Here are some models that I have been working on for this semester. They are done in Fire Dynamics Simulator. [Click on a picture for a larger version.]

The first set is a small section of the King’s Cross fire which occurred in a London Underground station in 1987 and killed 31 people. The flames were said to have been traveling sideways because of the trench effect that the escalator tunnel gave way to. Many people went up a parallel escalator and were later killed in the ticketing room where the hot gases were collecting from the escalator like a chimney.

Early stages of the fire in which the wooden treads are catching from the fire underneath:

View of surface temperatures within the escalator shaft. The concrete ceiling reaches temperatures of 700 degrees Celsius after a few minutes of the fire growth stage in our model.

The gas temperature represented by different colors. The gas temperature is about 1500 degrees C after a few minutes in the model:

Two views which show 1) the velocity field within the shaft 2) the trench effect on the flames and fire spread 3) the smoke layer within the shaft 4) and the plume trajectory in the shaft

This is another model which is being used to teach a class in structural fire safety. It is an arena model and shows how readily a fire will develop in an unprotected large room with no fire protection and a large fuel load. The layout is similar to churches as well, many of which are grandfathered into the modern times and exempted from installing fire protection such as sprinklers or evacuation alert systems.

The fire spreads from a source in the corner. The smoke spreads quickly and serves as a medium to heat the roof and structural elements. The energy from the seats flows upwards and feeds the spread throughout the roof, while the radiant energy comes back down to continue the cyclic destruction of the building’s elements:

Outside view of the arena with an angle wood roof and glass atrium at the peak:

View of surface temperatures inside of the arena:

I hope that you enjoyed today’s lesson and learned something from me sharing my current progress in fire modeling for the semester. Enjoy!

I suppose that I only seek meaningful work. That is a simple answer. It always is.

To describe working at a traditional engineering firm, you may hear me talk negatively of the type of work. Privatized research, closed-source for reasons of competition, etc. This can be meaningful, but there are more meaningful ways to provide value to the world. This is where my past experiences and future wishes combine with my decision on graduate school and ultimately a career.

Yes, this is me further breaking down the “do what you love” cliche when approaching life, but I always overthink things anyway, so allow me.

When in a sixty-minute lecture at a small university, I remember the speaker saying that if you wanted to be the absolute best and top in your field, you should follow these steps: some were regarding your productivity: like waking up at 5 and being done with your work for the day at 9 or 10 am. Other tips were regarding being a renaissance man, a jack of all trades who knows a little about a lot. I also remember a picture I took in Maryland, when it was raining on me as I was walking back from a bowling alley, and a sunset appeared  which contained every color in front of me that I have ever laid eyes on in my time on Earth.

I also remember a book that I read 8 years ago, called Essays by Francis Bacon, and how I loved his simple yet revealing and provoking style of writings from the late 1500s and early 1600s. I remember how some ways that he saw life by relationships or finances were mind-expanding, while others I loved to challenge. I also recall a lecture from one of my math professors, in which he stated that on that day in class, we were going to learn a method in differential equations that would finally and fully utilize something that I had been doing since grade 6: using the quadratic equation. Finally, a few years ago, I remember contributing to one of the open-source linux distributions by posting a version bump of a tiny library on the changelog so that the developers could update the repositories: I still run into that changelog every now and then when Googling my name.

Now, the common denominator behind all of these memories? First, let me say how I don’t think that I remember my past like most other people do. In fact, we all certainly have a method or way, as abstract or straight-forward as it may be, to remember our own experiences and life. But through this skewed method that I remember things, I can say that the primary thing that links together every drop of inspiration that I have come across or every muscle that I have moved - is meaning.

Meaning in a conversation. Meaning in having a smoke as the sun rises over the 70 foot pine trees and you wait for the rays to warm your freezing torso.  Meaning hitting you in the face as soon as you wake up. For me, meaning comes by many routes, and I look for more and more routes for it to be able to get to me. The meaning is all around me. I just work on venues that invite it in, and work to push away any entity, person, or culture that would try to keep that meaning from getting to me.

And ultimately, letting me share it with others.

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.

1) Sure, I can already believe that it is week 10 of this semester. I suppose everyone else cannot though. Only a few more weeks and I am halfway through with this academic year and only one more course away from my undergraduate degree. What a fantastic group of years it has been. I do, however, have a sort of dormant feeling as I await the coming of graduate school. Big changes smell of great excitement to me.

2) Unsurrounded by people gets to me a bit. I have no group of fire modelers or co-students heading in the same remote direction as me. It’s hard sometimes to work on the FDS project or fire models or even CFD basics when no one in the near vicinity is doing the same. Just me on my own, in my own lit up universe. Thanks to the internet, this is not a problem for me to contribute, but it is still a mental block in my day to day workings.

For instance, I have to wait until my local classwork and lecture work is done before I can get to what I really want to do, so I end up staying up late or working on this stuff at the end of my day. I can quickly see how something abstract like not having a group around me thinking alike has affected my sleeping habits, eating habits, productivity, even my daily schedule. Scary. I will take note and be careful in the near future and far-fetched future to set up my days to work as my mind and heart do.

I wrote a spreadsheet earlier this year for the fire modeling program that I use daily. Why? In an effort to help everyone write faster input files by hand without calculating values, then looking up the value on a table, then dividing the blah blah, and back and forth and so on. Some students came up with very tedious ways of “automating” this process by using Goal Seek in Excel and just making the process even more inefficient, hence the reason I made the spreadsheet tool - for myself and the world to use.

My point is, tonight it was returning an incorrect value for one of its calculations. Hmm, surely I must have made an error somewhere. But it only happened for this very specific number. Hmm. The student teaching aide in the class starts going off on how everyone should be using a real tool like the classic one programmed by a Doctorate, which is still available online. His tool is great. Mine has a bit more functionality. Isn’t that where growth comes in?

Oh technology; it will cripple you if you let it.

Moving on, I get to thinking of the tools that I use everyday and who made them (someone with the same progressive mindset) and who broke them (the users) and how they are better than ever now (the result of that community effort and collaboration) and it just keeps going.

Turns out, after extensive testing, that I actually found an Excel bug (2003 on Windows, 2004 for Mac are the ones I have tested thus far) with the MATCH function. Reproducible and all. Aha.

Sure, I am an undergraduate that made a workable spreadsheet. Apparently I was clouding minds and killing student’s brain cells when this bug was uncovered earlier. What a crazy perspective. All I ask is that in your environment, wherever that may be, please don’t halt and impede progress and growth because you don’t agree with something or think someone is under-qualified to make it, chances are, you might not be as qualified as you think, having that mindset and all. Thankfully, I feel as if that notion is flying out the door day by day with progress, but it is unfortunate that I do my work with a few (and sure you do too) people who revel in the sour taste of regression.

Tell me, what is worse? A version 0.01 (beta beta) that has some odd glitch in it, or version zero that doesn’t exist and doesn’t contribute to anyone? You could apply this concept to a tiny spreadsheet program or all the way up to some idea that you have had in the back of your head for 5 years.

All I know is that now, I am excited to move this spreadsheet tool to another robust platform and make it even better and more functional now. No thanks to the folks impeding it, but thanks to the students (users) for breaking it and causing progress.

Think.