Saturday, January 9, 2010

Feelin like a local

I dove Gordon's bay today while Karin went out for a snorkel. It was a long swim around from GB to Clovelly. Really shallow and surgey. I saw a few nice things but nothing new this time.



Ol' Blue holding the fort.















A nice under-hung seaslug.





















Sponges.









This guy knew how to keep his game face on, even in huge surge!
(I realise that the irony here might be a little too subtle to actually be funny)













(... see it's funny because his emotions are written all over his back! ha!)



























Me llamo Gemma! Y estas anémonas son mi casa.


Vallate.




Work is going really well. I love my job. I've been writing an optimiser using the Strand7 API that stiffens a shell element model by tweaking the nodes along their normal direction to increase the natural frequency. +z, -z, repeat! I'll post vids of this once I have them. It works quite well but is slow, so I parallelised the solver calls on a dual-core. This would be handy for designing high-attenuation heat shields and such. I results in a bumpy shape you can stamp into the sheetmetal something like this (p6).
I also analysed a stalactite and stalagmite merging into a column using the staging function. The thing is, a stalactite is in tension, while a stalagmite is in compression. When they join into a column over 10,000 years they actually retain their residual stress states from before they touched. Inspired by Blue Mountains Caving.

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