Recent content on ariadacapo.net
The fact that many key figures of thermodynamics have had tragic lives makes good material for (dark) jokes in class. Sadi Carnot died of cholera aged 36. Boltzmann hanged himself, Lavoisier was decapitated, von Mayer was forcibly detained in an asylum, and Rudolf Diesel drowned in the British Channel. “And now let’s see what chapter 7 is all about, you’re going to see it’s a boatload of fun!” The…
This winter I transited from working alone on a big project to searching for new employment. In the process I found myself taking a lot of words in, and here is a salad bowl of pieces I discovered or rediscovered:
Kevin Kelly (2026): How Will the Miracle Happen Today?
But the strangeness of “kindees” is harder to explain. A kindee is what you turn into when you are kinded. Curiously, being…
For me the day that will never come was last Saturday. I made a stupid mistake, not reading the electrical panel labels well enough before proceeding to replace a broken switch in the electrical stove. At some point, my body became the thing through which the current was flowing. Within a few hundredths of a second, the main residual current device in the panel sensed that current was not…
Olivier Cleynen Fluid mechanics nerd of sorts, passionate teacher, daydreamer. Now building the Next Project after a two-year stint teaching math and physics in a German high school, where I had just the coolest students ever. (Dear students, if you read this you cannot repeat it, it’s the rule.)
Recent projects Learn Fluid Mechanics, my latest endeavor, just getting started.
Two…
I am delighted to release the textbook Engineering Thermodynamics today, completely free to download at thermodynamicsbook.com.
I translated this book from my French-language Thermodynamique de l’ingénieur which is simultaneously having its ten-year anniversary. Wow, ten years!
These books are not only completely free to download, but can be reused and remixed in all sorts of ways too,…
[last of a series: Two Years a Teacher]
[student names have been altered]
Memories I take with me.
Finn, whom I thought of as a difficult student in a really tough class, on the last day of my first school year, patting me on the back and saying “it was nice with you Mr. Cleynen”. My next-door colleague Anna, upon learning that a student had just told me I was the worst…
My greatest success in these two years teaching physics in high school was called the Human Project. This project came to life at the intersection of several ideas and impulses. First, the search for rituals for emotional connection in the classroom. This is very important in high school, since if you have not done the requisite emotional and social preparation, your teens won’t learn anything.…
The authors of their physics textbook thought it would be things like “what is the relationship between voltage and current” but instead they asked me:
How many car batteries do you need to supply Magdeburg with electricity for one day? How big is the world’s biggest battery? What happens if you listen to music and your phone falls into the water? does it stop the music or does the…
[part of a series: Two Years a Teacher]
At the start of the school year I would hand my students a questionnaire with a few personal questions, then answer the same questions for them. I did this because it helped me understand who they were. Some chose not to answer, some trusted me right away with big secrets. Just so you get an idea how intense, thrilling, and uplifting it can be to work…
Probably the least fun part of being a high school teacher in Germany is becoming one to begin with. All of the teachers I have met recounted their training as immensely stressful and disconnected from the reality of the job. In this sense I was lucky to jump on board directly from my former job as a University researcher, right into the classroom on day one. Nevertheless, the process of becoming…
Over the course of my second year teaching in high school, I was able to make much clearer sense of what I was doing. Eventually I formulated it into something that I could explain to my students:
In Physics class, you prepare for a world with a changed climate.
And so, a couple of months after the start of the school year, I would present my mission to my students of classes 9 and up: why…
I have just completed a two-and-a-half-year stint as a high school Math and Physics teacher at the Internationales Stiftungsgymnasium Magdeburg. This is a meaningful and challenging job, and I have grown a lot through it. In this article as well as a few following ones, I would like to reflect on the experience.
I took the job almost on an impulse and never regretted it. Before that, I had…
I write this in the hope of saving time for others faced with a defective or broken active pen for their Smart whiteboard, since I couldn’t myself find any information on disassembling this pen. Let me jump to the unfortunate conclusion: this pen is completely irreparable. It cannot be disassembled without causing major damage.
The pen is assembled axially from both sides. The center structure…
Last month I made a conference talk titled “the Cockpit Classroom”. I made it for my colleagues, who like me, teach at the high school level.
The talk is inspired from, and largely based on, a talk given last year by Dominique Arickx for French glider pilot instructors. Arickx, a retired Air France pilot, now spends his time training medical professionals about importing safety practices and…
My views about software, privacy, technology and have changed a lot since I first wrote on this website sixteen years ago, and with them, my understanding of how our society works. Back then, I was passionate about free and open-source software. Now, not so much.
The kind of software that I use has always largely reflected ways in which I connect to the world. When I first installed Firefox on…
I started teaching in high school one year ago, and I have found help in books. Out of every ten books I found online, I bought one; and I kept about one out of every five that I bought. That’s a lot of books! Here are tried-and-true books to help you become a high school teacher.
The First Days of School, by Wong and Wong (I have the 1997 edition).
This month marks one year since I started teaching in a high school in Germany. This new chapter follows one of 12 years teaching in various universities in France and Germany, and a few other work experiences as well. I have learned a lot this year, and have yet a lot more to learn.
Teaching in high school is very challenging and very interesting; it has something of the ultimate human…
Over the last few weeks, I have started picking up trash on the way to work.
At the moment, one of the great blessings of my life is that I get to cycle to work, on a beautiful path along the river. There is a little stretch where there is a lot of litter among the trees and bushes. It never gets picked up (I have great appreciation for the hard work the municipal workers in my city are doing,…
Je suis revenu sur mon expérience avec mon livre de thermodynamique dans un article publié aujourd’hui sur le Framablog : Mais où sont les livres universitaires open-source ?
Cette année, le projet Wikimedia Commons, la base de donnée multimédia qui se cache derrière les projets Wikipédia, fêtera son dix-huitième anniversaire. Je connais bien cette communauté puisque je m’y promène presque tous les jours, pour le travail et mon loisir, depuis dix ans. Wikimedia Commons est une caverne d’Ali Baba, incontournable pour l’édition d’un de documents éducatifs libres. C’est…
It’s hard to describe to other people what it feels for me to listen to Keith Jarrett’s music, because it sounds so mystical. It’s sorcery. When it finally works and the fire has been lit up, it is an opening of oneself, an immense liberation. I am possessed by the music and possessing it at the same time. It’s a connection to something greater that has been there all along, and the sudden…
[updated 2023-01-01]
If you are paying revenue tax in Germany, the German federal government can support you financially with your donations, in the form of reductions in your revenue tax. The process is not particularly complicated, but not well documented in English on the Internet. Here is how it works, based on my readings online, my understanding, and my own experience.
(I am not a…
In the summer of 2020, I rented a drone and took photos and videos of Magdeburg, Germany. The photos are now all published on Wikimedia Commons and some serve to illustrate Wikipedia articles. I intend to use the videos as decorative features in the videos of course in engineering fluid dynamics. In the meantime, I publish them here, under a CC-by license: this means you are free to use them for…
Now that the semester is over, I can take a few moments to reflect over the 2020 edition of my fluid dynamics course at the University Otto von Guericke of Magdeburg.
The semester began right as Germany shut down due to the pandemic crisis. The course, with 153 students, took place entirely online. I spent nearly half of the semester working from abroad, attending to a close relative. I was…
I own a city bicycle with a very nice 3-speed Shimano Nexus 3 wheel hub. It is the SG-3C41 model, which has an integrated coaster “backpedal” brake. (The SG-3R40 and SG-3D55 models don’t have that.)
A Shimano Nexus Inter 3 hub with integrated backpedal brake I really dislike coaster brakes, which throw me off balance when maneuvering at low speeds, make starting from a standing position…
The beginnings of this mahogany desk from my dad’s house are not known for sure. The wood is very likely from Cuba, which is in itself a sad story, as this entirely renewable resource was completely wiped off from the region through catastrophic mismanagement. In any case, the desk arrived in the hands of a Soviet diplomat in the island.
The diplomat must have traveled around the world, and…
Through my work as a university teacher, I am in a position where my decisions regarding technology directly involve and affect other people. With time, I have seen my views and values change.
In 2007 I was convinced that software freedoms (as incarnated by the open-source movement) were, by far, the most important ingredients of a healthy computerized society. At that time “iPhone” and…
By Olivier Cleynen and Samuel Voß
You are a university student in Europe, you have very little money, and are unsure whether you should buy a laptop, and which one: we wrote this guide for you. Our students are engineering students in Germany, so this guide is geared towards them, but most of the information here should also apply to other disciplines and countries.
You Need A Laptop You…
Part 1: The optimization loop
Part 2: A sandbox for experimentation
Part 3: Practice
In my first three months of using Dakota, I have learned several things worth discussing. The configuration described in part 1 of this series makes for a correctly-working but crude optimization. Each optimization is different, and some experimentation and tweaking is necessary for the optimizer to…
Part 1: The optimization loop
Part 2: A sandbox for experimentation
Part 3: Practice
In order to play with the configuration settings of Dakota’s moga optimizer, you may use a “sandbox” demonstration optimization case in which the results are quickly obtained and easily visualized.
Evolution of a population in a Dakota moga dual-objective sandbox optimization Attached is a…
Part 1: The optimization loop
Part 2: A sandbox for experimentation
Part 3: Practice
Dakota is an open-source optimizer with many functionalities. It is excellently documented, but because of the wealth of options available, a fair amount of reading is required to get started. In this article I describe the essential mechanisms of the moga optimizer, a multiple-objective genetic…
In this short post I would simply like to link to Jason Wong’s series of posts on diversity and inclusion, written over the last year.
Ten years ago I took the topic to heart within my own community, with a single-page website and a couple of conference talks. As I look back on this today, I think the tone was appropriate (although I was certainly quite narrow in what I perceived to be true…
I didn’t have coins to buy stamps at the machine-which-gives-you-change-only-in-stamps, so I waited ten minutes in the post office to buy them from a human. I received the kind which stick only when they are wet. Working at the Deutsche Post must be quite the experience. You can make xenophobic remarks in front of ten customers one day, and receive flowers from a customer another. Two-hour lunch…
At the moment, I belong to those people who would rather be kids than have them, and so last month I bought myself an electric skateboard. I ended up with a Metroboard “Micro Slim” (we’ll see later the quotes are quite deserved). This was my very first time on a skateboard, so here I both review that specific product and relate my fresh impressions about electric skateboards in general.
Market
Quelques petits projets réalisés récemment parce que l’occasion s’en présentait :
Un changement d’ampoule de phare de Renault Modus ;
Une page web pour expliquer comment faire des majuscules accentuées ;
Un puzzle en trois dimensions avec quatre roues motrices ;
Des scripts en Java et en bash pour faire tourner un programme sur 128 processeurs en même temps ;
Une lampe-réveil…
I discovered the Bechdel test about nine years ago. It is very simple: a film passes the Bechdel test if, within the work:
a woman talks to another woman, and; they talk about something else than a man. The conditions are so trivial that it hurt to find out how incredibly few of the films I had ever come across passed the test. The pain hasn’t decreased much with time.
Depuis que j’ai écrit un livre de thermodynamique, je reçois deux ou trois fois par an un e-mail dans lequel, en substance, quelqu’un détaille un procédé ou une expérience qui va à l’encontre du second principe de la thermodynamique, avant de me demander ce que j’en pense. Je vais essayer de répondre ici de façon la plus générale possible.
La recette est la suivante. On part d’une situation…
The first article I would like to write this fall is an opinion column I taped on my office door last November, after the Paris attacks. I wished to read it again on the first anniversary of the bombings, but it turned out otherwise. It is called “Didn’t the French Flag Look Good Behind those Facebook Profile Photos”.
A story in three pictures, titled “The Vertical One is Just Slightly Harder Chalk”.
One Two Three
Things you should probably find out by yourself, rather than read on a website, if you aspire to be a teacher:
All that you work on with your students is gone after two years – all of your files lost, all the paper recycled. The fraction of a percent that may remain in the students’ minds after that time, however, is entirely in your hands. There is no consensus on the purpose of education.
Any given point of equilibrium should only be given as much attention as its stability. This applies to vehicle dynamics, to politics, and I suspect to everything in between. Soja milk > cow milk The rules are always written by the strong, regardless of whether they are written for the benefit of the weak. Rules written by the weak never have any value. Pink is a nice color. How to show by…
Every time I take a picture with my digital camera, the embedded software stores a large amount of information along with the photo inside the file, contained in EXIF tags.
Some of that EXIF information, such as the date and time the photo was taken, is very useful. Some of it is only interesting to photography enthusiasts: it gives insight into the camera’s performance and the photographer’s…
2005-2012
[Ceux que l’on appelle à tort les « natifs numériques » ] sont semblables à toutes les générations qui suivront. Leur spécificité, c’est d’avoir du se construire comme individus dans cet univers alors que dans leur grande majorité, leurs parents et leurs professeurs en étaient absents, et par là incapables d’installer un environnement favorable à cette construction. Il fallait donc les appeler des…
Trois quarts d’heure de queue devant le bureau de vote ce matin. Toutes ces histoires de campagne m’ennuient à ne plus finir, mais je me réjouis de voir tant de personnes faire un effort pour un dix-millionième de quelque chose.
I am an avid, passionate music listener, and so it happens that I regularly draw myself into difficult recordings. It is a perhaps unfortunate and certainly disconcerting fact that the most revealing and furthering music I know is often also the least accessible. The consequence is that I put a lot of effort in the preparation of an occurrence which is essentially made of free flow. The cost to…
Our perspective changes so much as we grow and as time passes that all personal accounts of changes are skewed. There is no vantage point from which our existence and story can be told accurately – nor should there be. School, education and learning are very different things (and perhaps related in the same way as church, religion and faith are); I had failed to find this out for twenty years.
I became the third owner of the six year-old laptop this summer. I brought it home, carefully wiped it clean of all the stickers, the printed warnings and the dirt; it runs happily and quietly now in the middle of my little apartment, day and night. It is a source of joy, a quiet, peaceful gleaming expression of love. A computer? Can one ever be?
This one is, to me, because with it I have…
Last of a series of posts about an aeronautical engineering course I created this year.
Background (introductory) remarks | Course homepage.
What a journey. It took many weeks to recover from teaching the course and many more to be able to look back calmly. I view the course as a success, but there are significant weaknesses I would like to address.
First and foremost, the course is…
We are almost done with a series of posts about an aeronautical engineering course I created this year.
Lecture 8 & Project 8 release notes | Course homepage.
Lecture 8 — Longitudinal stability Project 8 — Designing Canards
The objective of this eighth and final project was to explore the notion of longitudinal stability and the constraints it imposes on aircraft design and operation.…