LazyRoot
Jul
25

Seafair Torchlight 8K run

By Dejan @ 20:19 | Uncategorized | Add comment

Went for an 8K run today. The anual Seafair Torchlight run. The plan was to ride my bike down to Qwest field and do the run, then ride back. Unfortunatelly I got a flat tire on the bike and was unable to fix it since the tire bead got all screwed up. I guess I’ll have to buy some new tires, cevlar this time, since I had an unusual amount of flats this year.

So since the bike was out of commision I decided to bus to downtown on 41 and then catch the new light rail in the downtown tunnel. It was my first ride on the rail. I was pleasntly surprised how smooth the ride is. The rail is very quiet and acceleration and decelration are very gradual and smooth. I wasable to stand without the assistance of the poles. I can’t wait for them to expand the service.

Back to the run. It was very hot. I was completely wiped out at mile 2 and at mile 4 I had to walk for about 2 blocks. This has never happened to me. It did not help that I was carrying my backpack with water, food and change of close. I finished the run in about 45 minutes, which is my regular jogging time and as such I was pretty dissapointed. I did manage to see a LOT of friendly faces there and it looks like I might try and get a regular running crew going. I’m waiting for an official time but I’m sure my clock was accurate enough. This race proved to me that I really have to mix in some drills with my regular jogging if I’m going to improve my times.

Jul
9

A lot has happened

By Dejan @ 21:33 | Uncategorized | Add comment

Been to a farm again :) .  And I should be going to see some baby tigers soon too.  I was extremely busy with work and a whole BUNCH of photo shoots.  Enertia had a 10th year annyversary, so I did five photoshoots for that, then Passion had a mini show at the starting line of Livestrong.  Besides that I went to Mt. Rainer and managed to sled in July :) , that was my 4th of July weekend.

As far as schoolwork I stoped writting about it since I got a hold of another book by prof. James Callen from U of Wis-Mad.  and have been trying to absorb some of the stuff and understand it a bit better.  This book seems pretty good and it’s a lot more detailed than the previous one.  Most of the equations are derived right then and there so it takes a bit longer to understand everything.  I will be posting more as I go along.

p.s.

Jamaica trip is coming up in just few weeks.  I’m super psyched about it.

May
15

Day at the farm

By Dejan @ 15:31 | Photography, Travel | Add comment

Well I haven’t been writting much since I was very busy with a take-home midterm we got, plus we had bunch of Navy guys come in for a review at work, so I had to spend a lot of time on that as well.  Now the things are quiet again.  I turned in the midterm today and took the day off, so decided to go to Issana’s work place. It’s a little farm in Bellevue next to Kelsey Creek Park.  It’s free admission and anyone can just walk in and take a look at the animals, most of which you can pet as well.  I did some picture taking there so check it out in my photos section or click here.

Tomorrow I’m off to a cheese festival and then I should be making some Bosnian pies.  I hope they come out good, it will be my first time making my own philo dough.  I should also continue my plasma posts tomorrow.

May
7

Debye shielding and the plasma criteria

By Dejan @ 19:43 | Plasma Physics | Add comment

So in previous post I defined what plasma is and today I will define some additional criteria that are required for plasma formation.  These criteria are necessary to distinguish between an ionized gas and plasma itself.  Before we do this we need to define the quantity known as Debye length which is the measure of the shielding present in plasma.  This type of shielding is called Debye shielding. What happens inside the plasma is that we have a lot of positively charged particles (ions) and negatively charged particles (electrons) floating around.  If we insert a positively charged sphere into the plasma all of the electrons would rush to it and neutralize the charge.  So we would end up with our positive sphere and a bunch of electrons right around it and the number of electrons would be equal to the charge required to neutralize the positive charge.

More…

May
3

Plasma, what is it?

By Dejan @ 15:07 | Plasma Physics | Add comment

As I mentioned couple of days ago I will be going trough my plasma books and witting about things I go over.  So start of the first post I guess I should give a brief introduction to plasmas.

Currently there are four know states of mater, plasma is one of them.  Most people are familiar with solid, liquid and gaseous states of mater, but very few people know much about plasma.  It is said that about 99% of all matter in universe is in plasma state, yet on Earth we see very little plasma.  This is because the thing that makes mater transition from one state to next is temperature.  In the case of water ice is the solid state and it occurs when temperature is below 0C, liquid water occurs between 0-100C and above 100C is vapor or water’s gas state.  In order to make water into plasma we would have to raise the temperature of the water to thousands of degrees, which is very impractical here on Earth, but on Sun and billions of other stars it’s a completely different story.

More…