WPI

Welp, I’ve been accepted to start my M.S. and eventually start my Ph.D. at Worcester Polytechnic Institute this fall! I will be studying fire protection engineering, a continuation of my bachelor’s degree. The school is populated with just under 4,000 students and it is a private engineering school. Not only does this school house one of the top fire protection engineering programs in the US, but the faculty and their work align closely with my values and passions in life.

The big move will look something like this in 8 weeks:

Some cool info about the school includes the fact that Robert Goddard went there and graduated in 1908 - he was the gradnfather of modern rocketry with the first liquid fueled rocket. Also, the fire protection engineering department has about 150 masters of science students and 4 (!) doctoral students. This is quite the opportunity I smell.

What I did during the summer of 2008

So far this summer I’m being funded by UHD as a last request to make a catalog of fire models for various textbooks. The work is very refreshing and I love to work when I learn much more than I expected. Another cool side effect of this work is that I can include the FDS models and example writeups on my website, free for anyone else in the world to see and learn from. The technical writeup is located here and it gets updated automatically anytime I change a single word in there. Eventually it will have links to FDS files for FDS users and students around the world to download and use on their own - I love technology.

FDS MESH Size Calculator tool

Finally, to finish off a nice post about fire protection engineering and FDS: I updated my FDS Mesh Size calculator on my other website to include some awesome and never-before-done functionality! It now takes in x, y, and z dimensions and an expected heat release rate and gives the user three MESH lines (coarse, moderate, and fine) to guide them on making an FDS file that has an adequately resolved MESH.

The tool can be found here on my FDS/sciency website and the nice folks at NIST gave me a link on their third-party tools page of the FDS website: http://fire.nist.gov/fds/thirdparty.html

—–

I know I post out-there stuff like this on my blog here sometimes, but this is what is on my mind and taking up my mental cycles and daily days. Jump in and read the linked pages or play with the tools of my creation!

It’s raining pretty hard here, the rain that lets you know that the earth is still here. I have been thinking a lot lately. Even the past two days. Which I haven’t been working much in the past two days, or crossing off things from my GTD to do lists. Just being.

And in that I find confusion, like the mind wasn’t made to think without a pen and paper. It just walks repeatedly in circles.

University of Maryland. Maybe not. Mountains in Virginia. Culture in DC. My favorite research firm down the street. Maybe not. Damnit.

The other university in Massachusetts. I realize that I need mountains and a motorcycle season and a season of deep relationships and culture. That I am not the person who thrives on just one branch of life, but a life of Renaissance. All of the arts come together, the sciences. Traditional and new age. What’s next then?

An internship at a place like Google? Teaching at UHD for a few years? Work at an actual job? Who knows. Questions bring more questions, and that’s usually a comforting thing for me. Except when it’s real.

A draft of wind just blew by from the Northeast direction of the water-soaked sky. And it smelled deeply of endearment. Of where I should be. Where Every Part of Me Wants To Be. And the next breath smells of the past. The air is cool and full in my lungs; they can think too, you know.

My lungs are full, but nervously anticipating what is to come. They know. The heart knows. But does the world know?

“We need to find a balance.” The phrase of a lifetime.

During my odd and exciting lifetime, I have been paid to put out fires. I have been paid to prevent fires. I have been paid to provide warning and detection against fire. I have been paid to model fires. I have even, as of recently, been paid to talk about fire (in fire dynamics and fire modeling courses).

But today sets an important milestone in my life as a fire science student. Today was the first day in the 22 years of my life, in which I was paid to set something on fire. Not that money is everything, no not at all. My point is that my value is being successfully transferred to others and it is through a medium that I have found works for me - professing.

What am I saying? Excellent question. Earlier this afternoon, I performed two trials for my first fire validation experiment. The experiment involves burning ethanol in a rectangular pan and measuring the mass loss rate as the fuel is consumed and translated into heat energy. Following this burn, I will create a representative fire model, input the appropriate material properties, and compare the mass loss rates and see which parameters worked, what they were doing, and why.

This is validation work at its heart. Verifying and validating if what I see on the computer screen in front of 20,000 lines of code and man-made programming can accurately represent this natural process that sits as a burning pool of ethyl alcohol in front of me, combusting as it did twenty-thousand years ago. And it burns out, my pan is empty.

Sounds exciting, no? It always goes back to fire dynamics and the relationships of nature that we are exploring everyday, and there is never a dull moment for me in that. It gives me a working motivation when staring at lines of code for hours and flipping through five books that are each larger than a casserole pan as I hunt for a single number to describe how much energy will be required to convert a gram of polyurethane into a gram of something that I can burn. So yes, this validation work is sort of like what I did this summer at NIST during my fellowship. Even then, this is very insightful as it provides practice through a fundamental and practical exercise in applying the scientific method, basic fire dynamics, chemistry, and many other subjects and concepts that I am merely a newbie to. These realizations are what make this scientist The Artful (and Applied!) Scientist.

So, do you remember when you translated your beloved subject or area of life into a real value for others to peruse and cultivate from? Then, do you remember when that value finally revealed itself in a monetary shape or form? Finally, like a scorching meteor of thought, something clutched your mind as you realized that you could do what you love all day, have enough money to keep doing what you love all day, and get to experience the ever-so-missed opportunity to live out what you love one-hundred percent - each and every day. You do remember, don’t you?

I just consumed perhaps the best homemade taco meal ever made. Thanks , of course to a Texas-style care package that my lovely friends Marcos and Jose sent over. I opened this mysterious 30 lb. box only to find it filled with old-school Lone Star beer, classic taco seasoning, a pound of tortillas, Lucas, and then some. Delicious! You guys rocked my soul with that care package.

A lot has happened even with only 7 days left. I spoke to a faculty member who works at the University of Maryland (UMD) and NIST, as he came to meet with me regarding graduate studies in fire protection engineering. He heads up the FDS research there, apparently at the #15 ranked research school in the nation. That makes my head warm like a toaster. UMD has been eons more responsive than the other school than I am considering, and its funny how an hour and a half meeting can rearrange your whole view of a lifetime. This happens to me more often than I can even dream up. So, next week I will be visiting the UMD campus and get to meet the fire superstars and plentiful brainy resources there.

Will I be feeding my brain with fire in Maryland or Massachusetts in a year?

On a much more easy to stomach scale, as far as this weekend goes, I have just been catching up with some administrative stuff. Getting ready for some fall courses: to take some and to teach some. Perfect. Also, I’ve been preparing the Society of Fire Protection Engineers Student Chapter for a rockin’ semester. Writing out words and words about fire, FDS, community, teaching, fire, cables, cables on fire, and soybeans.

But wait, getting ready to move into a new house is another thing excitedly looming in the humid August air! A thinking room therein will contain a huge black chalkboard, fire books staring over my shoulder - waiting to be written from, a large window facing West to take in the cool orange sunlight in the evening, three colorful pens for editing, and enough paper to contain my thoughts for a year. I can’t wait, Ami and John.

Of course, transitioning into this means that there are some friends that I will be whisked thousands of miles from after I leave here, Gaithersburg. You remember that friend that was so amazingly insightful and inspiring to be around, that friend from four, maybe five years ago? When was the last time that you - yeah, it’s kind of like that. A mindful, overhanging death of a micro-era. Celebrate it with delight - the life edition.

Finally, my presentation is next week, so perhaps I should get to it. 15 minutes to leave my ding in the minds of a powerful few. It was a respectful privilege to do what I did this summer. 1000 pages of thought and exploration can only pinpoint what that thing was.

This summer really has had no price tag. So much development came from thousands of seen and unseen places, much like the making of a sweet, sweet, simple taco dinner.

I had an amazing Wednesday last week, and it is these days that make the trip up here worthwhile so much more than simply the project that I am working on. Like a waterfall of information lapping down into a vast blue sea, the opportunities light a bright and exhilarating path.

I visited a smoke detector laboratory where they perform detector activation experiments:

I got a chance to meet with the Executive Director of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers:

And my co-advisor accompanied me along the way and was extremely insightful as he shared some tips that will make my future ride in life sure to be a must-read story. It’s exceptionally nice to have people who are in a great position recognize the potential in you and to assure you of their confidence. It makes my brain spill happy juice to be told that I “get it” with respect to the bigger picture of things; and that is what will cause a single person to alter the world as we see it and make it a better place. Feynman comes to mind. And then goes.

Why get worked up with the small annoyances in life when there’s… this.

Sure, I am working on stage 2 of a cable failure model using fire dynamics simulator (FDS) research, and the best part:

• I get to act out the day-to-day life of a NIST FDS worker
• I wholly appreciate the resources here, such as the macronormous computer cluster and teeming fire literature
• I meet and immerse myself into the brainy and non-stop academic world of fire ‘people’
• My wisdom takes in the important and cutting-edge topics and gets familiar what doesn’t matter, which is usually more important than what does

Now, let us just hope that I can effectively take all of this back with me to Houston in 1.5 weeks!