Almost looks like work

Over the last few years I've been working towards a PhD in the realm of experimental physics.

A puzzle has been floating round the internet, apparently impossible and assigned to 8-year olds in Vietnam.

I am a short man.

In my last blog post I waded through a lot of maths with no pretty pictures to show for it.

I've talked before on this blog about the propagation of electromagnetic waves, and that's not stopping any time soon.

What does this title mean?

As the old saying goes, you wait ages for a bus and then two come along at once (or more!).

I was playing pool recently, rather badly, and remembered it was much easier to play on a computer, when one can look down on the table from above and see where the balls are more easily.

Paul the octopus, for the unaware, was a true hero of the modern age.

Continuing on from my last post concerning optimisation and Lagrange multipliers, I came across a neat little paper on the arXiv here, which asks and answers the question: what shape should a planet be to maximise the gravitational force at a given positi…

It's that time of year again where I am forced to come face to face with my one and only flaw: wrapping presents.

I was recently at CERN for one of their accelerator schools, learning about new and potentially disruptive plasma-based particle accelerator technology (disclaimer alert - the subject of my PhD).

I was reading the other day about the Tube Challenge, where people attempt to visit all 270 stations on the London Underground in the quickest possible time.

I saw an article on the Guardian website here on the 3D-printing of shapes which project interesting patterns of light.

A while back I heard about the Summer Data Challenge, hosted by my university.

Diseases have been in the news recently, for one reason or another, and journalists are engaged in an increasingly ridiculous race to construct the most alarming headlines possible.

I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong: The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector 'read out', i.e. there was some motion during the exposure…

From a recent post I've had the scripts lying around to calculate the trajectories of particles around black holes.

If you're anything like me, the excruciating boredom of a trip to the supermarket is enough to get you thinking about anything else, in a desperate attempt to avoid a conversation on the best value lettuce on offer.

What's in a rainbow?

I've spend an unreasonably significant fraction of my life sitting in traffic, particularly along the infamous M4 corridor in England.

During one of my many spells stumbling around on the internet, I came across a very cool paper on modelling the trajectories of particles around black holes (bear with me...).

The Android app below will no longer receive updates, but you can access an improved online version at https://wifi-solver.com !

A few posts back I was concerned with optimising the WiFi reception in my flat, and I chose a simple method for calculating the distribution of electromagnetic intensity.

I've been experimenting with my data presentation recently, trying to make it a bit more 'fun' (read - epic procrastination which has a thin questionable veneer of usefulness).

We'll continue the theme of this fledgling blog along the lines of fractals, pretty pictures, spirals and Matlab.

I was told an example interview question involving ants following one another around in a square, and it continued to bug me for a while (pun wholeheartedly intended).

When initially fiddling around and getting to grips with Matlab a while ago, I had a go at implementing the 'logistic map', a well known mathematical process which leads to deterministic chaos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_map

To simulate your own WiFi signal, check out: https://wifi-solver.com !

The above image is of a few iterations of a Newton fractal.