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11.09.2024. Every student majoring engineering or science should read this list of "Common mistakes when using the metric system". These will help you write better reports and theses. 11.03.2024. Here is a 1 year old, 155 pages long Microsoft report about the early tests they have done to understand GPT-4's general intelligence capabilities. Some of the tests and the results are really interesting. Please remember that Microsoft is the largest financial suppporter of OpenAI, the company that develops of GPT-4.

01.08.2023. Sabine Hossenfelder is not your ordinary physicist and here is how she understands the concepts of entropy, arrow of time and heat death of the universe. Suggested to students who'd found the entropy chapter of their thermodynamics courses not confusing enough.

11.01.2023. Here is a recent humorous and thought provoking article with 12 myths and legends of today's high performance computing world.

07.12.2022. Brian Kernighan, co-author of the K&R C book, interviews with Ken Thompson, co-createor of UNIX, about the good old days at Bell Labs, where a ton of amazing things happened back in 1970s.

05.12.2022. Exhalation is a Hugo award winner science fiction short story by Ted Chiang. It is about a race of air-driven mechanical beings that depend on swappable lungs filled with pressurized air. And their destiny is in the hands of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, like everything else.

07.09.2022. In this amazing video Inigo Quilez shows us how to create a realistic amination character using mathematical functions.

22.07.2022. Here is a video about Turkey for foreigners who don't know much about it and maybe want to visit one day.

05.07.2022. Just like at the beginning of every summer break, I am, once again, interested very much in learning music theory and here is a rather long video that paints the big picture at a very fast pace. I only know parts of the top two levels explained in it.

25.06.2022. Here is an on-board camera video of one of SpinLaunch's test flights that makes use of centrifugal acceleration instead of rocket engines.

20.06.2022. Here is what the 10 minute space tourism ride is all about inside Blue Origin's New Shephard suborbital vehicle.

05.02.2022. Here is an interesting flow solver development effort, where the simulation is visualized inside a small terminal window using ASCII characters.

29.01.2022. I am going to teach a graduate level numerical methods course next semester and while getting ready to it I came across to these two videos (part 1 and part 2) about the mathematics of pandemics. They explain the SIR model and its variants that are used to model the spread of an infectious disease.

09.12.2021. Here is a montage of 100 amazing images captured by the Hubble space telescope.

19.11.2021. We're all familiar with the dynamic system known as the Euler's disk, but maybe you haven't seen a demonstration of it as good as this.

11.09.2021. In this video, Dr. Hossenfelder explains the current status of quantum computing and the big players in this emerging technology. You may want to watch it at 1.25 speed.

22.07.2021. Almost all classical music and popular western music we listen to is based on 12 notes and on something called equal temperament. Here is a video about what this is and why it is the case. Some strict instruments such as the piano cannot generate a sound outside this system. It is possible to build a modified piano to get different tones, but it just does not sound very right, although there is no right or wrong here. Some other instruments such as the violin or the fretless guitars are more flexible in generating in-between tones. It is a really interesting experience to listen to the music of a non-western culture that is based on a different tonal system. Turkish music is an example with instruments such as ud and bağlama, but of course we Turks already know it and need to find something else to feel the experience.

17.07.2021. Secure Hash Algorithms such as SHA-256 are probably the most frequently used algorithms on earth. Several cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin use SHA-256 for verifying transactions and calculating proof of work. Here is a video about how they work and why they are so important.

29.06.2021. Depends on your age, but you probably know about Bob Ross, the painter and the host of the famous TV Show, The Joy of Painting, where he taught millions of viewers how to paint. Here is where all those 100s of paintings are being kept nowadays.

25.06.2021. Watch how a luthier builds a violin. Peaceful and relaxing sounds of tools working on the wood.

05.06.2021. If you are planning to take a DNA test or want to learn more about them, this guy took today's 5 popular tests at once and compared the services provided. I discovered the UsefulCharts channel today and found some of its videos really interesting.

25.05.2021. Here is a recent Veritasium video about the hole at the bottom of mathematics. It walks on the path "We must know" -> "We will know" -> "We don't know" -> "We can't know". It is about undecidablity.

24.04.2021. And you call yourself a mechanical engineer? Watch this and think again. Marble Machine X is an amazing machine playing music with marbles. Its designer and builder Martin Molin is a great musician, a fun YouTuber and a wizard of mechanics. Many years of hard work and a great accomplishment.

21.03.2021. After creating the World Wide Web 30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee is not happy with the current status of it, mostly in terms of user privacy, and working on a new version called Solid. You can learn about the baics of it in this 7 min video.

09.03.2021. Fluid Mechanics 101 is a YouTube channel with high quality CFD content. Highly suggested to students doing research in this field.

20.02.2021. Have a look at what Istanbul looked like more than 100 years ago.

11.02.2021. If You Were Me was a documentary series aired on BBC in 1970s. In this episode two children, Nicolas Tuprin from Bristol and Alptekin Oktayer from İstanbul exchange their places for a short period of time to experience life in another culture they do not know much about.

09.01.2021. DALL.E is a GPT-3 based neural newtwork trained to create images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language.

06.01.2021. Should we teach mechanical engineering like this? More hands on, more fun. Probably yes.

24.12.2020. Two years ago, China achieved humanity's first soft landing on the far side of the Moon with their Chang'e 4 spacecraft. And 10 days ago they became the third country, after USA and Russia, to successfully return samples from the Moon, as a part of their Chang'e 5 mission.

26.12.2020. Kelimeler ve Şeyler TRT 2'de yayınlanan bir edebiyat programı. Tüm bölümlerini internette izlemek mümkün.

09.12.2020. Based on the fact that the cost of AI training is improving at 50x the speed of Moore’s law, this article claims that we are still in the very early days of AI, it has the potential to be the first foundational technology to dwarf the internet.

20.10.2020. I normally don't share music videos here, but today I just wanted to. Here you are: Şahdamar from Aytekin Ataş.

23.09.2020. Here is a conversation with Brian Kernighan, a computer science professor at Princeton University. In late 1960s, and 70s, he worked at Bell laboratories together with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, and contributed to the development and popularization of the UNIX operating system. Together with Ritchie, he wrote the first and the very popular book on the C language. In this conversation he talks about those good old Bell Lab days.

16.09.2020. This video is titled as "Is Most Published Research Wrong?". In it, the following quote from Brian Nosek, the co-founder of the Center for Open Science, is used: "There is no cost to getting things wrong. The cost is not getting them published", also know as the "publish or perish" aphorism, describing the pressure to publish academic work in order to succeed in an academic career.

06.09.2020. Here is a video about the simulation of baking and cooking. The channel Two Minute Papers discusses scientific papers in a few minutes. Some of the papers discussed are about fluid mechanics simulations using non-conventional techniques, such as the Material Point Method used in this paper. For more similar beautiful fluid simulations, check out this, this, and this video for example.

04.09.2020. This video shows a few student projects from the Mechatronics Design course at University of California @ Berkeley. Projects are similar to what our students do in their senior year design course. And here is the past projects archive of the Berkeley course.

03.09.2020. C++ Core Guidelines, written by Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter, is a set of guidelines for modern C++. Its aim is to help C++ programmers to write simpler, more efficient, more maintainable code.

02.09.2020. Based on the performance of the recently developed GPT-3, this video performs a quick cost estimate of training a neural network with 100 trillion parameters, which is somewhat equivalent of a human brain.

01.09.2020. Although evolution in nature is a slow process, some animals evolve at hyperspeed when they are forced to adapt to fast changing environmental conditions, usually as a result of human intervention. This video shows 7 such animals, which are birds, fish, mosquitoes, sea snakes, ocean microbes, butterflies and elephants. These animals are forced to evolve only in about a few generations.

19.08.2020. The Human Genome Project was the most ambitious biological research program ever attempted. It started in 1990, with a 15 year timeline and $3 billion budget. It was an international, colloborative research effort whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings. After 8 years it got started, a small private company called Celera Genomics, claimed that they could finish the sequencing in 3 years, ahead of the government based consortium. And the race to find the human code began.

13.08.2020. Oumuamua means "Messenger from the distant past visiting us" in the Hawaiian language. It is the name given to the first known interstellar object detected passing through our Solar System. It was discovered by Robert Weryk using the Pan-STARRS telescope at Hawaii, on October 2017. When it was first observed, it was about 33 million km from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon), and already heading away from the Sun. These two videos are about this one of a kind (so far) celestial object.

12.08.2020. Steven Pollock is a physics professor with many teaching awards, such as 2013 US Professor of the Year. In this 22 lecture video series he teaches particle physics for non-physicists. It is quite easy to get lost in certain details of this complicated field, but as Prof. Pollock himself puts it, it is OK to get lost from time to time when you study new topics, as long as your teacher somehow manages to take you back to the track.

11.08.2020. James Webb space telescope is planned to be launched in about 3 months. Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is under development and planned to be launched in 2025. With these two missions ahead, NASA is already taking proposals for future space telescope missions. This video is about 4 such proposals; HabEx, Lynx, Origins and LUVOIR.

06.08.2020. Orbital Index is a curated newsletter from Andrew Cantino and Ben Lachman highlighting interesting technical developments in space, astronomy and related stuff. You can read it in your web browser or you can subscribe to their email list and the letter will arrive in your inbox weekly. Tons of information, tons of fun.

25.07.2020. Every 2 years, conditions become optimal to launch spacecrafts to Mars, essentially making other times unconsidered. 2020 is such a year, and that is why 3 different nations are starting their new quests. United Arab Emirates launched their orbiter Hope 5 days ago. It will study daily and seasonal weather cycles, weather events in the lower atmosphere such as dust storms, and how the weather varies in different regions of Mars. China launched Tianwen-1 2 days ago. It consists of an orbiter, a lander and a rover. And USA will launch their Mars 2020 mission in 5 days. They are sending the Perseverance rover together with a helicopter drone. These spacecrafts will all arrive Mars after about 7 month long journeys.

23.07.2020. Here is a list of worthwhile books to read during each year of life, from 1 to 100, along with some age-appropriate wisdom they impart. I am 46 year old and my book this year seems to be "Salvage the Bones" by Jesmyn Ward.

13.07.2020. RSA is the Royal Society of Arts. They have this video series called RSA Animate, where they created whiteboard animations for things such as TED talks. I am seiously thinking of using this technique to deliver online lectures. But first I need to learn how to draw. But the experts say that it is the easy part. All you need to do is practice, and the drawings do not need to be perfect at all. So I started practicing. Note that many of these whiteboard animations are created by a software such as VideoScribe or Doodly using template drawings. That moving hand you see may not be a real hand. I don't want to do it that way. I want to sit down and draw.

10.07.2020. Here is an animation that shows the entire field of mathematics in a single map. It shows how pure and applied mathematics are related and all of the sub-topics they are made from. You can also find an errata in the video description. If maths is not your favourite field of science, you can also find maps of physics, biology, chemisty and computer science in this channel.

08.07.2020. Starting from this episode, this video series is about World's strangest borders. I've always believed in that drawing borders and dividing the planet into countries is quite a useless practice with countless negative effects. The whole planet with a single nation also sounds impractical, but what we have right now is quite dumb. The 3rd episode has some content related to Turkey.

07.07.2020. Here is a short video about 10 basic features of cancer. After watching it, you can appreciate all different abilities of cancer cells and understand why it is so hard to treat this disease. The video is in Turkish, but with English CC.

05.07.2020. This is how the Market Street of San Francisco looked like in 1906, 4 days before the earthquake that destroyed over 80% of the city. What amazed me in this digitally enhanced video is the amount of traffic they had in the city a century ago. Tramways, horse carriages, cars, bicycles, pedestrians, all moving in the street in a terrible chaos. It is interesting to note that, by the start of 2020, Market Street is closed to all private vehicles in an effort to increase the efficiency of the public transit system and increase the general safety of the area. Sounds like a decision that had been made about a century late.

04.07.2020. This video is about the design details of the Hindenburgh air ship, which got destroyed in a disaster in 1937. Jared Owen's channel has several nice animations about things such as how the keys and pedals of a grand piano work or how the International Space Station got assembled module by module in the last 30 years.

03.07.2020. Here are two videos about Markdown and Pandoc, and how they can be used for academic writing. And this blog post compares writing technical papers in Word, LaTeX and Markdown/Pandoc. Students can also utilize the Markdown/Pandoc combination to create homework and project reports that look more professional than those written in Word.

29.06.2020. This article discusses 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. The techniques include very commonly used ones such as highlighting and rereading, and less known ones such as elaborative interrogation and interleaved practice.

24.06.2020. From July 1969 to December 1972, a total of 12 men have landed on the Moon. After 50 years, NASA is planning to land men and women on the Moon again by 2024. Everybody is asking why we haven't sent anybody to the Moon in the last 5 decades. Many are thinking that if we could have achieved Moon landing 50 years ago, it should be a simple task considering today's advanced technology. It is not. 50 years ago Apollo 11 was launched on the amazing Saturn V rocket, powered by Rocketdyne F1 engines. This video talks about why it is so hard to remake those engines today. It is not that we need engines with exactly the same capability today for new Moon landings, but the discussion and the reasoning why we cannot remake something we made 50 years ago is interesting. And this related video tries to answer a similar question.

09.06.2020. The Soyuz spacecraft was originally built in 1960s for the Russian lunar programs. With more than 140 flights, it is heavily used in the International Space Station (ISS) program. After the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011, the Soyuz served as the only means for Americans to reach the ISS until the first flight of Dragon 2 Crew of SpaceX 3 weeks ago. It is an extrememly safe and reliable spacecraft, with only two fatal accindents in more than 50 years. It can carry up to three crew at a time, and this video shows how it undocks from ISS and brings the crew to earth after a 4 hour journey.

02.05.2020. This documentary is about AlphaGo, the computer program that can play the board game Go, and its 5-game match against the professional Go player and world champion Lee Sedol. AlphaGo was developed by DeepMind Technologies, an artificial intelligence company, which was acquired by Google in 2015. According to Wikipedia, "Professional Go is undergoing a decline due to advances in AI programs that play at a far higher level than any human can. Former top player Lee Sedol said he had decided to retire after realising: 'I'm not at the top even if I become the number one'. Many other Go Professionals have expressed similar sentiments". In the future, same can happen in, for example, tennis. A highly skillfull tennis playing robot can beat the top professional players, spoiling the fun in the sport. Go and tennis are beautiful games, because of the humans playing them. Who cares about a Go match of two amazingly intelligent computer programs, other than a bunch of code developers?

18.04.2020. This moving dartboard let's you hit the bullseye everytime, no matter how bad you are at playing dart. Or it can drive you crazy with a miss everytime, no matter how good you are. It can be a really cool ME 407 project. But be warned, it took 3 years of 2 good engineers to perfect it. This is Mark Rober's channel, full of fun science and engineering projects. He is a mechanical engineer and a former NASA employee, who actually worked on the development of the Mars Curiosity rover.

16.04.2020. Apollo Real Time project lets you experience Apollo 11, 13 and 17 Moon missions in real time. This multimedia project consists entirely of original historical mission material; sounds recordings, videos and photos. You'll learn what happened in every second of those missions, all the way from launch to returning back to earth. At first, you may get lost a bit due to the amount of material and options available, but just give it a chance if you are a space exploration enthusiast. Simply amazing.

10.04.2020. In the first 25 minutes of this 1 hour long video, this crazy, talented, Russian (?) guy manufactures a model-sized jet engine in his personal machine shop, totally from scratch. In the next 25 minutes he, again totally from scratch, builds a model jet aircraft. And in the last 10 minutes, he tests his airplane + engine combo. If it is too long for you, have a look at the part where he tests the engine, getting 5 kg of thrust at 90000 rpm (22:30 - 26:15), and the test flight (54:05 - End). The video has English subtitles.

03.04.2020. Like many others, we are also having movie nights on these COVID-19 days. We watched "Loving Vincent" last night. What an amazing creative effort it was. But especially the song Starry Starry Night played at the end of the movie was very touching, just like Vincent's life.

29.03.2020. Niklas Luhmann is considered to be one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. He was an amazingly productive writer, with more than 70 books and 400 articles. He attributed his productivity to his interesting note taking system, called the Zettelkasten (slip box). You can read about it here, here and here. You can also find software implementations of it, such as this free one. Definitely worth to learn and give a try.

22.03.2020. The YouTube channel Ninja Nerd Science has a nice educative video about the epidemiology, pathophysiology and diagnostics of COVID-19. There is also a second video about the treatment, prognosis and precautions of the disease. I discovered this channel just today, and it is simply amazing.

12.03.2020. Exponential growth and the logistics equation is explained in the context of epidemics such as the one we have right now due to the new corona virus.

16.02.2020. Over Simplified is a YouTube channel with 20 videos explaining wars and conflicts that shaped the world in a simple manner. Caricatured explanations with an interesting sense of humor make the videos fun to watch. I found the channel while searching for a short video about World War I.

16.02.2020. Biographics is a YouTube channel devoted to biographies of "people who changed the world for better or worse". About 20 minute videos for more than 300 people can be found. I came across the channel while searching for the Italian explorer Marco Polo.

10.02.2020. Two related videos about the Feigenbaum Constant 4.699 and bifurcation of quadratic functions These introductory videos from Numberphile and Veritasium channels talk about the famous quadratic "logistic map" equation that can be used to model various physical phonemena such as population growth and how bifurcations and eventually chaos occurs. Quite fun to watch, especially if you do not know much on the subject.

08.01.2020. Gilbert Strang's Computational Science and Engineering Lectures Gilbert Strang is the lecturer again, so these have to be watched. The material is similar to what we cover in our ME 510 course. The lectures go parallel with Prof. Strang's book with the same title.

07.01.2020. Gilbert Strang's Linear Algebra Lectures These lectures from MIT courseware are a must to watch due to the lecturer, Gilbert Strang. He is an excellent teacher. I know him from his Finite Element Method related work and today I came across to these videos and started watching them. Even in the very first lecture, which is about very basics, I learned a few interesting new insights. It is such a joy to watch a lecturer who is in love with the things he is teaching. Simply beautiful. Textbook used in this course is this one written by Prof. Strang.

04.01.2020. Lex Fridman's AI Podcasts Lex does research in human-centered AI, deep learning, autonomous vehicles & robotics. He also teaches courses on deep learning. He is an expert in the field and in these podcats he interviews with other experts. His list of guests is simply amazing, including Donald Knuth, Noam Chomsky, Elon Musk, Bjarne Stroustrup, Gary Kasparov, Michio Kaku, Eric Schmidt, Guido van Rossum and many others. Hard to find this collection anywhere else.

02.01.2020. Manuel Ramsaier's MATLAB version of 12 Steps to Navier-Stokes. Manuel is a PhD student and in these lectures he converts Lorena Barba's original 12 steps series written in Python to MATLAB. These are short codes starting with the solution of the 1D linear advection problem and ends with the solution of the steady, 2D, incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for the classical lid driven cavity problem.

02.01.2020. Lorena Barba's Introduction to CFD Lectures Prof. Barba is mostly popular for her lecture series "12 Steps to Navier Stokes" where she teaches how to write a code to solve Navier-Stokes equations in 12 simple steps. These ME 702 lectures are going somewhat parallel to those. I already watched some of these long time ago, but I want to watch them again in the following weeks during my preparation for the new semester.