I'm on the cover of a Magazine!!! My paper "An educational opportunity: Acoustics in an empty room" is featured on the front cover of the July 2026 issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

Getting a corner of my research lab setup to start some serious testing of pickleball paddles and balls: modal analysis to measure vibrational mode shapes and frequencies, attempting to correlate with PBCoR, impact sound, noise levels, and other aspects.

Acoustical Society of America 2025 Rossing Prize for Acoustics Education.

My 2013 27-inch iMac died and it couldn’t go beyond Mac OS 10.15 Catalina. Just got a new MacBook Air (M5) with external monitor and OS 26.4 Tahoe. Of course I had to make sure I could still play Doom (runs great!)

you mean like this . . . .

Saw this quote from J.R.R. Tolkien posted somewhere a while ago . . . for the last 15 years as a Teaching Professor of Acoustics in the Graduate Program in Acoustics at Penn State, this has been true for me also.

My campus office when I moved in (summer 2024) and now (spring 2026)

First torsional mode for a free-free bar

Third bending mode for a free-free bar

Second bending mode for a free-free bar

First bending mode for a free-free bar

I have a new M.S. student working with me - exploring vibroacoustic behavior of ping-pong paddles (including the new 7-sided STIGA Cybershape). He's learning how to do experimental modal analysis - some of the cleanest free-free bar data I've seen a new student collect. #iTeachPhysics

One of my graduate students is making a website with some useful interactive tools for teaching acoustics concepts . . . today in my undergrad Intro to Acoustics class, I used his online web-based spectrogram for a demonstration. What a useful tool! www.acs.psu.edu/noahparker/a...

Now that the U.S. is no longer making the 1-cent penny coin, I was reminded of these 1-cent paper bills we used to use in Hong Kong in the 1970’s.

Holy plagiarism, Batman! I just found a 2020 book chapter that plagiarized my data originally submitted (paper copies only!) to the American Journal of Physics in 1998 before the editor asked me to rotate the plots for publication. How did these authors obtain my original unpublished plots?

I've always been a huge fan of the extensive footnotes in Allan Pierce's "ACOUSTICS" textbook . . . but I've found a new favorite: "Wind Waves" by Blair Kinsman. His writing style is delightfully refreshing for a textbook, but this full-page footnote on the Bernoulli family history is amazing!

30 years of making animations . . . I'm updating HTML code for my Acoustics and Vibration Animations website (for WCAG accessibility and HTML5) and found an archive of my original website from 25 years ago with a photo of me in my office at Kettering University. www.acs.psu.edu/drussell/demos.html

My favorite way to spend a quiet Sunday evening.

What a stupid waste of money. @PSUEngineering is replacing many dozens of doors in our 6 month old new building because the wood veneer on some doors has some unsightly wood knots. Here’s my office door (with ugly knots) that is slated for replacement. What a stupid waste of $$.

Listening to the keynote address for #ASA187 . . . humorous inverse correlation => larger larynx (deeper + louder vocal production) in howler monkeys correlates to smaller testicles. Bigger balls means less powerful and higher sounding howl.

2/2 . . . that I no need or don't use. I put the books outside my office in the hallway emailed all of our grad students to tell them a bunch of books were available. Within 5 minutes, this was the scene outside my office door! Hopefully most of these books can find a new home.

Went through some of my parents’ photos after dad died last year and found this autographed photo of Tenzig Norgay (2nd person to the top of Mt Everest in 1953 behind Sir Edmund Hillary). I got this photo as a kid in Hong Kong in 1976 but thought it was lost years ago. Wonder if it’s worth any $$?