Testing out integrating plotly.js charts into the blog by going straight making animations of systems of differential equation to test their performance. The article image is, of course, not actually interactive, and the article read time is accurate only if you read the page source of the plots.

I downloaded my facebook data and all I learned is that I have sent enough messages through their platform to enough friends to compute a power law distribution. Also, several apps sell your app-opening information to Facebook.

Rummaging through my Dropbox I came across a video of a simulation I ran in graduate school of the nucleation of hard polyhedra. This is an example of how excluded volume (the only interactions between the octahedra is that they do not overlap) can lead to the formation of an ordered system. The octahedra are placed in a box with fixed number, fixed volume (so fixed density of around 56%), and allowed to move. Eventually the system undergoes a phase transition from a disordered initial state…

So it came to pass I was at Cloudburst brewing and remarked to another regular that the only way I could remember the beer names and hops within them as well as him would be to scrape the website… so I did. And put it into a graph database so I could visualize the networks of related beers and hops.

Friend of mine recently asked me for a copy of my old doctoral defense slides and due to email file limits, so be it I’ll host the slides here