write major on diploma?

There is a petition going around to have the College of Engineering print our major on our degrees. Currently they just say "College of Engineering". I wrote to the Engineering Joint Council to say that I liked the diplomas just the way they are. If you care, you can let them know your opinion.

On another note, it turns out that David J. Griffiths has published a second edition of his quantum mechanics textbook! It's not on amazon.com, it's not on his web page, but it's in our student book store, and the colophon says "Copyright 2005". It's blue now.

SSAB steelworks

Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 17:45:42 +0200 (CEST)
From: Tobin Fricke <tobin@splorg.org>
To: underground@urbanexplorers.net
Subject: [UG] SSAB steelworks

Yesterday I had the good fortune of being able to tour the SSAB steelworks in Luleå, Sweden.

My Luleå friend and I were driving around seeing the various sights of Luleå and had paused to admire the huge construction of the blast furnace at the steelworks -- it's a monstrosity of pipes rising up into the sky, everything dark in shades of gray. It was a gray day, too, 2 degrees celcius, overcast, and misty, which all added to the apocalyptic look of the steelworks: black and gray pipes against a gray sky, with steam venting from some orifices and with railroad cars rumbling through to deliver coal. Then we had the idea of asking if we could have a visit...

The luck was that we were able to arrange a "study visit" to the plant, a personal tour of the place. The construction is ominous enough from the outside, but awesome from the inside. We were able to inspect the blast furnace from a distance of a few meters, down at the bottom where thirty two nozels inject compressed air at, if I recall correctly, 1500 degrees C. Towering above us is this vessel containing thousands of tons of liquid iron. They drill into it to "tap" the furnace, to allow the liquid iron to come cascading out through a ceramic trough to a hole in the floor, where it falls into a "torpedo car," a torpedo-shaped tank on a railroad car that transports one batch of metal to the next stage in the process. There's flame erupting at sporadic points along the way, and around the furnace. The liquid metal is a brilliant, radiant yellow...

At another stage of the process they add small amounts (on the order of 20kg to a multi-ton batch) of metals into the liquid metal, to form an alloy. This, of course, has to be properly mixed, so imagine now this giant cauldron of liquid metal bubbling as if at a boil -- they mix it by injecting high-pressure Argon from a ceramic lance, the bubbles stirring up the mixture.

It was a thoroughly impressive 2-hour visit... the working steelworks was incredible in all the superlatives of mass of and of temperature and just how completely "industrial" everything appeared.. but I think even an abandoned steelmill would be quite impressive to explore. An adventure for the bold would be to hop the train that carries ore from Kiruna to Luleå four times daily.

Tobin

Strange Behavior in Baltimore

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