Old and old: Concentration

• Relaxation precedes perfect concentration
• Mental freedom. Avoid three devils: hurry, worry, and fear
• Seek a quite place
• Definite schedule

Jakarta and Bomb

I hate to see both word together, but they often appear that way. When I visited the city last time, the security was tight. Every hotel has security guards that check your car and scan everyone. But imagine if they have to do the same thing for years, as a matter of fact they did, without any thing peculiar happenning. Doing those things for years would wear them down, which is quite normal.However, I did not say this is the case for the last bomb.

Another thing, they did scan every car: visually check inside each car; opening the car trunk, running a scanning tool across it; and done. If one purposely want to attack, it is not hard the by pass the security system. Off-course, it is also difficult to increase the security level because that will make the system unconfortable.

It is quite a tricky problem.

Muscle response

Unlike many engineering materials, muscle responds to a load in a completely different manner. An engineering material, for an example: steel, will elongate when a load is applied, and at the same time, the stress will increase. For the case of muscle, the stress will increase but the muscle will not elongate until a latency time is reached. The above figure shows a typical response of muscle when a constant load is applied; such a test is called a isotonic test. The more peculiar phenomenon is that the latency time is different depending on the magnitude of the applied load. Furthermore, the muscle elongate shorter when the load is bigger. How does such thing happen? How to implement such a phenomenon in FEM?

FeG