ericmock's blog

Teacher, Scientist, or Engineer

From thinking about the 'I'd Love to Change the World' discussion, I have concluded that my dilemma stems from the (basically) three career paths from which I can choose.

A teacher that can have a great deal of influence on a select number of other individuals' lives and can take great pride in helping others achieve their potential, and possibly make great contributions to society.

A scientist that can continue to explore the unexplained and hopefully discover something that could contribute to society.

...But I Don't Know What to Do...

 ...So I Leave It Up to You

 by Ten Years After (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Years_After or on iTunes)

I recently stumbled across the patent that is attached to this post.  It's title 'Simulation of String Vibration' obviously caught my attention.  Hoping there was more to it, I downloaded and read it.  To save you the time, I'll summarize.  It basically reads like a conference paper that would probably not get accepted into any respectable journal.  What is patent is a little more specific than the title would imply but nothing that is any more than a trivial extension of existing research.  Essentially the patent describes a way (finite elements) to simulate the planar vibration of a strin

I am putting together a proposal in response to NSF's Engineering Virtual Organizations solicitation regarding what I call Open Source Publishing.  The proposal can be found (and edited if you setup an account) here.  I would encourage you to register and edit if you're interested.  All revisions are saved so there is no risk of messing something up.  The proposal is fairly unstructured at this point and consists of mostly just my th

With a great many ties to VT, I have been following the tragic shootings there closely. While my former student (Nakhiah Goulbourne) and my former department head (Dick Benson) are both safe, I am afraid we may have lost one of our own this morning. From an AP report, a student stated that the instructor teaching a 9:05am mechanics class in 204 Norris Hall was killed. According to the timetable of classes at VT, this instructor would have been Liviu Librescu. I certainly hope the AP's report is wrong. As someone very interested in shell theories, I have spoken with Prof. Librescu many times and followed his work. His loss would be a great loss to our community.