Dover book

Its has certainly been a long time since my last post. But in the last few days I discovered a little book first published in 1963 called "Ordinary Differential Equations" that single-handedly gave me the inspiration for this post.

The book was re-published by Dover publications in 1985. Written by two professors Morris Tenenbaum from Cornell University and Harry Pollard from Purdue University, the book is the best reviewed about its subject on Amazon.com More than forty years old how can this be? And to top it all its price is less than $20.

When I took a course in differential equations a few years ago the textbook required for the course was definitely more than $100. So if you know what derivatives and integrals are, and want to learn about differential equations consider this book.

To look at the stars and wonder

This is perhaps the most interesting video I've seen about the challenges and opportunities in the current and future space programs.

A few surprising facts are that the average American contributes $.15/day for the space program. And that back in the Apollo program almost 4% of the country's national budget was spent in NASA. Now that figure is less that 1/16 of 1%.

Personally, I strongly disagree with Congressman Barney Frank views. While I understand there are a lot of important issues that need immediate attention, we must also not loose sight of the future. The future. And the future is indeed space. Hopefully a new generation will emerge that is fascinated with space, and than when looking at the night sky they will be captivated by the big question "If."

The few, the proud, the Engineers.

A blog in Wired has generated a surprisingly amount of discussion on the internet in the past few days about engineering. A post in Slashdot has over 900 posts about it and with a very good range of information on why engineering deserves more respect than it currently receives.

As an engineering student I have a few thoughts of my own. One thing is for certain: engineering is hard, challenging and demands a lot of dedication. For example, just in the past week I spent about 5 days in a project, in which I spent about 30 hours solid working on it. Sometimes I feel as if to get an A in an engineering class you have to work 6 times as hard as many other Liberal arts, and business majors, etc. Even worse, to get a C you still have to work harder than said majors. That is not to say those degrees don't matter, but the reality is that there is a big difference in the amount of work an engineering student is expected to do.

However, as hard as it gets, the many late nights studying, the all-nighters, the frustrations and the headaches, Engineering *#$%ing ROCKS! No other field lets you take math and physics to create amazing stuff. And to all the engineering students: hang in there. We are going to make it through no matter if it takes us 6 years!