I’m fairly certain it’s potpourri which is not a drink. When you heat it up on a stove it’s meant to fill your house with its scent. “pot pourri” directly translates to “rotten pot” which I think is accurate because I’ve never been fond of the smell

Well actually it’s the other way around. The reason imaginary numbers were invented was to solve a problem we’d been crying over for centuries.

Then, as in most cases, solving one problem opens the door to millions of other problems like why in the fuck does the universe use these imaginary numbers we made up to solve cube roots?

Why is i a core part of the unit circle with like e^i*pi^ ? “Oh that’s because i is just perpendicular to the real number line” ?! Say that sentence again, how the fuck did we go from throwing sharp sticks to utterly deranged sentences like that? More importantly why do utterly deranged sentences like that accurately describe our universe and what is the next ludicrous math concept we’re going to discover is integral to the function of the universe?

“The Yellow Wallpaper”

It was quite scarring for most of the kids in my 7th grade class.

Also I’ve only just now realized that wallpaper back then could have contained arsenic so going insane from being in contact with it constantly enough to stain your skin is a very real possibility.

“Scary door” from Futurama

It’s a play on the twilight zone and it’s quite something.

“A casino where I’m always winning? This must be heaven!” “A casino where I always win… I must actually be… IN HELL!”

“No Mr. smith. You’re not in heaven or hell. You’re on an airplane!”

“Help! There’s a gremlin destroying the plane! You’ve gotta believe me!”

“Why should I believe you?! You’re Hitler!”

For those interested: The Scary Door

ANSYS my beloved

One of the effects of me getting medicated is being able to make phone calls and schedule meetings. Do I still hate that everyone would rather I call and stumble over my words and forget what I’m going to say rather than let me write an email that allows me to clearly and concisely ask my questions? Yes, fuck them for doing that. Hell, it’s stupid and inefficient to try and find times your schedules are both open to have a meeting when you could just write a fucking email and reply to it when your schedule allows. But yeah, anyway, now I actually have enough executive function to make those phone calls and meetings when I have to.

Also here’s a reminder to take your meds because I definitely would have forgotten to take mine if I hadn’t seen this post and remembered.

Wikipedia disagrees: Roman Sculpture

Most statues were actually far more lifelike and often brightly colored when originally created; the raw stone surfaces found today is due to the pigment being lost over the centuries.

Wait. I just realized energy also creates a gravitational pull, and the death star’s whole thing is destroying a planet right? That’s got to take a huuuge amount of energy because the explosion has to massively overcome the gravity holding the target together.

A quick google search says you'd need 10^32 Joules to blow up the earth. E=mc2 so dividing that energy by the speed of light squared gives about 1.1e15 kg of equivalent mass which is relatively small compared to earths mass (6e24) but still large.

For reference, if the radius of the Death Star was 1000m you’d get about 5.2m/s2 acceleration from just that energy in its core.

But if the Death Star is able to blow up multiple planets, then the energy it has to have on hand goes up. So if the Death Star contains enough energy to blow up 5.4 billion planets, then just that stored energy would have nearly equivalent “mass” to the earth.

But gravitational acceleration is inversely proportional to distance squared. So since the Death Star is small, you wouldn’t need that much energy to get earth gravity. If we assume the Death Star has about a 160km radius, then you’d only need enough stored energy to blow up ~45,000 earths to get a surface gravity of 9.1m/s2.

This gravity would increase as you got closer to the core or whatever part stores all that energy. But if you spread that energy out a bit you could probably extend how large the earth-like gravity range in the station would be.

The mass of the structure itself would contribute to the gravity too so that 45,000 is probably an overestimate.

TL;DR: From rough math in my head, assuming a radius of 160km, point mass, and ignoring the mass of the structure, you’d only need to store ~5e19 J of energy in the Death Star to get earth like gravity on the surface. That is approximately the amount of energy required to blow up 45,000 earths

I second what the others are saying. 3D printing doesn’t have too much to do with ME besides being another manufacturing technique. Kind of like asking “what is the fastest way to learn mechanical engineering now that CNC is available.” Sure both of those can make manufacturing easier or even make it possible to manufacture geometries that would have otherwise been impossible, but the fundamentals of ME will remain unchanged.

In answer to your question I, like the other comments, would recommend trying to understand calculus since it shows up everywhere.

Next, I think learning basic physics and drawing free body diagrams would be especially helpful. Seriously, free body diagrams seem to be the foundation of ME.

Learning basic manufacturing (3D printing comes in here) is also vital because if you design things that work but can’t be manufactured then what good are they?

Going a bit farther in depth on material science like FCC vs BCC crystal structure and metal phases and shear planes is also useful especially if you want to study or work with specialized materials like superalloys.

You’ll need to know basic thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. You’ll need to learn how to create engineering drawings and use CAD software.

You’ll need some electrical engineering basics too. Lots of mechanical devices use microprocessor so getting experience with those is also useful especially if you want to go into robotics or mechatronics (does robotics fall into the category of mechatronics or is it kept separate?)

There’s a lot to learn and the best way to learn it all is going to be through getting a degree. There are wayy too many important things to learn before becoming a mechanical engineer than can be summed up in a simple list. Usually it’s summed up in textbooks that are several hundred pages long. Buckling modes, fatigue cycles, bolt failures, are all pretty important, like human-lives-at-stake, important but they take time to learn and use in practice.

It’s probably not going to be that fast, but that’s kind of the point. (You wouldn’t want to fly in a plane designed by an engineer who wasn’t thorough.) Hopefully a good college will give you lots of hands on experience so you know where to apply what you’re learning.

On a different note. If you can’t pay for school or you just want to learn ME for fun (I mean who doesn’t want to build cool machines in their free time?) I’d say the best way to learn is to look up what you have questions about. Find something engineered that you think is cool and try to learn why the engineer built it the way they did.

Want to build a robot to clean your desk but don’t know anything about PWM or microcontrollers or basic circuits? Chances are someone has already built something similar that you can analyze. Hell, they might even explain exactly why they did what they did. And if you catch a word or topic you don’t understand, look it up. The answers to your questions are probably out there in the internet somewhere.

Learning like this won’t teach you everything (and will not be adequate to get professional engineering certification) and it still probably won’t be fast, but it should teach you the basics of what you want to know which… well, is what you want to know right?

“Good thing it’s not the grammar bee…”

Was it that one episode of Hannibal where the guy grows mushrooms on diabetics he keeps in comas in the forest?

Allegedly