Ep. 7: Whose House?

Notes from 26th of February - 4th of March

Monday

I had my usual Jiu-jitsu class on Monday afternoon which was probably my favourite to date. We were working on a technique called side control, basically where you have passed the legs of the person whose back is on the mat and pivoted around so your bodies now run perpendicular. It is a very dominating position to occupy but as was being explained to us, is often poorly executed and understood. The guy teaching us was an absolute meat of a human being, but the thing I am beginning to appreciate here is that size alone is not sufficient, nor is it particularly painful. Sure, having 250 lbs. resting on top of you is uncomfortable, but it won't cause you to submit anytime soon. Size plus leverage however, now that is another story. The teacher was demonstrating a particular technique on me to a few others, and the sensation of having someone absolute crush the life out of you is one that I have never really experienced, nor appreciated before. By maintaining immense pressure on my neck, chest and back and locking my wrists in a way that made them feel oh so fragile, it was about enough to suck the air out of me within seconds.

Several hours after the session finished, we had our first final for the intramural basketball league. I mentioned in a previous week about the team of Latinos that had recruited me to play for them, and after finishing second in our pool of four in the round-robin games, we had received a first round bye. Regrettably again, we were tipping-off at 11 PM on a week night no less, and what should have been a simple game for us to win was anything but. The other team were absolute rubbish, but on that night we were even worse. I had a lot of fun playing, but it was an objectively dismal affair and we ended up losing by a few points, ending our hopes of a deep run in the bracket.

In any case, I was thankful even for the opportunity to play a few games of semi-competitive basketball whilst I was over here. I also just found out the other day that the championship game for the intramural basketball league is played in Mackey Arena. Not that we had any chance of ever reaching that point in the competition, but my that would have been quite the experience.

Thursday

On Thursday night Purdue had their final away game of the regular season, and of all places it was at Madison, Wisconsin. I had briefly considered catching a bus down to try and catch the game in person for reasons that will shortly become clear, but it was a really busy day for me with exams and a few other items to attend to so this was one of those opportunities I had to regrettably let slide. For anyone not in my direct family, the Marks tie to the Badgers is one of great importance for us, deep enough that I have been an avid supporter of their sporting teams and the city at large ever since I was able to appreciate said connection.

My Dad's side of the family is from Sri Lanka, and it was a Rockefeller Scholarship won by my grandfather to study at the University of Wisconsin that gave my grandparents a pathway out of the country and to a new, exciting but tremendously unknown life at a time when life in Sri Lanka was becoming increasingly tumultuous, ultimately culminating in the outbreak of civil war in the early 1980's. That I never got a chance to meet Grandpa Geoff is one of the very few points of deep sadness in my life, but on almost every occasion I visit my grandma she speaks so warmly of their years in Madison, she having left her family behind to move to a completely foreign culture at an age several years to my junior. As such, over the years I have developed a deep affinity for the school and the role it played in placing me into the life I now lead, because surely without it things would look a lot different.

Watching the game at a friend's apartment¹, then, I was deeply conflicted as to who I should support. Ultimately, for a struggling Badgers' basketball team, they put up a really good fight and the game went right down to the wire, which is perhaps the best result I could have hoped for. With the win, Purdue won at least a share of the Big 10 Championship, now the 25th in school history and by far and away the most in the entire conference. Following their final game on this coming Sunday (see below), the season then shifts to tournament time, and my favourite season of sports all year. First, the Big 10 Tournament, then the big dance - March Madness.

Saturday

I was perhaps as surprised as anyone to receive an invite during the week to a pre-Spring Break house party that was being thrown in one of the off-campus apartment buildings. Way back in the first few classes of the year, a girl in my electromagnetics class had introduced me to this guy Timmy, a good friend of hers who also does electrical engineering. After a brief first conversation, ever since that point we've said hello every time that I see him in the electrical engineering study space, which is often a few times a week. Aside from celebrating some guy's 21st, Timmy had also just finalised selling off some software and so celebrations were indeed in order and he was nice enough to invite me along.

I had fairly low expectations of what the party would be like, but it turned out to be a great deal of fun. I met a few people, put names to faces that I had repeatedly seen around the place, and overall had a solid time of it. Best of all, it ended up not being a ridiculously late night. It was very much what you would imagine - loud music, guys in beach shirts acting like their king dick, and beer pong. Some of the others there who I already knew, upon seeing me rock up, seemed to be just about to explode from euphoria, so strong was their delight. Very nice of them, but it would appear that much of this can be traced back to being (slightly) drunk, because rocking up to class and saying hello to them a few days later brought a much more funereal level of warmth and enthusiasm. Oh well.

On Mackey Arena, One Last Time

Sunday brought with it the final home game of the regular season for Purdue, and given how many fond memories I have had at Mackey since I got here I was definitely not going to miss this one. It was no where near the rivalry of Indiana, but given our recent rocky form, I was a little apprehensive about the result awaiting us playing against Illinois. With several attempts under my belt now, I have become rather proficient at sourcing tickets from the Discord server and so I ended up getting two extras for two other exchange students to come along with. One has already been at Purdue for a semester already and had gone to an exhibition game late last year, and the other just arrived at Purdue a few weeks ago on a research program and had as such never been, so I was glad to be able to (re)introduce them to the thrills and wild atmosphere of Boilermaker basketball.

As the first half wrapped up, we held a very comfortable lead of about 20 points and it looked like a question of not whether we would win, but by how much. Then, as has happened repeatedly the past few outings, we hit a cold patch and all of a sudden we found ourselves in the dying minutes with the game hanging in the balance. Victory would eventually be ours, but it gave us a right old scare to be sure. With that said, it did make for a much better viewing atmosphere, given that with the earlier large lead most of the spectators had begun tuning out a little bit. Not the student section though, never the student section.

And with that, the magical outings at Mackey Arena have come to an end. At least being in the arena as a student, that is. Though there is much basketball still to be played in the season, all the remaining games are played at neutral cities, so the best we can hope for are one or two games in Indianapolis, but I'm not holding my breath. I feel like I've said it several times already in this piece², but reflections upon leaving the stadium for the final time left me with nothing but radiant memories and deep-seated gratitude. Beyond Mackey being consistently ranked as one of the top 3 loudest/hardest places to play in the entire country, to be here at a time when the team is having such unprecedented success is yet another stroke of supreme luck.

On Spring Break

Before I stepped foot on campus this year the term Spring Break to me meant the big Summer holiday break after the semester has finished. Don't ask me why I had come to that conclusion, especially with the clear season discrepancy entailed, but that's how it was. Of course, what it actually is is the equivalent of a mid-semester break, although whereas Monash has tended to define mid-semester as after week 9 of 12, at Purdue it pretty much is around halfway through the term. Common associations with Spring Break for me are with wild partying and music festivals down in Florida, and I am happy to report that all of this seems fairly accurate. And no wonder, given that the weather here in Indiana is still very cold for the most part with only the occasional sniff of warmer weather. There is also every incentive to get away from campus for a bit too. Apart from the university and West Lafayette more generally becoming a ghost town upon the mass exodus, I discovered this week to my amazement that all of the seemingly essential university services are closed up to for the week, the big one being the closing of dining courts. For the unfortunate souls stuck in their dormitories for the week, I can only imagine the sad dietary lineup that is in store for them at this time, probably some combination of two-minute noodles, instant ramen and microwaved meals. Ouch.

With only one more week after this one until Spring Break, I thought it fitting to finally sit down and make good on the travel plans I had been ideating on for the past little bit. If there is one part of the US that I feel I have missed out on to this point, it is the country's immensely beautiful and varied national parks. From Sequoia to Sedona, from the green, Avatar-esque rainforests of Washington to the flat plains of the Midwest, there is nothing quite like it in my opinion. I had messaged a few Americans and done a little bit of research and a common consensus emerged around a recommendation of doing a bunch of national parks all closely situated together on the tripoint of Utah, Arizona and Nevada. I had actually stumbled onto an Instagram reel that had a 7-day national park road trip all outlined in fair detail, and so I busily set away at researching cheap flight options and so forth. This all proceeded with gathering momentum until it came time to rent a car for the trip, in which case for the 7 days I was looking at at least US$700 which for one person was a fairly eye-watering sum. And so progress ground to a halt, a seemingly impassable one at that. I had also wanted to go and visit Philadelphia and Boston during my time here, and so all of a sudden I found myself hurriedly looking at possible accommodation in either of these two cities.

That was until Wednesday night when I was about to leave the dining court after dinner until I bumped into a friend of mine Jose. He and a few others had come to the Windsor dining court for the very first time to try out the food, and so I swung past their table to say hello. It just so happened that at the table with them were Ludo and Armando, Italian exchange students I had gone to Chicago with earlier in the semester. And it just so happened that they asked me what my plans for the break were, including how they had suddenly changed. And in a miraculously fortuitous turn of events, it just so happened that they too had planned almost the identical trip that I had, plus or minus a few details. An invite to tag along quickly came and I jumped at it even faster. With a few more things to book in, we are going to fly out to Las Vegas at the start of the week off and do a road trip to around four of five of the parks there. I cannot wait.

It is moments like this where with even the slightest of changes - finishing dinner earlier, going to a different dining court, taking a slightly different route on the way out - I may never have heard about the Italians' plans and would have gone and done my own thing out east. It is yet another source of unceasing gratitude I have for just how supremely fortunate I have been with all that has transpired at Purdue this semester.

On Purdue Orbital

Having had about 3-4 weeks now of meetings with Purdue Orbital (the rocketry team I mentioned in previous weeks here and here), the details of our project work have become incrementally clearer. Above all else, it makes it almost impossible for me to conceive of the amount of work that goes into making an actual scaled rocket, not to mention anything of one that has people in it. We take it for granted looking at launches of these crafts that this is something of an almost commonplace nature, but allow me to remind you that these are some of the greatest engineering feats in human history.

A few weeks back, I gave a brief sketch of the sub-team I am working on which is GNC (Guidance, Navigation and Control). Put simply, we are designing the "rudder" of the rocketry, maintaining what is known as the attitude of the trajectory. Basically what direction the pointy bit of the body is pointing in. How does one do such a thing? There are three basic components:

1. The plumbing: the rocket contains a tank of pressurized gas (here we are using nitrogen because it is inert) which is connected via transducers and actuators to the four outlet nozzles. The actuators (solenoid switches) are fancy switches which can be programmatically opened and closed by a simple little integrated circuit. The transducers allow you to convert between pressure and current. Part of the project is both sending and receiving data from the craft whilst in flight about what it is doing, and so we need a way of signaling to the tank what pressure it should deliver to correct its attitude but then also a way of receiving back from it the actual pressure it ended up delivering. Ensuring proper calibration between the two is critical.
2. The hardware: For about $30 you can get your hands on a nifty little device called an IMU that tracks the rocket attitude and angular velocity (how fast it is rotating) via an accelerometer, magnetometer and a gyroscope (I believe). These two readings are then sent via a transceiver (basically a two-way radio) to the ground station but also to the onboard computer (see directly below).
3. The software: Upon receiving the data from the IMU, we need some sort of computation to take place that will tell us which nozzles to fire and for how long to stabilise the flight path. This is done using control theory, which is a really interesting field of applied mathematics whereby you construct a system that takes in a reference signal and does its best to tune the error in the output of the system to zero. There is a lot of complex theory behind the state system that we have implemented so far, most of it revolving around the use of quaternions which are mathematical constructs conventionally used in 3-dimensional problems featuring rotation. Do I understand it all? Absolutely not, but there are some really smart people involved and they are very graciously taking the time to explain a lot of it to myself and other new members of the team.

At the risk of introducing an anachronism, in Week 9 (the future week of what you are currently reading), we delivered a project review to the leaders of Purdue Orbital to document how we are progressing and whether we are on track to meet the mission requirements. If you wish, the PowerPoint from the presentation can be accessed via the link below.

Footnotes