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catalytic combustion

I am sitting on my couch, watching a niners team with more than their fair share of momentum push my Rams team down the field again. I sit and watch these games, and leave satisfied if I watch a win. If it is a loss, I feel guilty for not having accomplished something with my time. Right now, I'm thinking that I should have been trying to find more professors to try and talk to this week about research.

The quest for research is the next one that will have to be resolved. I am starting to get flak from the department about not having declared am advisor, and now that I have my apartment and everything, I have no excuse. Besides, I am excited to find some work to get excited about. It is, after all, the reason I came back to school.

I talked with professor Krystis earlier this week about some of his work. He described a project researching catalytic combustion for mesoscale burners. It is an exciting area -- you've heard about research into replacing batteries with cartridges of methane -- this group is working on a way to burn methane without a flame in appropriately sized burners. The project is much better than the refrigeration project I was nearly suckered into earlier, but I'm not ready to jump at it. It isn't the kind of energy advancement I'm looking for, and I don't think that this approach has much future. The scope of the project doesn't include investigating converting the heat from combustion into electricity (a major component of the total technology, I think). It also has serious other problems (think of professionals hunched over their laptops in thier cubes dead from carbon monoxide poisoning).

I like the professor, though. He is teaching my Thermodynamics class right now, and is a smart guy. I think he has a little bit of an inferiority complex, but I don't know if that would make him easier or harder to work with. He shared some advice with me (they always do): he told me not to even consider work that didn't interest me. After all, he said, grad school is all about doing what you want to do. It was the kind of advice you like to hear, and was the exact opposite of what the refrigerator guy said. Of course, we already disliked him.

This is the most oddly officiated game that I have seen in a while.