Poultry Processing Plant

Today I had the opportunity to tour a small poultry processing plant.  It was all very fascinating and hard to describe.  This plant was not that big (maybe a million pounds or so per year), and the cut up line was not connected to the kill line, so it was hard to get an idea of the birds per minute they can processes.  The pluckers (remove the feathers from the bird with plastic fingers - in the link the bird goes along the axis of the drums) where really interesting; I haven't seem them on that scale before.  It was also interesting how much emphasis was put on chilling the birds - to the point that in grinding the meat they were willing to sacrifice yield in order to have less friction production cuts.  They also had air vents in their cooling / holding tank, which I enjoyed because of the convection vs conduction aspect. 

I think that if a lot of people made the connection between a processing plant and the meat they eat there would be a lot more vegetarians in the world.

Christmas

David and I examining our boat

I got a boat?
Actually David and I got a boat to share.  No idea what to do with it.  Thinking about cutting the back off of it and making it into a giant sled to pull behind the truck.  Or maybe fastening a sail unto it and sailing down Wisser's the hill in Wisser's heifer pasture.*

Urffer Christmas
My family are a suckers for tradition.  Every year on christmas eve we all write letters to Santa and put them out on the kitchen table.  Then Mother reads us "The Polar Express".  On christmas day my Father always has to go downstairs "first" (now sometimes the bigger kids help with the turkeys before Eli is awake) to make sure Santa came.  Then we all line up on the stairs (youngest to oldest) for a quick portrait, and file into the kitchen to see what we got in our stockings.

Opening presents is also a huge ordeal.  Everybody has their spot to sit in the great room (I sit next to David near the snacks) and Samuel passes out the presents.  We open them one at a time, youngest to oldest in many rounds.  Takes a very long time.  After that is done we usually go outside and do something (I can't stand being inside for that long of a time).  Some time later we have a big Christmas dinner, and that is that.

*It was free alongside the road, and Father wanted the trailer that the boat was on.

Lunar Eclipse

On December 21st (Winter Solastice) there was a  total eclipse of the moon.  I stayed outside to watch it.  It was very cold and pretty.  I tried to take a photo of it every 30 minutes, but I gave up toward the end.  In any case I compiled them in Adobe on the left, where you can see the progression as the eclipse ended.  I just realized now that I should have rotated them so that the patterns on the moon are aligned; I think they are close.

Redish Tint

Wiki

I was intrigued by the copper color of the moon; I attributed it to the absorbition and emission of light scattering through ozone. Why the color changes can be seen by thee figure on the right. 

Source

The wavelength of reid and orange light is between 590 and 650 nm.  I thought that the copper color the moon had during that time was because it matched the spectral bands of ozone / oxygen, as shown to the left.

The real reason seems to be a bit more clouded.  NASA writes "The molecules in Earth's atmosphere scatter short wavelength light (e.g., yellow, green, blue) more than long wavelength light (e.g., orange, red). This process, which is responsible for making sunsets red, also gives total eclipses their characteristic red-orange color. However, the exact color can vary considerably in both hue and brightness." 


Maybe I am close.  There is a dip in the reflectivity in that wavelength.

Sunshine and Temperature

A bit of a ontinuation from what I did before on the amount of sunlight a location receives. I've always thought that the amount of daylight a location got was an indicator of temperature.  The more sunlight, the more energy imparted to the earth, the warmer the place would be.  The question that has been bothering me is why the shortest day of the year (winter solstice) is the not the coldest day of the year.  I found the average temperature from 1971 to 2000 from NOAA, and used the location of Philly for the sunlight.

 I then see that the temperature seems to follow the sunlight with a difference in peak position of about a month.  This fits in with the experience that the end of January is usually the coldest, a month after the shortest day.  The conclusion I got for this is that the earth is a much bigger heat sink than what I previously thought - it takes about a month to cool it down (late fall), and about a month to heat it back up (early spring).

Turtle Cookie

Turtle from turtle cookies

Today I helped my mother at the bakery.  I had to make a cookie tray with the main cookie as "turtle" cookies.  So I made a turtle out of turtle cookies!

Visiting DC

Paradoxical Germans

On the way up from Tennessee I stopped in DC to visit a friend in DC.  I (and hopefully he) had lots of fun.  On Wednesday (December 15) we attempted to drink a beer from each continent.  We tried very hard but couldn't find an African beer, an Australian beer (the restaurant was going out of business and didn't have its New Zeland or even Fosters) on an Antarctic beer.  On Thursday I toured the city.  I decided that in order to be a suave urbanite I need to learn how to tolerate scarves. Currently I think that they are one of the world's silliest and uncomfortable garments (who puts something deliberately around their neck?), but they seemed to be all the rage in DC.

USSR & USA same range
and payload missle

Notable Events:

• Skilfully navigating DC Metro after first putting my card into the out part, putting it in upside down, and finally putting it in the correct way



Model of an Aircraft as mass on a spring

• Walking to the Smithsonian without getting lost
• Destroying little kids at questions during a demo at the Air and Space Museum
• Eating a lot of wasbi peas

Hope Diamond

Cello Face

In the museums I visited I would have liked for there to be more indepth information.  They crystal section of natural history museum was fascinating; but it could have been a lot better it they showed what lattice structure the crystal was.  There was a whole section in the aerospace about CFD; it would have been nice to learn about some CFD techniques.  There is just so much science there.

At Home

I'm at home until sometime in January.

Oversimplification

I wandered to a nuclear proponent site which has awesome skits about different types of energy and spends a lot of time knocking wind energy.  It's horrible.  I understand that scientist have a hard time communicating in general, but I think that this presentation of over simplification insults people's intelligence, and I am never satisfied with being told an over simplistic answer.

The other part that really ground my gears was then they were talking about the wind industry having to prove their worth (mostly attacks on reliability).  I just don't like arguments where they don't have a number to quantify what they are comparing.

Jokes (December 6 - 10)

Appaloosa (known for their spots!)

In honor of the ongoing horse mystery this weeks jokes where all horse related.  I think everybody got Wednesdays (my fault; it was like saying boo to a goose) but nobody got Fridays.  Friday's was even the most groan worthy!


Though Night mare is pretty good.








Friday:
What do you call a clean Appaloosa?  Spotless!


Thursday:
What's the scariest type of horse?  A Night mare.


Wednesday:
What side of the horse has more hair?  The outside.


Tuesday:
What goes clip? A one legged horse. (Kinda sick, but we where discussing the stolen horse being turned into glue at that time so the joke had to match.)


Monday:
Why did the boy stand behind the horse? He thought he might get a kick out of it.

BlueBox

Introduction
BlueBox is a homemade cooler at Pappy's Orchard that has 6" thick extruded Polystyrene walls.  Polystyrene is a good neutron moderator and reflector, so the idea is to put a small reactor into BlueBox in order to provide power for Pappy's Orchard and Pappy's Orchard, turkey division.

Simulation

Core Geometry

I did a basic simulation of a 1x1 reactor with nine water inlets.  The core was just U-235, and for both the water and the core I used single group diffusion; i.e. thermal averages of the adsorption and fission coefficients were used.

I had to do an simpler similar problem for a course project, but in that project we had to solve the diffusion equation with a linear system of equations; for this I used MATLAB's PDE toolbox (it made the more complex geometry easier to solve and is a lot faster).

Core Flux

The core flux of neutrons is on the left.  Water is a moderator (slows down and absorbs neutrons), so in and around the water inlets the flux drops.  You can also see the general cosine shape of the flux, the analytical spatial solution for a homogeneous reactor (no water inlets) is

$\Phi(x,y,t)=\sum_{n~odd}^{\infty}e^{-\lambda_n t}\left ( C_n Cos(\frac{\pi x}{n a})Cos(\frac{\pi y}{n a})+ B_n Sin(\frac{\pi x}{n a})Sin(\frac{\pi y}{n a}) \right )$

Here the sin terms drop out because I required the flux to go to zero at the boundary, resulting in:

$\Phi(x,y,t)=\sum_{n~odd}^{\infty}e^{-\lambda_n t}\left ( C_n Cos(\frac{\pi x}{n a})Cos(\frac{\pi y}{n a})\right )$

Radiation Mess Ups

I am reading about the effects of radiation on humans (Turner, Chapter 13), and there have been a lot of messed up treatments.

• Doctors tried to shrink the thryoid in children in the 1930-40s by x-ray radiation.
• X-rays (large doses, several Gy ) where used to treat ringworm of the scalp in 1940-50s.  There was a six-fold increase in thyroid cancer of those treated.
• X-ray doses where delivered to the spine to treat ankylosing spondylitis in Britain in the 1930s.

I wonder what procedures we are doing now that will be silly in 60 years?

Congratulations

Congratulations to Eli for successfully hunting a doe.  I think he also achieved something with his skating - look for him in the 2014 Olympics.

Congratulations to Miss Sutherland upon her engagement.

Mischievous Murph

A while ago I started to write notes instead of signing the receit when you use a store credit card machine.  A cute girl write my number.  Not so pretty one - David or Isaac.  Sometimes draw a dinosaur.  For a particullary grumpy clerk I wrote Macbeth's Soliloquy.  Gotta keep them guessing.  Anyway, I got a phone call from a number I didn't recognize, and they told me I left them my number.  Oops.

I had to give a presentation about our research to Dr. Worbel, DHS Research Program Manager. I compared one of our detectors to "saying boo to the goose", and later used the phrase "turmegatroid".

Two apartments down there is a group of guys who have there christmas lights spell out Tennessee.  After a football game in the early fall these guys threw an empty bottle at me because they thought I was wearing an Alabama shirt (hatred between UT and Alabama I guess?) when it was my CMU shirt (colours are the same).  So I went over late one night (coming back from the library) and redid their lights to read 'Alabama Rocks'.  They haven't noticed yet.

I am also being setup for stealing a horse.  I may or may not be responsible for this.  I am responsible for ripping its leg off, but David provoked me. At least it might go to heaven. Enough horsing around!

Unrelated to these escapades, I am now probably on the FBI's watch list.  RSICC thought I lost my simulation code package - it is export controlled.  I really don't know why; you can get the same results from GEANT4.

Jokes

I have been putting incredibly awesome jokes as my status in gchat and a couple of people have guessed at the answers.  Here they are.

Friday:
Why do cowboys always die with their boots on?
So they won't stub their toes when they kick the bucket.

Thursday:
Why don't oysters give to charity?
Because they're shellfish.

Wednesday:
What happened to the shark that swallowed keys? It got lock jaw.

Tuesday:
Why did the raccoon cross the road?  To see its flat mate.

Prize goes to Isaac, he got all but Friday's.

Published

I am pretty sure my paper with Dr. Chang was accepted for publication.  Yay!  Bottle of whiskey for me!

If you want, you can look at the presentation.  My work is pretty much all of the pretty charts.  In a similar vein, someone out there is the IEEE stuff.  I don't know where in the process that is.