Where is my mind?

You are probably all wondering where I've been in the last few weeks... Well, let me tell you... I feel like I've been to the ends of the earth and back.

First, there was Thanksgiving. What a great time! I had so much fun hanging out with friends, playing paintball, eating tons of food, and playing games. Thanks to all who made this Thanksgiving the best ever!

Second, Madrigal Dinners. Otherwise known as "Hell Week", because when you're one of the key players in the direction of the performances, you have quite a lot on your mind. I was the script-writer and stage director this year. Effectively, I monitored the performance as it progressed and made sure everything was going smoothly. This was already on top of the 30-so-odd pieces of music I had to sing or play. As my friends who attended probably could attest, I was having a lot of fun but was rather stressed.

Third, this week, otherwise known as "Dead Week". During dead week you're not supposed to have as much due because you should be studying for finals. Hardly anything happens during dead week, most campus organizations won't have meetings and such, but overall it is usually a pretty laid back week for me -- but not this time. My "evil" professor of the semester had given us these ridiculously hard project problems that basically spent all my week's time. I haven't started studying for finals yet because of them. On Wednesday I broke my record for time spent on campus, I was in Shrenk (Chemistry building) a grand total of 14:55 minutes. Time flies when you're doing stupid projects. You know, another thing that bugs me about these project problems is that NOBODY in the class is learning anything from them! Our prof is sooooo terrible that NOBODY really knows what's going on in the first place, and we're just sick of playing his games. All this is over now... So I can start studying for my finals! Good thing I only have two in-class finals and one take-home final this semester!

Finals week should be one of the better weeks of this semester, though, actually I'm looking forward to some calm days. Bet you never thought you would hear someone say that! Welcome to my life...

MRI, NMR, and the Japanese Professor...

I had a 2 hour lecture today on NMR. You know what it is even if you've never heard the term before. You know it as MRI, or Magnetic Resonance Imaging. You know why you don't hear it called NMR or NMRI by Doctors? Because of that lovely little "N" at the beginning, which stands for that dreaded word "NUCLEAR"! I know, you can't hold back your shock of disbelief and fear. Actually, the American public can't seem to get over that word, and because the majority of Americans wouldn't take an MRI scan if they knew it involved "nuclear" imaging, Doctors have decided to just knock the word off... but I digress...

I didn't take notes today during this lecture, rather I wrote down my 'thoughts'. This professor is probably the most boring lecturer I've ever had. I have described his lectures to people as "listening to paint dry." Think about it. Anyway, his obtuse and vague way of teaching leaves me with many, many questions, yet when I ask questions I only get long, drawn out, obtuse, and vague answers. I'm reaching the apathetic stage faster than ever before. So let me put my Sarcasm Hat on and tell you what I learned in my lecture today...

Travelogue - NMR Lecture 11/19/03
1pm - Amazed at the speed at which I can become lost in the material.
1:15 - I ask a question regarding how the blazes he managed to get a complex number into a physical quantity. He attempts an answer and baffles the class, but I'm sure an answer is out there even though the NMR book I own doesn't seem to indicate it...
1:20 - Bogus drawing #1. Rotating coordinate system? What the?
1:25 - Oh, magnetic spins have ENSEMBLES? Who would have thunkit, I didn't know they were so talented.
1:30 - Magnetic spins begin to take on even more personal aspects when I find out that they have COUPLING. Greeaaaaat...
1:35 - Spin interactions disappear when theta = 55degrees 44minutes! (angle measure) NO KIDDING! It's the 'magic angle' of spin! No joke, the terminology exists!
1:41 - Discovery of the 'fictitious temperature' that can happen to take negative values. Anybody up for negative absolute energy? Maybe this is antimatter...
1:43 - The fictitious temperature can also happen to take an infinite value. This just makes Ramin and I crack up. Uh-huh... It's kinda like saying "two plus two equals four, except for unusually large values of two, in which case two plus two equals forty-two."
2:15 - We are told that the Hamiltonian (quantum mechanical operator) is "easy to understand" in matrix form. Bull. Make the insanity stop!
2:40 - Total amount learned = 0

"If you can't answer the question, just make fun of them."
-Me, to Ramin, regarding my prof's answer to a question

Can you tell I was a little ticked? Haha... I'll perhaps have something more pleasant in a day or so... Until then: study hard and remember that NMRI is a very safe and excellent method that really does work... I just can't explain it yet.

Apples to Oranges?

Can you believe it? Two posts in two days! Amazing.

Anyway, a chemistry friend gave some links I found quite incredible. You should check these out.

"Everyone should know the wonderful fruits of science."
-Ramin H., Rolla Chemist, pun intended

Apples and Oranges - Actually, they're quite similar...

Kansas - You thought it was flat? You were right.

USPS - Our postal system is pretty amazing! Laugh your socks off with this one.

Homestar makes headlines

Wouldn't you know, good ol'Homestar Runner has his 15 minutes of fame in the Missouri-Miner, the University newspaper. I thought it was funny, so I'll share it with you.
~The Yellow Dart

-----
http://www.missouri-miner.com/news/549696.html?mkey=596540
Homestar Runner as a basis for society
By Laura Warren

Well, since I am not exactly a fan of the hate mail, I decided to avoid a controversial topic this week. Thus, those of you who have ever visited www.homestarrunner.com, prepare to be amused.

In my year of watching the wonderfully amusing cartoons on this website, I have noticed many parallels between the characters and various types of people we run into in the real world (yes, there is a world outside of your computers and Rolla, believe it or not). Thus, I give you how the characters of Homestarrunner.com fit into the real world (or just whatever I happen to think of related to a character).

So without further ado, in alphabetical order we have:

Bubs: Grease monkey, McDonalds worker, whatever you wish to call it, Bubs is the person you depend on for conveniences that for some reason no one can live without.

The Cheat: The Cheat (my favorite character) is the little devil that runs about playing pranks on everyone. But, he's so well loved, no one ever suspects or blames him for anything. He may seem to be Strong Bad's lackey, but the Cheat has masterminded plenty of pranks on his own.

Homestar Runner: Homestar is the "slow" athlete. He thinks he's in charge, but really, he's incompetent at anything outside of whatever athletics he's involved in. He even has the moronic girlfriend.

The King of Town: The King of Town seems to be a caricature of the corrupt, bumbling career politician. Other examples of this role could be Mayor Quimby of The Simpsons, or Dick Gephardt of the St. Louis and Jefferson County areas. This type of person seems to be in charge, but is just an idiot who looks for publicity opportunities, and does nothing to benefit the area in which they supposedly have influence (unless it benefits them). Oh, and he also reminds me of the Hamburgler.

Marzipan: Marzipan is the dirty hippie of the bunch. If she were not so busy protesting everything, I could see her sitting around smoking weed, strumming on her guitar. Silly hippies...

The Poopsmith: The Poopsmith is the perfect example of the hardworking laborer. They may not have much a job, but they do it, whether they like it or not, they get paid, and they go home. The job may suck, but someone has to do it.

Strong Bad: Strongbad is a fine example of a teenage bullyboy with too much time on his hands. He is constantly causing trouble for others to gain amusement out of it. He cheats his way to get ahead in life, with a modicum of success.

Strong Sad: Strong Sad, the eternally depressed brother of Strong Bad, as well as the butt of many jokes, reminds me of the rock in the Zoloft commercials. Heck, his face even looks like the rock! He is just a big, misunderstood teddy bear who really needs to learn how to have some fun. Maybe he should try drinking...

What can I say - I have too much time on my hands.
------

What I Will Be

I'm going out on a limb here... but I don't think it matters anymore.

There has been a lot of occurrences in the past few weeks lately that have involved romantic relationships. Without going into details about this, I want to propose something that has been on my mind lately, and that may to some people be a tad revolutionary. Sometimes we concern ourselves too much with finding someone to love rather than being someone who can be loved; being the type of person who a lady/gentleman would be honored to have as a spouse. This change of thought can occur once you realize that God has in mind someone special for you, and in due time, once He knows you are ready, will reveal that portion of His will to you. After the fact, you can prepare for the day that you will become united with your spouse, rather than worry about the whole issue.

This is what I will be, what I will offer, for my wife:
God-centered - More than anything my allegiance will be to Holy God, Jehovah.
Integrity - I will be consistent in what I say and do.
Character - I will exemplify what it means to be a servant of Christ by considering others before myself.
Trustworthy - She will be able to have full confidence in me.
Loyal - I will keep my oath of faithfulness to her.
Perseverance - I understand what it means to bear up under trouble and stay the course.
Patience - I will be level-headed and even-tempered. Anger will only occur when it is demanded of me by conscience and the Word of God.
Humility - I know my limitations and am not afraid to admit wrong. Moreso and again, I will serve my family, the household of Believers, and my fellow man.
Confidence - Even in humility, I will be confident in my ability to do whatever it takes to accompish goals.
Courage - I will not shrink back when trouble comes in whatever form - the meaning of Godly courage.
Leadership - I will provide physical and spiritual leadership, keeping in mind that he who believes himself to be a leader must first and foremost be a servant.

"But Norman," you ask, "don't you want to be a fun, nice, romantic guy?" Yes I do, but don't you see how minor this is compared to the bigger issues? Can't we understand that it is easy to show a girl a good time, and that it is much more difficult to have the character of a Godly man? Most of us don't have to work very hard to be fun and cheerful. Let's strive to be people who are more interested in what they bring into a marriage than what the other has to give.

I'm sure I've missed some important qualities, feel free to comment on what I have forgotten. (When you write on the fly and do very little editing, you miss things...)

Well, it looks like I've got a long way to go... but if I'm good at one thing, it's never giving up.

Nothing else to write about...

... so I'll tell you my schedule for this semester and the next. Oh what fun!

This semester I'm taking and their respective subtitles:
Chemistry 251 Lab OR how to play with toys and get bad grades
Chemistry 251 - Instrumental Methods Lecture OR theory of toys that get you bad grades
Chemistry 244 - Chemical Kinetics Lab OR how to become an MS Excel major
Chem. Eng. 235 - Separations OR how to make a distillation column
Chem. Eng. 237 - Continuous Mass Transfer OR how much can YOU memorize in one hour?
Statistics 213 - Applied Eng. Stat. OR how to laugh at stupid college students
Music History 1 OR can we spin your head in 3/4 time or 4/4?

Next semester's schedule? I just finished it this afternoon, one class is dependent on the project being accepted by NASA... Sorry no subtitles... yet.

Chem. Eng. 145 - Chemical Process Materials
Chem. Eng. 234 - Chemical Eng. Laboratory 1
Chem. Eng. 247 - Molecular Chemical Eng.
Chem. Eng. 281 - Chemical Reactor Design
Music History 2 (now you can have your head spin in 5/8 time)
Undergraduate Research OR Eng. 60 - Writing and Research (boooooo) if the research doesn't work out...

That's all for now.

Computer Upgrade

This is officially the first post for my blog on the new computer I built. Since there isn't anything particularly worthy of note right now (besides the fact I can't find the sign error in my study notes, grr), I'll just post the specs of this beautiful machine and let you ooooh and aaaah over it's majesty...

Gigabyte GA-7VAX dual-bios motherboard, KT-400 chipset
AMD Athlon 2200+ (Glacial tech heat sink)
512MB DDR400 RAM
ATI-Radeon 7500 64MBVRAM video
80GB Western Digital Caviar with 8MB buffer
Sony CD-RW, 52x24x52x
Windows XP Home (eventually with Linux dual-boot)
Envision 15" flat panel monitor

aaaand... I'm done.

Concert Update

The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields performed in Rolla two days ago, and they were fantastic. These guys are so good it's ridiculous.

First, they played Mozart's Concertone for two violins in C Major (K186e/190). Kenneth Sillito (director) and Harvey de Souza were the soloists. A very beautiful piece.

The next piece was Alfred Schnittke's Moz-Art a la Haydn. This is definitely one of the strangest pieces of music I have ever heard, yet it was stunning, amazing, and humerous at the same time. You just have to see it in concert to believe it, a recording just cannot do it justice. Schnittke took little vignettes from many different pieces by Mozart and Haydn and interspersed them between extrememly complex rhythm and 20th century dissonant styles. Bitonality was rampant, and sometimes you would literally hear two different pieces being played on top of one another. Some vignettes were even modified by inserting chromatic intervals. I was caught totally unprepared to hear this, and I was shocked and amazed at the... bizarre-ness of the piece. Nevertheless, it was incredible.

Stravinsky's Concerto in E-flat Major and Mozart's Symphony No. 29 followed the intermission. There isn't a ton to say about these, the Academy played them beautifully.

I like that I didn't have to pay anything for this show either... ;-)

Newsflash - Needing some divine intervention or mad skilz

I received my new motherboard for my desktop in the mail yesterday. I am going to start rebuiliding the computer in less than 5 minutes (9:45am). After all the problems I've had with that computer, I think I need some divine intervention to make it work... Pray hard my friends, pray hard. I'll let you know if it was a success later today.

Concert and Master Class Update

So I need to post SOMETHING about Bill K's concert and master class. Here's an analysis...

Concert
Bill started out strong with de Falla's "The Miller's Dance." This is particularly amazing because this is normally done as a duet. The fact that he can even attempt this solo basically screams, "YES I AM A GUITAR WHIZ."

I loved his arrangement of Santiago de Murcia's Sonata in D minor. This is a beautiful piece of music that captures the essence of both the Renaissance and Baroque periods, yet has a different feel to it because of the Mexican influence on his music.

Bach's Chaconne is perhaps overplayed by guitarists, but Bill made this particularly interesting by playing the piece in the key of D, not C. Very innovative!

Bill is incredibly talented at the classical-jazz-fusion style (as I like to call it). This new style is definitely making it's mark on classical guitar, and with people like Roger Hudson, Fred Hand, Dusan Bogdonovic, and Brian Head leading the way, how can that be bad? Bill played Hand's "Missing Her," perhaps one of the most beautiful contemporary pieces I've heard in a long time. I'm only beginning to get more into this style, but I hope to add some of these pieces into my repertoire.

Bill ended the performance with my current favorite classical suite, Domeniconi's Koyunbaba. He had not played the piece in a while, but he could still play in the awkward tuning of C-sharp minor, to which you have to down-tune the guitar to play the piece.

Master Class
What fun! So I show up half an hour early and get to talk to Bill one on one for a good 20 minutes or so. That was great! I need to remember to go early every time a master class comes around...

So I play de Murcia's Preludio from the Suite in C. Bill had never heard it before then, so he had the good forune of seeing something he was completely unfamiliar with. No matter, he's so good he can virtually sight-read the thing. (sick!) I played VERY well, in fact he had no qualms with any of my technique and didn't comment at all on it. That was sweet considering that my teacher has taught me to focus on the sound, unlike some teachers who sacrifice musicality for playing the "big pieces."

Bill focused on musical interpretation the entire time, and I learned three things in particular that I'm going to tell you a little about...

1) Dirty Rasqueado - This is the simplest issue we addressed on how to approach the strumming in the piece. The "modified" rasqueado wasn't quite as authentic as it could be, and he showed how to modify it even more until I had it sounding even better.

2) Musical Moments - This is one of the hardest things to do with pieces with which you are unfamiliar when you learn them. Imagine you are leading your audience on a journey (giving a tour, per se), and along the way you want to point out certain features of the landscape. What do you do to make it clear that you want their attention focused? You emphasize the feature and talk differently about it. In music, you are basically 'talking' to your audience, and you want to point out certain things to them as they happen. These are 'musical moments'. You need to be aware of where they are and what you can do make these known. They are critical to the audience's experience, and should always take priority over any sort of technical issue.

3) Tempo-awareness - This follows closely with #2. The guitar lends itself famously to using tempo changes for emphasis, moreso than other instruments in my opinion. (This may be because many instrumentalists have no concept of this sort of thing and isn't taught well, at least I haven't heard it often.) You have to use this to your advantage, to keep people's interest and to assist #2. This sort of thing would take far too long to talk about so I will bring this to a close...

In some sense, what I learned was not stuff I didn't know already, but that I have a good ways to go in my understanding of musical interpretation. Classical guitar, along with piano perhaps, is the most diverse of solo instruments, with nearly infinite possibilities of ways of playing beautiful music and displaying emotion. We need to be aware of not only technique, but also of how our music is directly affecting other people as we play it, and communicate clearly the message of the song. Make that guitar talk, son, make it talk!

Liberals, Conservatives, and Principles

I just put up a new blog link for my friend John from the chemistry department. He's a great guy, even though we sometimes get in arguments. (homeschooling, John?) John is more or less liberal, I am more or less conservative. Thus we don't always agree on things...

The whole liberal versus conservative thing, however, can sometimes be overcomplicated by party politics. For instance, on Hannity and Colmes the other day we were listening to a lady basically do nothing but insult the President. She offered no evidence, no justification, simply insults (I am quite serious). Shawn Hannity (conservative) then proceeds to tell her this, but then the argument heats up to the point when HANNITY very nearly insulted the Democratic party and his guest. His passionate rebuke was fine for a while, but he went over the line and let too much passion get in the way.

The crux of the matter is that even though I believe conservatives are right most of the time, liberals also have some good ideas. We shouldn't just throw someone's idea out because "he's a liberal" or vote for somebody because "he's a democrat" or "he's a republican." Examine their views, evaluate their policy, judge their character, for that is really what matters.

For instance, another time on Hannity and Colmes, Chuck Norris (die-hard Republican) was describing a plan for a new juvenile justice system which emphasized community service and instilling moral values rather than jailtime. His idea effectively was to train these young offenders into productive members of society. Though I may not necessarily agree with every point of his system, I thought it was a good idea. Get churches involved (I think Norris even mentioned this) and perhaps we have a winner. This isn't particularly conservative, and Colmes even told Norris he was starting to sound like a liberal. (GASP!) Does that diminish the merit of his plan? I don't think so.

Do what's right regardless. That's the message I have for politicians, whether liberal or conservative. If we would just do that party politics would hardly be necessary, and we would move back towards the system that the Founding Fathers envisioned.

So if the President really is a lier, cheater, corrupted individual, then oust him! But until it can be proven without a doubt, would you democrats quit slandering to get your own guy in office? I've heard enough...

Feel free to comment. Am I right? Am I wrong?

Enough pontificating, I need to work on lab reports...

You wanna game?

If you haven't played Settlers of Catan, you haven't lived.

Settlers is definitely one of the greatest board game of all time; in my opinion it is only surpassed by the eternal classic Chess. Made by Mayfair Games, it is very strategic and, if played by experienced people, is not too dependent on luck. (Although, as in any game, luck always helps.)

I found about 6 months ago a way to play Settlers online. First, you need the Wannagame Messenger, which allows you to find games online. The Settlers program you use is called Wancatan, which you can download here.

It's quite fun to play with people from all over the world (the majority of the online players are from Europe) and try your hand at beating them. If you're interested, you can even join in a league and get a player rating!

So, if you really wanna game, contact me and I'll play you...

I also have just procured a new game, Puerto Rico on recommendation from BoardGameGeek.com. From what I've read it looks really cool.

On a side note, I've added a ton of new links and blogs to my sidebars, enjoy!

New Template!

Hello my blogging friends...

Welcome to the new, improved Quantum-Mechanic Blog with a template by Thinkering! Be on the lookout for more links and other new freebies...

THANK YOU THINKERING!!! You're the best!

Comment on the new template! (and make sure to say that thinkering is the coolest!)

What am I doing here?!?!?

So the legendary three day weekend is coming up... But there's still homework to do. Thursday afternoon we begin the Chem251 homework, thinking we would finish by 5pm. Boy were we wrong! We knew it wouldn't be easy, but this was ridiculous. The difficulty level was far beyond what we had learned, and we got nowhere in the 4 hours we worked on it.

So I pushed back my departure time to Friday afternoon. We begin working on it at 9:30am... and we're still not done by 3:30pm. I haven't even started the Chem244 lab report yet! I have a HUGE test in transport phenomena next thursday! I need to catch up on reading! AND THE 251 HOMEWORK STILL ISN'T FINISHED!!!

Forget going home, I say, I need to work. So I worked this weekend. Yay. There were 5 people in our house the entire weekend (out of 37 residents), which was actually a good thing because there were far fewer distractions than a normal weekend at the CCH.

I've been able to chill a little bit - we watched Equilibrium and went to Dairy Queen - but otherwise I've been working straight through the weekend.

And I'm still not done... :-)

It's a good thing I love chemistry and chemical engineering because otherwise I would be a very unhappy person.

Why Abdel is a stud

Abdel Rawashdeh, my fav grad student at UMR, has changed his name. He is now DOCTOR Abdel!

Yessiree, Abdel has run the gauntlet and returned unscathed. He defended his thesis and won! Long live ABDEL!

Why am I telling you this? Abdel is a great guy, he's been an inspiration to me since we traveled to the University of Notre Dame Radiation Laboratory to do research in 2002. I'm thrilled that he has made it!

So in a few weeks he goes back to Jordan, his home. :-( That's too bad, But I'm excited about his future prospects. He's going to do great things...

L-A-G-Q-me baby..

Not only will I get to see LAGQ's William Kanengiser play, but I also will get to play for him in his 'master class' the next day! What a great opportunity - playing with one of the top guitarists in the world is not something you do every day!

You know, this is definitely one of the beautiful things about the classical guitar community. You can't just "play" for people like Yo Yo Ma after seeing them in concert. It just doesn't happen. However, classical guitarists really make themselves available to teach the new generation of players. How cool is that? I'm definitely going to attend at least 3 of the master classes sponsored by STLCGS this year. The opportunity to play with these incredible players is just too good to pass up!

~QM

Classical Cool: Who is William Kanengiser?

Big Classical Guitar News: Bill Kanengiser of LAGQ is performing at the St. Louis Ethical Society on October 11. It definitely will be a concert to remember. Bill is an incredible musician, the legendary "first guitarist" of LAGQ. If you live within 100 miles of the St. Louis area, you should go to this concert. And you need to buy his latest album: Classical Cool.

Unfortunately, the St. Louis Classical Guitar Society website is not functioning right now. There you would theoretically find more information about concerts coming up. In the future, we will see the amazing talent of Denis Koster (he studied with SABICAS!!!), Jason Vieaux (he studied with MY TEACHER), Antigoni Goni, Paul O'Dette (best lutenist ever, period), and Denis Azabagic (Bosnian wonderboy). This is going to be an incredible concert season!

Ion Exchange Chromatography

Want to hear about what I did today? Here's a sample...

Chromatography is the art of separating chemicals. Fundamentally, any chromatigraphic technique uses two phases, a stationary phase and mobile phase, inside a long column. The stationary phase is usually a sort of resin or coating that interacts with the analytes that are present in the mobile phase. Depending on the level of interaction, the analytes will stick around in the column for different amounts of time. (Note that an important feature of the mobile phase is that it cannot interact with the stationary phase.) After exiting the column, a detector will 'see' the analytes pass through and will produce a signal that is recorded by a computer. Thus you can produce a graph of signal vs. time, and you will see 'peaks' on the chromatogram that will represent the amount of analyte flowing through the system and the time it took to travel through the system. Because every compound will have a unique retention time, you can use chromatography to assist in understanding the composition of unknown samples. Amazing.

There are so many ways to do this it's unthinkable - from gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy (my specialty) to liquid to size exclusion to gel permeation... to ion exchange, which is what I learned about today. Here's an excerpt from the introduction of my IEC report...

***
Ion exchange chromatography (IEC) is a specialized analytical technique whereby ions are separated and detected by attractions between oppositely charged ions. A subset of IEC techniques is simply called ion chromatography (IC), during which two ion exchange processes are used. Our objective in this lab was to analyze the electrolyte content of Rolla tap water and the fluoride content of Crest toothpaste.

The primary differences between ion chromatography and liquid chromatography are an immobilized ion stationary phase and an anion regenerant. During the first stage of IC, the analyte anions go through an “anion exchanger,” and are separated from their respective cations. The second stage is a high capacity cation exchanger that protonates the mobile phase (eluent) counter ions, making them less conductive so the detector doesn’t see them. This second step is usually called suppression, and is done in a suppression column. After the second step completes, the suppression column will have lost a good number of its hydronium ions. Hence, an ion exchange chromatograph uses an anion regenerant (a strong acid like H2SO4) to replace those ions. As implied earlier, the detector is an electrical conductivity detector, and is particularly sensitive to ions. When a substance with an electrical conductivity different then the background passes through, the computer records a peak.

***

Hmm, I guess you need to understand liquid chromatography so you can figure that garbage out. Oh well, maybe that can be for another time.

Until then,
QM

Comments

Comments now available! YAY! Now you can communicate with me through flowing electrons. Amazing. (Not like we haven't been doing this for 100 years but I still think it's cool.)

Quantum-Blogging

The wonders of the internet never cease...

Welcome to my blog! I've been looking forward to this for a while - all my friends seem to have these and I've been lagging behind the trend (nothing new). I do have to warn you, this blog is not for the timid or weak of mind. You can expect intelligent, thought provoking posts that will challenge your brain, though I suspect a little fun here and there couldn't hurt.

For those of you who are visitors and have no idea who I am, here's a little more about me...
First and foremost, I am a Christian, simple as that. Second, I am a scientist/engineer, a chemistry/chemical engineering double major. If you ask my friends, they will tell you this is what defines me: I am a follower of the ruler of the universe and the author of science, Jesus Christ (I'm sure you'll see a post on this later). Hence, I'm consumed with all types of theological, philosophical, scientific, and technological pursuits.
Other interests:
Music and Arts - Nearly all kinds, in particular classical guitar and vocal music. My 'specialization,' per se, is Renaissance and early Baroque period music.
Games - I enjoy strategy games and card games. I especially like games made by the master, Klaus Teuber, such as Settlers of Catan and Domaine. For card games, I love Spades, Hearts, Bridge, and numerous CCG's. Occaisionally I find a minute to play a computer game, but my tastes are moving towards the 'instant gratification' games like Worms (fun and fast).
Reading - When I have the time, I enjoy to read all sorts of miscellaneous stuff. Since I do so much technical reading these days, however, I try to balance it out with readings on philosophy, theology, and history, with some fiction every once in a while.
'Other' Entertainment - A good movie is hard to beat, I must admit. ;-)

I hope you enjoy this blog. You can expect a post every couple of days, with new features coming all the time!

Well, here goes the first post...