

A Post of Firsts

Yes, yes, yes, it’s been a VERY long time since I posted last. However, with school up and running, I’m hoping to settle into the new schedule and allow for posts on Fridays. This post will be a bit of a summary of my summary in terms of “firsts”.

The American Olypmics team took first place in the number of gold medals! (Ok, I had nothing to do with that, but it also helps explain the picture)

This is my first post since June 17.

I had my first engineering internship this past summer, running from May 7 to August 10.

My first paper got accepted to an international ASMEconference, to which I am planning on traveling this November to present its contents. (The SMOC Project worked!)

We had our first guys (dad + bros) weekend traveling to Yellowstone!

I got my first smartphone!... but I had to return it since it was a work phone. L

Hope you all are having a great summer!

Ben

I Want You to Help Me

Joseph had a lot of siblings.

Honestly, he didn't even know all of them. There were some with whom he was very close, some were acquaintances, but the vast majority of them he had never even met. They were all united by a common purpose, despite a few minor differences, and they all lived to serve their Father.

Their Father had adopted them all, snatched from different dangers to come and live with Him in safety. Some had been adopted from as young as five and six, while others had silver hair before the adoption papers had been signed. All had different skills and varying levels of talents in each of those skills. Joseph was not terribly skilled at anything in particular, but he was more learned than a good number of his siblings.

The greatest ongoing project of the family was “the house”. It was an enormous structure that had been worked on for longer than any of the siblings had been alive, and could easily go on for decades, maybe centuries. Father included all of the siblings on it whenever He could.

Joseph was excited to work on the house. At times, Father would even leave entire jobs to him – Joseph had completed electrical circuits in whole rooms of the house, had lumber cut and ready for use when his Father arrived, and could set up or tear down equipment after any job was finished.

But as time went on, the house never seemed to end. Joseph would arrive at home, and Father would be sitting by the door.

“Joseph, would you like to go work on the house?”

If Joseph had had a good day, he would reply “Sure!”, but if he’d had a long or tiring day, he would say “I guess… let me go get ready.” with little or no enthusiasm.

Every day he would come home, and every day Father would be waiting for him.

“Joseph, would you like to go work on the house?”

And Joseph would more and more predictably reply “I guess… let me go get ready.” And as time went on, he was never ready by the time Father had left for work. Joseph would sigh apologetically, and would generally end up wasting what was left of the day.

At this point, whenever Joseph did come to the job site, his work was more foreign to him. He didn’t understand the pattern, and he didn’t always understand his Father’s instructions. As a result, work was slower, and he would always get frustrated. He used this as an excuse whenever he didn’t make it to the site. “It’s always inefficient when I’m around. Father works faster with a different sibling, or even by Himself.”

One day, during a relatively frustrating project, Joseph threw his tools down and raised this point to his Father, who sat down across from the exasperated son.

“Joseph, it is true, I can build this house on my own, and yes, you have siblings that are perhaps more skilled than you. I don’t need you to help Me, but I want you to help me. With this house, not only can it provide shelter for those who need it most, but while you and I work on it, it is where you learn to know me the most, and where you learn to grow the most. I love these times, Joseph, and even on the days where you may not enjoy it, I wouldn’t trade a moment of it.”

The SMOC Project: A Series of Events Which Some May Dub as Laborious, Others as Amazing, and Others Still as Rather Insane – Part II

The email came – that herald of doom that told us a whole semester of work would be thrown away in an instant with no hope for redemption… ok, maybe not that bad in retrospect, but man, we were pretty worried.

So we threw together a game plan – we listed out the experiments we would need, when we could be in the lab, and who was going to do what.

Experiment 1 – dvdt: this experiment had been planned since March, but due to its complexity and continual material failure, it had never occurred. First, one material was too weak. Second, the material was strong enough, but had bad thermal qualities. So, we decided upon a hybrid material that would combine both by fusing the two together. What could go wrong? Well, turns out we needed more material, and wouldn’t you know it, it wouldn’t get here in time (it is now sitting upstairs in my room). 

Experiment 2 – frictionless confirmation:  This experiment should have been pretty cut and dried. Basic equations of kinematics that we learned last year… blah blah blah… we start calculations, and our numbers are off in la-la-land. After banging our head against a table (and a bench, and the wall, and each other), our professor said he would take the data and look at it.

Experiment 3 – T vs. P: We’d already done this experiment… probably gathered over 300 data points. Unfortunately, our data was qualitative instead of quantitative. It wouldn’t be hard to collect quantitative data, but we still were going to have to plot all those points again, and from previous experience, we knew that was going to take a lot of time…

God was really looking out for us those two weeks. There were so many things that could have gone wrong, so much time that needed to be spent that very few of us had. But you know what? God does neat things: He put it into the head of undergrads to spend their precious evenings and weekends in the lab running experiment after failing experiment after experiment; He put it into the head of a graduate student to pull late (as in 1:30 in the morning) and all-nighters; He put it into the head of a professor to stick with the project even when thing weren’t coming together. We are so grateful to Ali and Dr. Xu for their awesome help! We are planning to submit our work to a scientific journal this summer! Wahoo!

And now... to prove just how crazy we were... (In case you needed any proof)

PS - Some of the experiment descriptions are vague, and that's on purpose. I'm not sure how much our prof wants published just yet...

The SMOC Project: A Series of Events Which Some May Dub as Laborious, Others as Amazing, and Others Still as Rather Insane

For any of you who didn’t know, the last two weeks of my life have been relatively swamped… ok, they’ve been really swamped. Whoever said summer was supposed to be relaxing? The last two weeks have been busy due to my new internship at Longview Fibre, and... finishing up the SMOC Project, a research project that me and my buddies have been working on for the past semester, and if the title did not convince you of the many points of view from which the last two weeks of this project may be… well… viewed, allow me to break it down for you in a slight calendar fashion.

Two weeks ago.

All was well. The school year was over, and only one experiment remained to be done. The team needed three major points for the paper. Two of them were completed and checked with the professor for necessary accuracy. The paper wasn’t due until May 25^th, so some evenings in the lab combined with Saturday experiments should be more than enough to finish the last experiment and write up the results.

Nine days ago

With our mindset of relaxation and ease, I received this email from our professor. He’s been helping us a lot from beginning to end, from getting grants to helping open doors in research for us. I was more than shocked up this email showing up in my inbox:

I am really worried about this project. We planned to submit the paper next Friday [A full week before we thought it was due], however we still haven't achieve any meaningful results yet. Usually, three well-presented results are needed for a paper. The [first point you had] is useless… Then we can start to work on other two results - which we have no clue yet.

Is anyone of you willing to work nights and weekends to get the paper done? I can be around any time you want. Otherwise, I am afraid we have to withdraw the paper...Please let me know who can work on this project and when.

Thanks,

After I woke up from my faint, I began to panic: we thought we had two out of three of these points done… and now it seemed we had none. Instantly, my calendar began getting full: I had no free evenings. Not to mention that this was on top of work, which required me to leave home at 6:00, and now I was getting home at about 10:00. I know that this is a normal day for some people, and I now have a great respect for them: I was completely not expecting this type of schedule though… I had no idea if we would make it, but now, we are more than making it… we are now finishing up the final edits, with the paper being submitted to a conference and to a scientific journal... but you'll have to read the next post to find out what happened to get us here...

Part II will be in a few days… now that I have time to post!