User:Raseekrocks

Welcome to Raseekrocks's userpage.

About me

I am a Duke University student questioning my existence in the universe and in the Pratt School of Engineering. I want to build a time-traveling machine, use it to travel to Ancient Greece, and be a philosopher.

My interests

I like to read books (Russian Literature and Victorian Literature are my favorites), travel, watch films, and read random articles in Wikipedia. I also like to listen to Coldplay. Even though I am in Pratt, I have a soft spot for literature and I hope to get a minor in either English or Creative Writing.

Grand Challenges for Engineering article

Here is the link to the Grand Challenges for Engineering article that I have chosen:
Preventing Nuclear Terrorism, Oliver Kamm, updated 30 March 2008, accessed 14 January 2009 (Grand Challenge)

My Favorite MATLAB Demonstration

My favorite MATLAB demonstration is Superquadrics. It is a plotting demostration where one can carve the eponymous ellipsoid into any shape. The default shape that appeared in the beginning, a cube, could be transformed into a star, a sphere, a cylinder, a spinning top, or some other shape that I had never imagined before. The thing that fascinated me even more about this demonstration was that, in my mind, it somehow bore resemblance to the universe. I manipulated the superquadrics into forming a six-pointed star-like figure by stretching the horizontal and vertical roundness to their limits, and then slowly changed the roundness components once again. In doing so, I could see the star-figure slowly enlarge and take different, unexpected forms. Watching the changing shapes stimulated images of the ever-expanding, ever-changing, mysterious universe in my mind.