It has been almost a month since my last blog post. This is because I started a new job at Trinity Western University as a .NET Developer. Yes, I have officially joined the Microsoft bandwagon! So you don’t have to worry (which I doubt you were), I will eventually start blogging again. Currently, I have spending all my time programming and playing World of Warcraft (If you play, you can look up Valaquen on Terenas).

I plan on extending my “holidays” another month. I still have software projects to finish up (which includes rewriting Flog).

Recently, I started studying ODEs and PDEs over again. I have always found this subject interesting, but I haven’t done much with it since University (besides the odd Classical Mechanics ODE). You should expect a lot more questions about Differential Equations in the near future.

Besides solving Differential Equations analytically, I have been looking at numerical approaches to solving these problems. If you use Maple or Matlab, it is fairly straightforward to solve Differential Equations numerically. However, these approaches are not really optimal for larger problems (especially problems that require parallelization). In order to solve these larger problems, it usually requires using a “real” language.

Initially, I started looking for numerical libraries for Perl. The only library that looked decent was Cephes which seems a bit incomplete. The Python library called NumPy seems a lot better, but this would require me to learn Python.

Anyways, while searching the web, I came across a cool little site called “My Physics Lab”. It contains a bunch applets that have physics simulations. The coolest one, I think, is the double pendulum. It is a simple example of chaotic motion.

Also, if you know of any good numerical libraries, please leave a comment (unless it is in C/C++ or Fortran).

I found an amusing video (in a very geeky way) on Uncertain Principles. The video is a contestant in the Physics Central Nanobowl.

I found the coolest webapp the other day from Mathematica which solves integrals. To be honest, I was very surprised that webapps like this exist. Mathematical computations are very cpu intensive and would put a huge load on a server. Considering the server load and the relatively small demand for online mathematical computation, I thought that mathematical software would be shackled to the desktop for awhile. Apparently I was wrong. It will be interesting to see how online mathematical software evolves.

I found an interesting video called the Story of Stuff which is about Materialism and Sustainability.

I think it is awesome how much attention these issues are getting.