Work

Right now, work is really neat. It's also terribly exhausting. Not so much in hours, but in how quickly things are moving, and how many things I'm working on at once. As a result I've been stressed and hardly sleeping (currently holding down around 4-5 hours a night).

It's all worth it, though, when I see something like this:


That's an acoustic shadow! It's a plot of how much sound is getting bounced off an object -- the bigger the lobe, the more sound is getting bounced in that direction. The shifting color means that the waves are out of phase with each other as you move around.

Well, nothing terribly neat or new so far. The neat part is what the wave is bouncing off. Get this... it's not a bloody sphere. That's right, we're finally past spherical (or ellipsoidal, or sometimes cylindrical) cows!

We've taken geometry from the Real World (tm), smoothed out part of it (the front half is still the original geometry), and then run our simulations on it.

What's the geometry? It's part of an engine from an airplane. Here's a picture, where the colors show a wave propagating along the length of the engine:



For the peanut gallery, no, there were no random cracks. Oddly enough, the original geometry *does* have cracks, where the engine connects to the plane, but those have been smoothed over for now.