As practicing scientists and engineers are keenly aware, keeping up with the ever-growing body of technical literature is fundamental to any research endeavor. Many tools exist to help organize and curate literature for consumption, including Twitter Bots, Google Scholar Alerts, and simple RSS feeds. While all of these can be great ways to be notified of any field’s current state of the art, my company has (under)-utilized a Microsoft Teams channel aptly called “Industry News.” After seeing the channel go practically unused for six months, I decided to solve the problem with automation.
In my first project for Pomona’s ART189 - Writing Art class, I wanted to explore the idea of writing itself. From the perspective of utility, writing is a tool with a single general purpose: to save thoughts for later, to transform the fleeting nature of our own minds into a physical artifact.
For my project, I wanted to reverse this sort of utility associated with writting by making the writting itself ephemeral. To do this, I chose the steamed mirror as my media because very much like thoughts, writting on a mirror will at once be vivid before slowly fading away. While re-steaming the room revives what was written, the artwork will never return with such vividness as when it was first installed.
Chemical and Thermal Processes is an introductory chemical engineering course broken down into two major sections: Chemical Processes and Thermal Processes. Major topics within this discussion include:
Equations of state and the ideal gas law.
Control mass and control volume analysis.
Thermodynamic cycles including heat engines, heat pumps, and power cycles.
When I began transitioning my personal website from its barebones Markdeep iteration to the more eye-friendly Jekyll template, one of the things I really wanted to change was the personal logo favicon. For years I had used a design I made almost 10 years ago that, looking back, I believe was once fitting but fails to capture how much I have changed over that time.
I used this logo for quite a long time, but its orginal purpose was for my first YouTube channel. I orginally planned to jump on the Podcasting fad from several years ago, but found far more luck with juggling videos. Although the channel has been long abandoned (student work caught up to me), the videos are still up at HNWpodcasts
But with the new website, I thought it fit to make a new logo that was more relevant to my professional interests. After a while of tinkering, I settled on this seemingly abstract design.
In the center, as an abstract H, representing my first name. However, the prominent outline represents my growth as a chemical engineer with a clear pump at the top and turbine at the bottom. The rectangles on either side depict a boiler and condenser.
For the uninitiated, together the diagram shows a Rankine cycle, the thermodynamic cycle that I studied for the first time as a sophomore in thermodynamics. Since then I’ve held this cycle in my heart as the moment I decided to study ChemE, and thought it only fitting for my personal “brand.”
Jekyll is a static site generator, an open-source tool for creating simple yet powerful websites of all shapes and sizes. From the project’s readme:
Jekyll is a simple, blog aware, static site generator. It takes a template directory […] and spits out a complete, static website suitable for serving with Apache or your favorite web server. This is also the engine behind GitHub Pages, which you can use to host your project’s page or blog right here from GitHub.
