User:Gmt9

About Me

My name is Garrick Tolley, and I was born in the all powerful city of bridges, champions, and steel: Pittsburgh. My noble parents were Geoffrey Tolley, hailing from Buffalo, New York, and Jane Scialfa, daughter of Charlie Scialfa of Italy, hailing from St. Louis, Missouri. As a young lad I enjoyed both playing soccer and skiing, and I have continued participating in both of these superb activities. I attended school in a suburb of Pittsburgh formally known as Mt. Lebanon but informally known as "the bubble" due to the extreme lack of diversity in the community and an unfortunate tendency of parents to shield there children from the real world, allowing them to live in a place eerily similar to Peter Pan's Neverland (post- Captain Hook). After graduating high school, I spent the summer straight chilling and working just a tad bit also. Then I journeyed down to the rugged land of Middle Earth, a.k.a. Durham.

Skiing

Although my parents felt immense love for me, they still decided to make me a leash-child during my early skiing adventures. As a leash-child, I was thrown into a harness and my parents would ski behind me, thus forcefully dictating my every direction as though I was a baby calf being hurded into an undesirable holding pen. Fortunately, these horrible times faded away, and my ruthless training reaped many benefits. I have gone skiing in Utah, Colorado, and Canada.

Soccer

Google Zach Batteer. I played High School soccer with him. He's a big deal. That is all.

Interesting Facts

• The best movie in the world is Never Back Down
• Aziz Ansari is the funniest man alive
• Lupe Fiasco is the next Tupac
• UNC is an unfortunate school
• Alspaugh floor 2 - Represent
• My favorite phrase is "that's bananas"
• It's "sick story bro," not "cool story bro"

Name Pronunciation

Garrick Tolley is pronounced like "g-AIR-ick Tall-E."

Engineering Grand Challenges

Provide Energy from Fusion

Nuclear Fusion Energy Project Could Lead to Limitless Clean Electricity , Richard Gray, The Telegraph - Science News, updated 5 October 2008, accessed 13 September 2011 (Provide Energy From Fusion)

Favorite Demonstration

I enjoyed two of the demonstrations more than the others.

• First of all, I found the Viewing a Penny demonstration to be highly interesting. The fact that matlab can generate a graphical representation of an object based simply on the heights of various points on this object is extremely useful. Using nothing but data values in the z-direction, the graph was able to create an image that was virtually identical to that of a real penny, even down to the minute details like the date of publication and the "In God We Trust" label. As a quick side note, I found the contour map and the pseudocolor plot to be the most accurate representations of a real penny.
• The other demonstration that I favored was the Inverses of Matrices one. I have absolutely no idea how the graphs that transformed various points into colors were created, but I was immediately interested in the demonstration. The most thought provoking part of the demonstration was the fact that when the pictures of A and A inverse, which were two abstract art pictures with various colors, were combined, they formed a straight white line on an all black background, representing the identity matrix. I would really like to know more about how that demonstration works because the transformation of data points into color vastly interests me but also confuses me greatly.

End Credits

Mt. Lebanon Blue Devils to Duke Blue Devils.