New Sensation

Heroes was AWESOME. Usually the story jumps around to about 4 or 5 sub-plots (maybe only 3 in a given episode, but there are several things going on at once), tonight was one story - a few of our heroes track down the is-he-really-bad guy, hold his family hostage, and demand answers about their powers. There was one point where I was literally shaking with excitement. If Heroes and Battlestar Galactica can continue to do a 1-2 punch like this weekend, my Sundays and Mondays will be worthless. Granted, BSG will be over in a month, so I won't lose too much time.

Tactical Missiles today was the Flandro discussing combustion instability. Think of the hardest problem you can, this stuff is harder. The Flandro has advanced the theory significantly by himself in just the last few years. We didn't so much discuss the solution as look at the evidence of combustion instability. We are supposed to address this stuff in our reports, and if he expects anything worthwhile, I'm going to need a lot more information. Oh, and the instructor totally lied to the Flandro when he said we'd covered internal ballistics. He mentioned one day that there was a power law relation governing the burn rate, but that's it. We didn't get into anything useful.

After class, during lunch hour, the three superfriends in that class decided to run some numbers and see how well our missiles are performing. In so doing, we were all getting different results for the same inputs. While Lee went off to class, I compared his code line by line to my code. I found a typo in his code causing a big error and two smaller errors, and I found an error in my code. His errors were the type giving him a range of 100 miles longer than he should have. My error, fortunately, was giving me results about 30 - 50 miles shorter than it should have been. Everything is fixed now, and we both have 1500lbm missiles capable of reaching out and touching someone at 400 miles. Except due west, where mine will only reach 385 miles. Something to do with the rotation of the earth. Stupid earth.

The weather has been gorgeous the past few days. Really makes me want to go disc golfing. More tomorrow.