Здравствуйте! Willkommen!
This will be a digital log of my activities in the Intro to Engineering Class offered at Wellesley College, near Boston. This class is being taught in conjunction with the Olin College of Engineering as a general introduction to the science (or art, one could argue) of engineering and as a stepping stone to further engineering classes at Olin or MIT.
On our first day of class we discussed what the field of engineering means to each of us, and what we hoped to gain at the end of this semester. Personally, my interest in furthering my understanding of locomotion and aviation propelled me (no pun intended!) to take this class. As a child, I was fascinated by trains; my favorite place growing up in Pennsylvania was the Steamtown National Historic Site and Museum in Scranton. Likewise, as a result of my father working for the legendary Pan American Airways, I was surrounded by model planes and stories of flight. One of my favorite sensations is the moment the air pressure under the jet wings finally propels it into the sky. Since my first major plane flight by myself to Germany, I've filmed every take-off and touch-down I've ever experienced.
Another memorable plane experience was while I was living just outside Hamburg, and visiting the town of Othmarschen, about 18 minutes from Hamburg's inner city. Per usual, I found myself lost wandering through a beautiful residential area when I heard a low grumbling sound and to my amazement, saw an Airbus Beluga soaring overhead. Lost for words, I did not know what it was, but immediately imagined it a majestic white whale coasting through the clouds.
Now to move on to the actual class; one particularly interesting product of engineering our professor introduced us to is the Lytro photography camera. My initial impression was, "well okay, a pocket sized, aesthetically pleasing camera that takes square pictures." That was until I realized how aperture works on this camera. On a traditional camera, one manipulates aperture and shutter speed to obtain the desired photo (or the camera is programmed with software to evaluate what's being seen through the lens, a.k.a. auto mode). Aperture controls the angle of the light admitted by the camera and shutter speed dictates how long. A traditional camera uses one value for each, and produces a single image. Lytro, however, takes a single picture at a range of aperture settings, so a single image, after being taken, can have it's aperture manipulated as though it was hardly a "still" image at all. As Lytro puts it: "Focus after the fact."
tl;dr Engineering is fascinating. Lytro blows my mind. Oh, and I ♥ planes!
No comments:
Post a Comment