Ahhhh… the Holiday Season…Every year around this same time a slew of  “experts on gift-giving” come out with numerous super-ultimate gift lists for mothers, fathers, friends, teachers, babysitters and hairdressers. But when was the last time you’ve seen a great gift giving guide for all of the Engineers in your life?

I have yet to see such a guide. So I am self-proclaiming myself as a gift-expert for scientists and engineers this season! Here is the SUPER-ULTIMATE Gift Guide for every engineer, scientist, and techie-in-general on your list. Enjoy!

(Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with any of the companies below and am not compensated for any of the product suggestions. I own MVP Modeling Solutions.)

SUPER-ULTIMATE Gift Guide

For your co-workers:

Working with Engineers? Thank them for their great work and attention to detail with:

Neocube 216pc Magnet Puzzle

It’s a fun magnetic puzzle that anyone working in front of a computer all day would appreciate! It looks cool sitting on your desk and keeps you entertained while you’re procrastinating… I mean, brainstorming.

$19.95 from www.Amazon.com

Click here to see the cool video of the puzzle.

For your lab mates:

Need a creative gift for a biologist or chemist that will actually help them work better? Get them a stylish looking Molecular Model Set. They are fun to tinker with while…uuuhhmmm…brainstorming, they look cool AND make you look smart while sitting on your desk.

$31.50 from www.Amazon.com

Piled Higher and Deeper comics are an oldie but goody. Created by a Stanford engineering graduate it kept me entertained though out grad school years and students and advisors alike can still empathize with the comic strip’s characters.

For your thesis advisor:

If you are a grad student, praying for graduation - give a small token of appreciation to your advisor! Every little bit helps.

World’s Best Advisor Mug

$12.95 PhD Comics Store

For your friends who are desperate to get out of grad school and start living:

Grad Student Motivation Chart Mug

$12.95 PhD Comics Store

For any of your Techie friends having to survive in the corporate world:

Of course we can not forget about Dilbert as we think of our “could-be” researchers who have sold their souls to the corporate world (yes, that would be me).

Make them a Customized Dilbert gift!

1)      Choose favorite character

2)      Select your favorite comic strip

3)      Choose to print the strip on a mug, card, t-shirt of water bottle

For anyone in the STEMs fields:

Entertaining t-shirts from www.thinkgeek.com. Here are some of my favorites:

T-shirt with a built-in equalizer. Animates to ambient noise or music. $29.99

Stand back t-shirt: Staring at $15.99

Molar Mole t-shirt: (it’s made out of repeated Avogadro’s number!) Staring at $15.99

For your HR, procurement of training manager:

Last but not least, remember that your HR and procurement departments can be helpful in letting you know about various opportunities in the company. Make their job easier by helping them spend company training budgets on courses that engineers would enjoy and managers would approve off:

MVP Courses now on sale! Choose from chemistry, chemical-kinetics and engineering modeling courses.

Students - help the people in charge of seminars and talks at your university. Suggest they look into the entertaining and valuable MVP Keynote talks.

Hope this gift guide will help take care of every engineer and scientist on your list.

Very Happy Holidays!

Masha

Hi MVP Readers,

As promised, here is my “Where has Masha been” video. Please forgive the video editing quality - I am still trying to get the hang of it. Turns out that using Windows Movie Maker is a complete nightmare. If anyone has a suggestion for a better video editing software for Windows XP,  please let me know in the comments!

In this video: My summer 2010 update, TurboExpo, Costa Rica, new book and new ACS courses!

- Description of my 2 hour TurboExpo presentation is here (page 34) http://www.asmeconferences.org/te10/pdfs/TE10_FinalProgram.pdf

-Upcoming ACS courses:

–Essentials of Chemical Kinetics

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=KNWEB

–Computer Simulation of  Reactive Flows

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=RFWEB

–Chemistry for non-chemists

http://www.proed.acs.org/courses/course_overview.cfm?course_code=CHWEB

All the Best!

Masha

I am trying out another spiffy new way to provide valuable information to you, MVP blog readers. This is a 4 minute slide presentation about two biggest problems that plague the reactive flow modeling efforts in the engineering industry.

Basically, they boil down to two issues:

1) A perfect modeling software does not exist

2) Chemical mechanisms are user input

- Correct mechanisms do not exist

-  An industry standard for mechanism testing does not exist

Interested? Play the video or watch it on youtube if your browser gives you problems. Read more »