cww.blog!

I thought you might be interested in reading about my classes. I'll start from the beginning.

My Distributed Systems class meets for 80 minutes, every Tuesday and Thursday. It is co-taught via multiple video, audio, and SmartBoard links with a professor at AIT in Greece, which makes for a very interesting class. There are multiple flat panel screens around the room, automated video cameras everywhere, and microphones integrated into the tables in the class room. It's amazing that technology can integrate two classes across continents so seamlessly. Very cool stuff. As for the content of the course, it's moving really slowly right now, I don't like the lecturer we've had so far, and we've been promised a four-person group project soon. I hate group projects. Hate.

I am also taking a nanotechnology course this semester, which is, so far, really amazing. It's taught by Elias Towe, who totally rocks the house, and it meets for 110 minutes every Tuesday and Thursday. After lunch. And coffee. The first half of the class is going to be a review of quantum mechanics, and the second half will be an introduction to nanoscale structures like quantum dots, photonic crystals, and so on. It's also a small class, which makes it even more exciting. This will be the best of the three, I'm certain.

The third class is Linear Systems, which meets for 110 minutes every Monday and Wednesday and is taught by, shall I say, a very unique character. The class is offered under the departments of chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering, and the professor does rather an excellent job of teaching the material simultaneously from each perspective. For example, we spent the entire class yesterday solving a particular differential equation to obtain the transfer function for a physical system, and the professor explained it with the discharge of a battery, a beam with weights, and a voltage divider circuit, all at the same time. Which is nice, but Nicole says his homeworks and exams are insane. His syllabus is 21 pages and has footnotes, citations, and a table of contents. Who the hell does that? This should be interesting. If not lethal.