{"id":401,"date":"2007-09-20T07:05:02","date_gmt":"2007-09-20T01:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wokay.in\/2007\/09\/20\/and-now-some-geek-humour\/"},"modified":"2007-09-20T07:05:02","modified_gmt":"2007-09-20T01:35:02","slug":"and-now-some-geek-humour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/2007\/09\/20\/and-now-some-geek-humour\/","title":{"rendered":"And Now, Some Geek Humour"},"content":{"rendered":"

From my Technorati inbound links, I discover that someone called Mohan KV<\/a> has called me ‘Arrogant.Opinionated.Must Read.’\u00a0 (Arrogant? Really?). The man is a must-read himself. The whole blog are strong, but this post about Mech Engineering endterms at IITM<\/a> is sublime.<\/p>\n

Especially power plant engineering:<\/p>\n

Doing a simple energy balance, we (all of us) find the exit temperature of water be a slightly<\/span> warm 35,000 degrees Celsius. Tungsten<\/span> vaporizes<\/span> at 5600 degrees Celsius. Hot.
\nOh, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics ( 35,000 deg C > 6,000 deg C<\/strike> K, Temperature of the sun) is for sissies, we’re Mechanical Engineers now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And once you’ve violated the Second Law, what’s the Theory of Relativity in comparison:<\/p>\n

Question 6: An induced draft wet cooling tower [blah blah yada yada]. It receives 4,50,000 kgs of air per minute, and 68,000 kgs of water per minute. [Some arbit question requiring the use of a psychrometric chart.]
\n.
\n<\/span>For any reasonable size of the cooling tower, the mass flow rates involved will cause the velocity of air to be comparable the speed of light in vacuum.<\/p>\n

Relativistic Heat and Mass Transfer In Conventional Cooling Towers. Joy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And let’s not forget question 11:<\/p>\n

Now question 11 requires some perspective. Reasonable men would look at a power plant, and ask in moments of deep introspection: If I put in a kg of coal here, how much electrical energy am I going to get out of the other side? Reasonable men will go ahead, put many, many kgs of coal, and publish their findings as performance characterstics.<\/p>\n

Agent Solar, on the other hand, waves away such efforts as mere child’s play. Real Men, he contends, find expressions for the input<\/span> of a power plant as a function of its output<\/span>.<\/p>\n

All is well, till that function happens to be a cubic polynomial. With two real, positive roots and one negative root. What does that mean? It means you drop in a kg of coal, and pray. Pray hard, and the output tends to the larger of the three roots. Else, be warned, sinner ! Your power plant could end up drawing<\/span> power, if the equation is to be believed !! Behold Divine Retribution !<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the absolute best vignette is this one about trying to mug a formula:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Mojan: Mapullais, I know what you are doing wrong.
\nMakam: Oh, peace, you got it, eh? what ?
\nMojan: You are not trying to understand concepts from a scientific perspective. The Spirit of Inquiry is what is missing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is profound, and has gigantic implications. The Spirit of Inquiry is essential<\/em>, in all applications.<\/p>\n

<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From my Technorati inbound links, I discover that someone called Mohan KV has called me ‘Arrogant.Opinionated.Must Read.’\u00a0 (Arrogant? Really?). The man is a must-read himself. The whole blog are strong, but this post about Mech Engineering endterms at IITM is sublime. Especially power plant engineering: Doing a simple energy balance, we (all of us) find […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7AOU2-6t","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aadisht.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}