Of visits, games and that which is flat.

So I'm done with winter quarter. Yay! I haven't gotten back all my grades yet, but I think my GPA should stay around the same. This coming week I have to get as much research done as I can so I have "conclusive data" with which I can write my thesis. My parents came up and visited today. We went out and had a nice brunch and then went to the park. I had homeworks to grade but they went surprisingly fast.

I went bowling yesterday, which was fun, though I'm not as good as I used to be when I was on a league (169 average then, bowled around a 120 last night). Also, I played "Go" for the first time yesterday. It didn't go very well though (pun intended). My attacks were too slow for my opponent and I forfeited the game after several major captures on his part. It seems like an interesting game though. Easy to learn the basics but tough to master the strategy.

The other day I picked up a book called Flatland from the bookstore and I've been reading that some today. It's about a 2D world, where shapes have a society. All of the women are lines and the men are shapes of varying sidedness. The higher number of sides the more respected. The book seems very harsh towards women which I found to be strange since I was expecting basically a playful mathematical sort of story.

Well, that's about all for my weekend update for today. See ya!

Weekend Update - Fun with Fluid Dynamics

So in the scheme of my blog themes, I've decided that at least one weekend day will be "Weekend Update" where I give a look at what has been keeping me busy.

The last few days I've been trying to get projects finished for my classes and have thus missed a few days of posts. (I had planned to post about my role-playing game, but that got canceled anyway due to my workload, so I'm not sure what I would have posted anyway.)

I still don't really have time to blog, I have one more report to do and it's a day late already. But I wanted a break and I thought I'd share some neat looking images from my computational fluid dynamics report. I had to model two jets of water coming in from the sides of the tank seen here, and coming out the top.

The velocity contours the program makes, like the one below are pretty cool looking.

This one shows that my flow is coming out the wrong end for one my simulations... epic fluid dynamics fail!

This is a picture of the static pressure profile, I thought it kind of looked like wings or something.

These last two show the velocity looking like what it's actually supposed to. Yay!


So yeah, I'm not sure if these are actually interesting or if I've just been staring at this stuff for WAY too long. You decide. :)

Well, back to work on the other report. Wish me luck.

What's in a name?

So Breeze made a comment asking me about my screen name and I figured other people might wonder about it so I thought I'd post a brief explanation. Here goes.

Nano- is for "nanotechnology," a hot topic in chemical engineering and especially in biomolecular (my area of focus in chemical engineering). -bri is for "Brian," my first name. Put the two together and you get "nanobri". I came up with the name when I was taking a nanotech class and was registering for some random site. I decided I like it though and have been phasing it in as my standard screen name.

Anyway, now you know. :)

Hello world.

I've kind of wanted to start writing a blog for a while but I never felt like I had a catchy enough idea or exciting things to write about. I've decided that I'm just going to start one anyway and maybe as I post more it will kind of evolve into something good. You have to start somewhere, right?

So I guess I'll begin with a little about me. I'm a master's student studying chemical engineering at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. My interests include games of various sorts (role playing, computer, console, cards, web, etc.), web comics, programming, philosophy, cooking, wine, beer, and probably other things but that's a good start for now. When I graduate I hope to get a job in the biotechnology field. Ideally I would like to work towards something that improves quality of life for people. (Secretly I want to advance the study of repairing and protecting the body so that I might live forever. Who says I can't dream, right?)

I am currently procrastinating on studying for a midterm I have tomorrow. (It's amazing the projects you will decide to start when you have something more important that you should be doing.) I suppose I'll get back to it now. Perhaps I'll take a break later and write some more.