Wedding Movie // Matt & Bri from MATTER VIDEO on Vimeo.
I found this article through LinkedIn. Its pretty cool, and I think generally important to all people, not just children. I feel that this is the true goal of education. When education achieves that goal it provides great societal benefit.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/02/26/things-every-kid-should-master/uM72LGr63zeaStOp9zGyrJ/story.html?p1=Article_Trending_Most_Viewed I also embedded if/when the link dies. First consult this video to get familiarized with the process:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hszyGlMaofE That video, and most other descriptions, suggests to remove the AC compressor and drop the alternator out the bottom of the car. I did NOT do it that way. I'm not sure if my car was missing things that made it easier to remove from the top, but I was able to remove the alternator from the top without removing the AC compressor. I also did not need to remove any turbo tube plumbing as was done in that video. To clarify, I was working on a 2000 VW Jetta TDI. It has a manual transmission and therefore requires the 120 ampere alternator. The 90 ampere alternator is used on the automatic transmission TDI cars. - Jack the front passenger side and place a jackstand for safety. - Disconnect your battery. - If necessary remove the passenger side and bottom plastic engine covers to gain bottom access to the serpentine belt area. You may be able to get away without removing the bottom cover and only remove the side one. My car actually has neither. - Remove the passenger side radiator fan. This is mounted by three Torx-30 screws. I used a 1/4" drive ratchet with a 1/4" socket and a T-30 bit. I dropped this out the bottom and this is where having the bottom engine cover off is probably helpful. If you can unplug from the top, then you can probably pull this up and out. Once the fan is out of the way place some cardboard up against the radiator protection for when you pull the alternator. - Remove the serpentine belt. Use a 16mm end-wrench and rotate the tensioner clockwise to loosen the belt, I did this from under the car. - Remove the belt tensioner. I worked from above to remove the 3 bolts holding this down. I used a 3/8" drive ratchet with a 13mm socket and a short extension for this. Be careful not to drop the tensioner on the ground and ding up the pulleys. Maybe put some towels or cardboard down underneath just in case. - Disconnect the alternator power cable lug, control connector and the cable clamp. The lug is held on with a 13mm nut. The clamp has an 8mm nut on it. - Remove the 2 bolts mounting the alternator. I used a 3/8" ratchet with a 13mm socket and no extension for this. I removed upper and lower from the top and bottom, respectively. From the bottom use a small pry lever to remove the alternator from its mounts. Then from the top work the alternator carefully up and out of the car. Work around the coolant and AC lines. Yay its out! Now reverse the procedure for installation, cleanup and enjoy a cold one, unless you're doing this at 6am like me. ;) My total work time was less than 2 hours, including cleanup.
I went out to the South Loop trail on Sunday. Super awesome!!! I actually only rode about half of what is available. Started at the Mead's Quarry parking lot and down the greenway over to Wyatt and then to Dozer trails. Then took Bluff down to reconnect with Dozer. Then Lost Chromosome to Chain Ring (in the Private Easment, lower right). AC-DC in the private easement is fantastic. Then made our way over to the Anderson School parking lost via Lost Chromosome and then just rode back to the parking lot via Island Home Pike. That ride alone was about 1.5 hours for us. We did spend quite a bit of time down on AC-DC though. The main purple line in the map below is the actual marked South Loop trail. I could easily spend multiple days exploring the full system. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
Link to hi-res map that is embedded below: http://www.outdoorknoxville.com/images-outdoors/South-Loop.jpg There's a couple of cool YouTube videos posted by others that take you through parts of the ride so you can get a better feel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB_oKAkfCC4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttVlqu8kHKk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9IkgfOGWT0 Ran across this quote today in the ASME email I got today:
"When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stone-cutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before." -- Jacob Riis, Danish-American social reformer I'm stuck right now on some stupid code. This is good encouragement. Gotta just keep hammering away. This is ~30 hours worth of driving compressed to 8 minutes using the time lapse feature of a GoPro. This is the trip we took to head out to watch the F1 race at COTA. Day 0: Pre-trip prep: Get RV and food! Day 1: Drive to Phoenix, AZ by 9:30pm and eat at Welcome Diner, which was an amazing place. Day 1 - 1/2: Drive all night to get to Texas in time. Day 2: Drive through Texas into Dripping Springs to pickup our rental cars. Then move on to Buda, TX where we parked the RV at a site at the Crestview RV Park and had the wonderful opportunity to meet Ed the Camp Host. What a charmer. Day 3: Play in Austin. The guys went to watch FP1 and FP2, while Bri and I went downtown. We mostly hung out around South Congress Ave. Parked, freely, at the Event Center and then went to Dominican Joe's. Excellent coffee shop. We got the Honey Cream Latte, how could that go wrong? Then headed over to Amy's ice cream and then Uncommon Objects. After that we went back to the car and headed over to the Jester King Brewery. Oh boy was that place AMAZING!! I absolutely loved the place and the beers, wish I didn't have to leave there. After this we went to Rainey Street and ate at Bangers. Then crashed at the RV Day 4: FP3 and Quals: Parked out near the track and then rode the shuttles in. From Buda to Turn 19 took nearly 1 hour. Space wasn't too bad today and leaving was pretty easy. Left the track around 1pm and then headed back to the RV to BBQ some awesome burgers we got from Whole Foods. Delicious. After which we all suffered from various levels of food coma. As I near the completion of my graduate course requirements and consider the academic route, I am attempting to critique my teachers to understand what and how I would improve the teaching of engineering courses. I often wonder if some of my teachers have ever asked the simple question of how a human being actually learns. I went ahead and Googled it, of course, and found a few interesting items.
The following quotes come from this forum: http://www.thinqon.com/topic/why_do_people_like_to_3And the general question posed was: Why Do People Like To Learn and How Do They Learn Best? Below is a nice quote by a user called Francis Engel: "The thing that has been the most useful for me as a learner has been learning how to observe. Each discipline, skill, world of knowledge or study has it's own sense, body language and lexicon, which it pays off to learn - but not at first. I find that I want to directly experience it first, before I'm trained into looking at it from the traditional point of view. After that experience, I'll understand what the solutions have answered; but sometimes it will allow me to innovate learning faster than the classic means." And also by Aggie: "Perhaps I take an overly simplistic view on your question but in my personal experience, learning is the often frustrating process we go through to arrive at understanding, which to me is about the best endorphin high there is...the connections connect, the light goes on and suddenly it is the amazing power to comprehend and control the cause and effect of what is happening in the world we live in. It seems humanity needs control, or all is chaos and we're helpless, so we seek power and control over whatever our focus is, whether it is ourselves, our finances, the human spirit, other people. You name it, it comes down to having the power to control our circumstances to gain shelter, food and comfort initially, and then beyond. I think we are hard wired for it. Wisdom, I think, is what we hopefully gain from an understanding of the consequences of our use of our power to control. In other words, if understanding is the endorphin rush that pushes us to test the limits of our power, wisdom is the brake that keeps us from rushing over the cliff." I appreciate in the first quote the idea of needing a practical understanding of the situation prior to fully utilizing the value of theories. The second is just an interesting idea that I have thought about, but never tried to put words to. It seems that, in a rush to meet the accreditation criteria, teachers focus upon merely getting through a list of concepts, rather than focusing on ensuring a clear understanding in any particular area. I can see where one might think that exposure to many ideas has value, yet I question whether making that the only metric is for good the students. Particularly for engineering, how does showing people a laundry list of "things some engineers do" ensure that they will be good engineers? You really only learn how to be an engineer by actually engineering things. Period. Sadly, I have met undergraduate students that actually think they are good at engineering after completing their upper division courses. That actually scares me, as they are likely the most clueless. Can you imagine driving a car designed by someone like that? Truly frightening. Then if school is not the place for training, is it fair to place that expectation on industry? And does industry know that that expectation has been placed upon them? If not it would be a great source of frustration and I think it is for many corporations. I know firsthand that they place interest in recruiting students that have large amounts of internship and project experience. Somehow though there is value placed in having a degree, so they haven't totally lost hope in the value of education I guess. |