Zhigang Suo's blog

An essential step to “understand” thermodynamics is to get to know temperature: how temperature comes down as an abstraction from empirical observations, and how it rises up as a consequence of the fundamental postulate.  I have just updated my notes on temperature.  The beginning paragraphs of the notes abstract temperature from empirical observations.  These paragraphs are posted here.

Looking back at episodes of our lives, we reflect on how people meet and how such meetings change lives.  Information technology, broadly interpreted as means of communication among people, is always part of these narratives.  But central to such narratives are nearly always people themselves and the content of their communication, rather than the means of their communication. 

The number of registered users of iMechanica exceeded 10,000 the other day.  The total number of posts is 4379, and the total number of comments 9222.  iMechanica was launched in September 2006, with the following mission:

This morning I was looking at the book Mechatronic Reliability by Wei Yang.  The forword I wrote for the book brought back memories of days he and I spent in Santa Barbara and Princeton.  The text of the forword follows.

Just got a message from Lesley Lam, iMechanica user number 1, as follows.  Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences IT is in the process of moving our servers to a faster, newer host.  As part of this process, I would like to take down iMechanica for about 10 minutes on Friday October 3rd at 10am.  I am hoping this will improve performance and reliability on the machine as well.

Hello from Adelaide, Australia.  I'm at the IUTAM Congress.  The big news today:  the 2012 IUTAM Congress will be held in Beijing.  The Chinese delegates made a brilliant bidding.  Among promised items are good food, low registration fee (which will pay for all lunches), National Conference Center in the Olympic Village, and a tour to the Great Wall (which is also included in the registration fee).  So start planning for the trip.

The number of registered users of iMechanica passed 8000 this afternoon.  The total number of posts is 3622, and the total number of comments 8429.  The total number of hits was 3.4 millions in March, 5.6 millions in April, 2.4 millions in May, and 2.7 millions in June.

iMechanica was launched on 11 September 2006, with the mission

From time to time people ask if I know other websites like iMechanica but focusing on different branches of engineering.  This morning I saw a recently compiled list of Top Engineering Blogs, and was delighted that iMechanica was ranked close to the top.  I'm aware of the widespread cynicisms among iMechanicians about rankings of all kinds.  But, heck, ranking is good if you are ranked high.  As Freeman Dyson would say, being consistent is a weakness of mind. 

I finally got around to read Does IT Matter, the 2004 book by Nicholas Carr.  He used the phrase IT (Information Technology) in "its commonly understood sense today, as denoting all the technology, both hardware and software, used to store, process, and transport information in digital form."  He explained, "The meaning of "IT" does not encompass the information that flows through the technology or the talent of the people using the technology."

At the invitation of David Clarke on behalf of the UCSB/Los Alamos Institute of Multiscale Materials and Structures, I gave the following three lectures:

1. Large deformation and instability in dielectric elastomers
2. Large deformation and instability in swelling polymeric gels
3. Mechanics and electrochemistry of polyelectrolyte gels

The abstracts follow, and the slides are attached at the end of this post.

People sometimes complain that reading iMechanica takes time.  This is because iMechanica has a large number of pages, and new pages are added frequently.  If you go directly to iMechanica, you have to load individual pages one by one.