A group of students (Pegasus Aircraft Group) from York University wants to build the next generation of short-haul jetliner, beating Airbus and Boeing to the punch, through the efforts of approximately 10,000 undergraduates from across Canada.

This plane is supposed to include:

• Full composite airframe and fuselage
• Narrower wingspan than either the B737 or the A320
• Engines designed in-house featuring hydrogen peroxide oxidizing agent
• Fly-by-wire avionics system

What’s the catch? You have to pay $100 for the “privilege” of becoming a contractor, after which you receive one share and $50 back at the end of the year. If you wish to participate for another year, it’s another $100, and the process repeats.

I hate to rain on peoples’ parades, but I wouldn’t go near this one, either as an investor or a student. Unfortunately it was mailed out to many of the Engineering schools across Canada — I hope people aren’t too gullible.

The image to the right (click on it for more related images) is an example of the research work I’m doing this summer. It involves image processing using “wedgelets” — squares that have a line dividing it into two regions, each with a different intensity value. By combining a variety of different line orientations within each square, as well as different scales of squares (not shown here), images can be represented fairly efficiently with relatively little information.

The advantage that wedgelets offer over conventional image representation and decomposition techniques used for filtering/compressing/simplifying images (i.e. 2-D Fourier/Wavelet Transform) is that they are very well-suited to representing image edges, which is typically how the most important information in an image is stored. Another advantage of wedgelets is that geometric information is inherent in a wedgelet representation. This means that once you represent an image using wedgelets, you also know where the edges are in the image, potentially saving you from performing edge detection at a later time.

My next goal is to implement the full wedgelet transform. In addition to having more wedge orientations, this involves having squares of various scales in the image so that more wedges can be used to represent a detailed area of an image, while fewer wedgelets can be used to represent large, slowly-changing areas of an image.

This post was mainly for the engineers in the crowd. However, as usual, a picture is worth a thousand words, so if you don’t understand or need a visual explanation click on the picture above to see the wedgelets used to approximate an image of a star.

I’ve got two nuggets of amusement here to keep my blog from going completely stale:

What were they thinking? The 10 worst LP album covers. It seems times were different back when you had to make your album covers without Photoshop, or good taste for that matter.

MC Lars – Signing Emo: I got this song in an iTunes Music Store sampler a few weeks ago. Here’s the video (largeish file) — it’s done in a storytelling format, and succeeds at being satirical, fun and catchy all at the same time.

If you’re wondering about the logo to the right here, it’s logo of the ficitious emo band Hearts That Hate, the main topic of Signing Emo. Watch the video, and it will all make much more sense.

Having been a bad blogger as of late, I trawled through my iPhoto collection looking for an interesting photo for the ol’ blog. The perfect thing to do on the eve of an Engineering Economics midterm.

And here you are dear reader: September 30, 2005 — Ryan, me, Scott, Jane and Daryl sitting behind our interlocking brick handiwork, seconds before an unfriendly PCL guy came and told us to remove it. A shame really… they should’ve worked our design into the finished sidewalk.

I’ve heard several stories from Dan and Paulo about an infamous question on the Fall 2000 Physics 1 (16.105) final exam, back when there were still long-answer questions. Now that Ryan is about to graduate, he brought in his whole collection of old exams, and this exam (and question) turned up.

Here it is, for anyone who might wish to solve it (if it’s possible — I think it might be, using conservation of momentum and energy).

A cannon of mass M fires a shell of mass 2 kg at an initial speed of 55 m/s (relative to the ground) at an angle θ over a smooth horizontal surface [as shown in the figure]. The horizontal range R is 290 m. The cannon recoils horizontally with a kinetic energy equal to 1% (i.e. 1/100) of that of the shell. When the angle of launch is increased by 5° (with the same initial speed of the shell), the kinetic energy of the cannon is found to be 0.76% of that of the shell. Use these data to find the mass M of the cannon.

Based on the figure, it should be safe to assume that the shell lands at the same elevation it was launched from (i.e. the cannon lies on a large, flat plane).

Good luck, and please post your solutions in the comments.

I’m trying to pick my jaw up off the floor right now…

Friend and former high-school buddy of mine Craig Braun, who is graduating from U of M Chemistry this May, is headed to Harvard for a M.Sc/Ph.D in Chemical Biology. All on Harvard’s dime. It sounds like it works out to about $300k US over 5 years. Damn. Congratulations, Craig.

It’s nice to have smart friends, and to know that there are opportunities out there for the people who deserve them (especially Craig). I guess the fingers are crossed for the end of next year, that something good will come up if I determine that grad studies is the route I indeed want to take.

There’s definitely going to be some soul-searching on the agenda for this summer…