I fried up some chicken with some pepper and some extra salt to counter the rice (according to Marcus instructions), then I put some cellophane wrap in a cup and put the rice in there, made a sort of cup out of the rice and then put the chicken in the middle.

I pulled up the plastic wrap and pressed everything into a ball and then put it in the fridge.

Today during one of the breaks in school I ate it, and it tasted really good, so I’m going to make more! After about 3 hours in school I usually get really hungry so this is a really cheap way (it cost maybe like 30 yen to make one of these balls and you actually get pretty full from one or two) to not be hungry for the last lesson!

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Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Tomorrow I’ll hopefully be buying a camera so you’ll get some pictures and nice videos and stuff in the future.

Also: I like apples, but they’re fucking expensive. Check out Eemmas post on the topic.

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I did fail my first exam ever though, it was on Sustainable Development. We got a list of articles of about 70 pages total and the teacher just said “Know this.” The first time around I studied it all very carefully, put down as much time as I usually do an exam and went to the exam, answered every question and felt pretty confident about it. I got back the result; 27.5 points, 32 was required to pass.

I was dumbfounded, absolutely utterly speechlessly amazed. How the hell did that happen? I checked out the exam and I had answered wrong on some stuff but.. some stuff was just utterly confusing.

Today I got to re-do the exam, the teacher was kind enough to schedule the re-exam for today instead of August because I’m going to Japan so I wouldn’t be able to do it in August.

So yesterday I read through most of the papers again. The first time around I pretty much knew it all by heart and this time around I just read up on the same stuff and got back some of the knowledge I had a few weeks ago when I wrote it the first time. I didn’t study anything else, I didn’t memorize more of it, just repeated the same stuff. I wanted to do more, but she had given us that list and nothing else so I didn’t really know what else I could do.

I went in to the exam today and answered every question, felt exactly the same as before, the test was at the same “difficulty level”. This time I did a preliminary point calculation, and according to myself; worst-case was getting 27 points, best case was getting 39 points. I handed it in and she graded it right away (also nice of her). Turns out, I got 47 points this time! The maximum was 53.

What? I have no more knowledge and I get a little under twice as many points?! How can that be? Well, according to me, that is the text-book example of a bad test. I have given this course some pretty scathing (but constructive) reviews, and I can’t express in words how pissed off I have been at both the course, the course material and the teachers.

This course is, summed up: Useless and random. I have learned nothing and every single piece of the course have been completely random whether you passed or not.

This course has taught me one thing though:

My life is a quest to get away from useless and random.

That’s why I chose engineering in the first place, this is the first course I’ve ever felt this way about, normally engineering is scientific, pragmatic and it’s about understanding; not memorizing. I think that’s why I like startups and small companies so much. I know that useless and random exist everywhere in life, but it seems like they (startups and small companies) get to focus a lot more, they get to avoid a lot of the useless and random that big companies have to put up with during their day. I really, really hate useless and random.

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Abstract

In this report we use Matlab and CALFEM to study the temperature distribution over time on a plastic mold injection tool. We also calculate the plane stress caused by external forces as well as thermal stress for the tool.

The second half of the project was about simulating the stress exerted on the metal that the tool is made up of. The stress caused by the mechanical stresses (the pressure from the plastic and from the force above) look like this:

Mechanical stress

When metal heats up it expands, and since the tool is constrained at certain boundaries and because the heat change is different inside the metal, this will cause further stress in the material, causing thermal stress. And the stress caused by the increased heat will look something like this.

Thermal stress

If you can read Swedish and is further interested in an account of how to solve this problem using the finite element method, you should read the entire report. You can view it online here. I have removed the code from the report out of respect for the lecturer. I will however share one piece of code, that I know he wouldn’t mind, that I am particularly proud of.

This is the code that generates the mesh you can see a hint of in the pictures (and is shown more clearly on the first page of the report). It automatically generates this mesh given a size of the element side. Almost every other group did this by hand, by entering like 300 values into a big matrix… by hand…

here is what the school had to say about the report.

Individual comments

The problem is well described and clear to the reader. The report is well structured, nice and easy to follow. It would be easy to reproduce your code without reading the attached Matlab code. Sizes of your matrices and vectors are presented which makes it easy to follow the solution process. The geometry is presented and looks correct. The derivations from the strong formulation to the FE-formulation presented correctly. The contribution to the stiffness are correctly defined and presented with illustrations that makes it easy for the reader to follow and you describe how to calculate the boundary vectors. The inital temperature is included. The transiet scheme is implemented correctly and a discussion on the size of the time step is present. It is clear that you have understood the relationship between stresses and elastic/thermal strains, but you have used the wrong formula for calculating the effective stress. The results are discussed and seem correct. The Matlab code is well commented but a bit complicated. In general very good report! Well done!

I have fixed those small errors (and regenerated the images) in the report that is linked in this post. I’m not sure exactly how my code is complicated. I would argue that it is powerful, contrary to some other people who as I said put the shit in by hand; that’s complicated!

I could without any further changes to the code replace my mesh with a non-uniform one and I could easily change just a few parameters to solve any general problem.

Half related comment about school

I just wanted to say that I put a lot of work into this project, quite surely more than I had to. I am however very happy that I have done it. School is mostly sort of.. drudgery..
It is very, very easy to just go through the motions and do the minimum required to pass the course. I strongly believe anyone could get a masters in Engineering Physics. But I think one should put in this kind of extra effort now and again to produce something that’s actually of high quality.

Whenever I come across a course or subject I really like, I put in some extra effort to produce something above the expected. It’s a good way to learn that subject extra well, but It’s also a good confidence booster. I’ve just shown myself that if I really put in just a tiny ounce more work I will get the maximum score and I will get pretty awesome feedback from the people responsible for the course. It feels good.

It does by far not feel good enough to do it in all courses, but I think everyone should just.. take some time now and then to mark their existence by putting in a bit more effort than required. There’s a full long blog post in here somewhere on these thoughts, but I’ll leave that for another time when I can think it through more thoroughly.

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It’s supposed to be a plastic mold injection tool. That means it’s supposed to simulate a situation where there is hot melted plastic on the “inside” of the tool, the right side and the upper part is kept at a constant temperature of 25 degrees Celsius somehow and the other sides of the tool are exposed to the air so their cooled through convection. The bottom of the tool has no heat-flow at all because it’s supposed to simulate a symmetry, so imagine there is an identical but vertically flipped part on the bottom.

Anyway, here is the simulation of the heat dispersion for the first 5 minutes after the plastic is injected into the tool.

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Jag och 4 andra människor fick/valde uppgiften att skriva en 20 sidors rapport på klimatneutralitet, vad det är, vad det innebär, vad det finns för standarder och ramverk för att mäta det och analys på tre företag som påstår sig vara (eller bör vara) klimatneutrala.

Jag hittade följande påstående i tidningen The Guardian:

Richard Hanns, Tetra Pak’s environment manager, said his organisation  had been carbon neutral since 2003, but despite winning awards for  environmental performance, had held back from making claims.

Och tänkte att det skulle bli en piece of cake att skriva om Tetra Paks miljöpolicy, det finns inget som Tetra Pak PR-folk älskar att prata om så mycket som Tetra Paks miljövänlighet. Min tanke: “Det måste ju finnas en uppsjö av information så jag lätt kan plocka ihop en 4-sidig rapport”.

Jag hade både rätt och fel, det finns en uppsjö av information. Faktum är att det finns alldeles för mycket information, utspritt på hundratals webbsidor som alla är skapta av Tetra Pak själva. Faktamängden i denna informationen är så extremt tunn att det har tagit mig 15+ timmar att samla ihop tillräckligt med data för en helt ärligt talat jävligt dålig sammanfattning :P

Hur som helst så vet jag att det finns en del Tetra Pak’are som läser denna bloggen, så jag tänkte ge er en chans att läsa min rapport (som enligt instruktioner från lärare skall vara “kritisk”, så den representerar inte nödvändigtvis mina egna åsikter) innan jag skickar in den för kritik från lärare. Den kritiken lär vara ganska hårt, för som sagt, rapporten suger, och kommer nog då förändras enligt feedbacken.

Jag påminner om att detta är ett ihopslängt utkast som inte är klart på något sätt, därför har ni väldigt stor möjlighet att påverka rapporten nu innan jag skickar in den för review. Det är också bara min del av rapporten, så på vissa ställen hänvisar jag till tidigare delar och de finns inte med i det jag bifogar nu.

Klicka här för att ladda ner PDF filen.

Vad tycks? Om ni inte gillar den så leta upp mer fakta åt mig! Jag orkar inte vada runt i fluffigt PR-snack 15 timmar till för att få ihop något vettigt.

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I did the first exercise yesterday and the result looked kind of neat so I want to show you. The exercise was about calculating the temperature distribution in a rectangular disc with a hole in it. Inside the hole the temperature is 1000 degrees and outside the disc the temperature is 100 degrees, so the question is what does the temperature look like inside the disc? Another thing that you “automatically” calculate is the flow of heat from the inside to the outside of the disc.

This is what the disc looks like divided up into 336 element on which we’ll calculate the temperature.

Disc with 336 elements

And when I let the computer solve it, it’ll look like the following, which shows the temperature distribution.

Disc with 336 elements solved for temperature distribution

This is all pretty well and good. To give you an idea of what use this is, this thing could be a model of what the temperature would look like inside a large square metal bar with a pipe inside it, inside could flow something very warm while the entire thing would be dipped in a coolant. This solution lets us know what the temperature will look like inside the metal bar, as well as how much heat will flow to the outside. With this information we could learn how to optimize the cooling process. A very simplified model of course, but it’s just an introductory course. Now, being the engineer that I am, of course I could be happy with just 336 elements, I naturally have to over-do this thing. For no reason what so ever.

Disc with around 1500 elements

Disc with around 1500 elements solved

This last one took around 3-4 hours to solve with my computer :P I’m happy I don’t have to pay for computer time!

What I’m worried about in this field however is that as things get more complicated we need to use more sophisticated software, and I think there will be less and less focus on doing algorithms and more and more focus on just using commercial software. I don’t want to be a user, I want to be a creator.

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I have the option of taking a third course as well, it’s completely voluntary and seems very fun. It’s called “Algorithm implementation”, and the course book is called “Writing Secure and Efficient C Code”. So it’s about writing super-optimized algorithms in C. The course is super-nerdy and I’ve had the lecturer on a course in C before and he’s totally kick-ass; like a nerd god!

I really want to take the Algorithm course, but the FEM-course seems quite large and complex and I really want to learn it thoroughly since I’m thinking of specializing in scientific calculation and simulation in my final two years.

So the questions is this. Skip the C course and focus on FEM and understand it really well or take both courses and maybe not understand the FEM as well and have a heavier workload? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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