Thread: My first programming job

Yeah, I know, my wording is cumbersome. It was research done with cadavers donated for science. SO...if you donate yourself to science when you are dead your spine might get broken!

It's also looking like I'm going to get to go into the field to take some measurements. We have accelerometers that are put in specific locations on the boat to gather acceleration data. The accelerometers work via strain gauges with little 'fibers' that flex when accelerated. The flex changes the electrical resistance of the fiber and subsequently alters the electrical signal applied across the fibers, which denotes the strain which denotes the acceleration. I got to watch how these devices are programmed and they're state machines that you might see with AI coding. We were having problems with one of the devices because it would keep sending packets of data as soon as it was turned on, which was interrupting data flow elsewhere.

I've finally completed a stand-alone implementation of the spinal effective dosage and now I'm working to port it into the main simulation program. It's really cool to see how a real commercial physics simulation is coded. The front end is written with MFC. The application is multi-threaded and communicates with the physics simulation code stored in dlls across a common interface. The actual math is ridiculously complicated. The physics works by taking data from a vessel (keel and chine B-Spline curves) and generates hydrodynamic sections (wedges). The force on each section is calculated based on hydrostatic (submergence) and hydrodynamic (slamming) loads, taking vessel speed and wave action into account. It's cool stuff. I've also gotten to poke around in a commercial air cushion vehicle (hovercraft!) simulation written for Textron.

So yeah like I said I got really really lucky.

Hmm... you are missing the point. A cadaver is an excellent choice for spine stress testing because you basically don't need to tell it to relax.

You could use animals, but countries prohibit that. I think snakes would make great guinea pigs. Especially if you also had guinea pigs to feed them with. Moreover Nazis had it right. Cadavers is not always the best option when you want to test in the upright position and so they used living human beings. But Nazis were defeated.

I really don't know if the people knew that their bodies would be dropped to determine the structural properties of the human spine, but the more common use of cadavers is to have them cut open poked and prodded by med students in their residency. A girl at the school I'm staying at just this week examined the facial tissue of a cadaver (after it was cut open by a med student). Regardless, donating your body for scientific testing involves some 'messiness' I guess.

Moreover Nazis had it right. Cadavers is not always the best option when you want to test in the upright position and so they used living human beings. But Nazis were defeated.

When I said 'people' I forgot the qualifier 'dead' people, and the research wasn't started until well after world war 2. I've read about weird Nazi experimentation (freezing people to determine how long a pilot or submariner could survive in the Atlantic) but I'm *pretty* certain that Nazi 'science' isn't included in this project. I hope.

Personally I always thought donating my body to science is a win-win situation. They get to learn something from me (... about bloody time!) and I get more attention per square inch of my body that I could ever have hoped in life.

Haha, fair point (I think).

You're creative.