I need to post more interesting things. I’ve worked on a few things recently, one is a visualization of people’s friends at DeBakey at http://g23.co/visualize.html It works by simulating a system of springs and and point charges. Then using a gradient descent (Cal 3 FTW) it minimizes the potential energy of the system. It’s not so great though as their is no friction in the springs, as a result the springs bounce forever and the system never stabilizes. To add friction I’d need to set up a second order ODE, the friction is proportional to the velocity (the first derivative of position) and the energy is proportional to the acceleration (the second derivate).

I’ve read a few things and been thinking about philosophy a bit too (partly because I wondered a bookstore for three hours recently). I’m curious what DeBakey students are learning in the (brand new) philosophy class this year. Anyone in philosophy want to reblog this and tell me?

Anyway, I’ll think of something interesting to post tomorrow.