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Why two rigs?

While most people immediately picture either their local Bumblebee or the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) when thinking of bees, those are just two species among thousands native to North America and tens of thousands worldwide.

Several years ago I wrote a post on simulation the Schrodinger Equation that had a brief intro to Quantum Mechanics paired with a simple Python simulation and visualization.

It’s been a bit over a year since my last astrophotography post highlighting galaxies and a bit over two years doing serious astrophotography.

I’ve always been a bit fascinated by radio and wireless communication, so I decided to get some commodity SDR dongles like the RTL-SDR blog V4 and see what I could hear, if you know what I mean.

Hive One sitting on the first BeeLogger platform after surviving the 2024-2025 Winter.

The last astrophotography post covered all the details on the technique for capturing deep-sky images and went into some detail about precisely how to interpret these images.

I was presented with an anecdote from a guy doing software development job interviews that went like this: Interviewer: Show me how you would add two big numbers represented as strings?

None of the images here were taken with this rig, but its where I started in 2010.

I’m now the proud owner of a Sky Watcher Quattro 200P on a EQ6-R Pro mount.

Technically not from the BeeCam, but about the same perspective.

A still frame from the BeeCam.

This post will try to give a grounded conceptual (with a side of mathematical) understanding of quantum computing by comparing it to classical computing.

When people learn that I have a physics degree, they typically reveal that they have a question about physics they’ve always wanted to have answered.

Motivation In this post, I will run through the construction of a 30A 125V smart plug based on the ESP32 platform that can be either controlled from a simple webpage, or integrated into a system like Home Assistant.

In a previous post I discussed the development and capabilities of the sdfray package, which represents scene geometries as signed distance functions (SDFs), and supports several rendering approaches.

I stumbled onto the concept of using signed distance functions (SDFs) to represent a three dimensional geometry almost by accident when looking up ways to generate 3D models (for 3D printers) programatically, as opposed to using traditional CAD software.

The HSV colorspace, matching angle to hue around the circle, and saturation to the radius.

I was reading an article about scientists who created an accurate simulation of the behavior of simple cells, to really understand their dynamics, and I wondered whether it would be possible to do the same for “simple” atoms or molecules.

At this point, probably everyone has heard of the game Wordle where one has six guesses to determine a secret five letter word.

Statically generated sites, like this blog and other sites built with tools like Hugo, are great for simple deployment and fast serving pages, but they lack some features like live editing and other dynamically generated content.

My initial motivation was to build a device that could receive and decode the WWVB time code broadcast from Fort Collins, CO at 60 kHz, and used to synchronize so-called atomic clocks seen on people walls or on their wrists.

When I ended up with a second connection to the internet (courtesy of being a Comcast employee), there was a potentially painful decision to make.

We recently had a new large patio put in to replace the old, broken one, but there was no outdoor lighting or even outdoor power, so it was quite difficult to enjoy this investment after dusk.

This post is a (likely one-off) departure from the technical themes of previous posts to focus a bit on the career trajectory and prospects of academia compared to industry.

Neutrino detector often detect neutrino indirectly by recording information about photons produced in the neutrino interaction.

Photon simulations for DUNE The DUNE experiment is nominally a time projection chamber (TPC), which records the paths of high energy charged particles by collecting the ionized electrons left in their wake.

A historical perspective on automation As I’ve mentioned before, the desire to automate (cheat, bot, macro, …) games like RuneScape was the primary reason I learned to program at such a young age.

One could argue that the goal of a physicist is to write and publish peer-reviewed papers, which incidentally require enough research, novelty, and scientific merit to pass peer-review at some major journal.

Particle physics is the original big data field, and science in general produces some of the largest datasets in the world.

This is a post about an algorithm I developed over a decade ago to generate mouse movements that could be mistaken for actual human input.

I have previously posted about the basics of maximum likelihood fitting, and how to perform such a fit using binned histograms for both the data and the probability density functions (PDFs).

In previous posts I implemented a math library that can do perform computations on arbitrarily large (or small) numbers.

Following the previous post on implementing integer math without utilizing some lower-level math implementation, this post will extend the functionality to approximate real numbers using the building blocks for representing integers.

I previously posted about simple, programmable, Turing-complete machines.

Detecting neutrinos Neutrino interactions produce energetic electrons which in turn produce Cherenkov (directional) and scintillation (isotropic) photons in scintillators.

The SNO+ experiment will eventually search for neutrinoless double beta decay ( 0νββ0\nu\beta\beta) by loading Tellurium metal into the organic liquid scintillator Linear alkylbenzene (LAB) and precisely measuring the energy of electrons produced by double

Exponentiation, or xyx^y, is typically provided by a standard math library on the system you are using as the function pow(x,y), or similar.

Solutions to the puzzle This is (perhaps?)

Previous solutions Previously I wrote a depth first search (DFS) solver for the dust matching game pictured below, and have since done some thinking on how it might be solved more efficiently.

The case for a fast JSON database Simulation programs and data acquisition (DAQ) systems for physics experiments are typically driven by databases which contain the numerous parameters that can be changed to control the behavior of the simulation.

The dust matching game I was presented with a simple puzzle minigame from the MMORPG Nodiatis, which I had never heard of and know nothing about.

Programming a machine Von Neumann machines, such as a typical desktop computer or smartphone, can (in principle) have programs written for them by hand using the machine’s assembly language.

Context In a particle physics experiment, a lot of data is produced and must be analyzed to extract useful information.

Introduction Home sweet home on the Direwolf20 1.16 server.

I have a server on a residental internet connection with relatively limited upload bandwidth.

I was commissioned to solve a critical problem during the Covid-19 pandemic: staying active on Slack / Microsoft Teams / etc while not actually at your computer.

Introduction A Chroma model of the Theia25 detector with PMTs and LAPPDs as photon detectors.

Early in the Covid19 pandemic I decided to take a deep dive into the math and implementation of neural networks (NNs).

Introduction Chroma is a simulation package for optical photon raytracing that aims to be physically accurate and very fast.