Technical Reports and Papers from my work. Message boards: Muon1 Project Forum Software here General/Rubbish Discuss things. Miscellaneous: Black hole images Obtained by tracing photons through curved spacetime, done during my final degree year. |
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Browser Wars Connect-4 tournament by web browser Colunms Blockular matching! Tubetris Cylindrical Tetrominoes. NCGi website An unfinished Asteroids game! | ||||||
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2026-Aug-01 00:56:55 You should not let your roomba outside or it will vacuum all the dirt and there will be no planet left. |
2026-Jul-30 17:10:28 Quick update: I dug out an old file which was just the crystalline beam stored in the BNL booster with no acceleration. Its heating behaviour is the green line, which doesn't take off as fast as the accelerated ones. It will still eventually melt without a cooling system in place, but it looks (from the slope) that the accelerated beams could last longer if I fix the angular momentum spin-up issue that adding the RF is causing. #physics #accelerators
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2026-Jul-30 00:27:34 https://x.com/i/grok/share/bcb8cf844cbe44ae8f5d9172041a4a55 #GPU double precision per $ comparison.
It's telling me to go Intel Battlemage :D |
2026-Jul-29 23:08:08 This bit of #Mars looks kind of weird. [photos] #space #NASA
RT https://x.com/NASAMars/status/2082529612991762499 |
2026-Jul-29 00:10:04 I have a feeling if you buy a graphics card on "double precision FLOPs per $" you end up with an AMD gaming card, at least that's what I ended up asking for at work. |
2026-Jul-28 23:16:14 Electrical conductivity of #tree. [video]
RT https://x.com/accuweather/status/2081794347172061434 |
2026-Jul-28 22:23:32 It's still floating! #SpaceX #starship
RT https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2082186802912207064 |
2026-Jul-28 22:13:02 ITER tokamak sectors are 2/3rds complete. #fusion #physics [video]
RT https://x.com/iterorg/status/2082119059974332628 |
2026-Jul-28 20:12:07 I think this graph shows why my crystalline beam melted. It plots velocity gradients dvy/dz and dvz/dy (y is horizontal here, z is longitudinal) during the acceleration ramp. If these are unequal, the beam has angular momentum. I've found the standard RF acceleration won't change dvz/dy because it gives a constant speed boost irrespective of transverse position, so the two lines get out of sync and the crystal starts spinning. The "matched" ideal conditions are the diamond "model" points, with both equal. It eventually spins itself apart, flattening as it does so, as you saw in my earlier animations. The solution is quite simple: a tiny "crab cavity" but only at about 1/10000 of the voltage of the main cavity (think AA battery) to give the extra twist. In the final parts of this graph, the velocity gradients get more equal, since angular momentum is mr^2omega and r is increasing from the crystal vaporising, while omega has the same units as the velocity gradients, it gets scaled down. #physics #accelerators
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2026-Jul-27 22:18:49 Watched The Odyssey at the cinema just now. In terms of my favourite fantasy/epic films it doesn't quite beat Fellowship of the Ring but it's very good. My only proviso would be you might not like it if don't you like a lot of loud battles.
Looking at the synopsis of the book, they cut a couple of interesting episodes. I'd have been up for a two-parter film. |
2026-Jul-26 22:13:56 I was getting worried my house lock was sticking but then I put some light machine oil (like I use for the 3D printer) in the lock and it made a huge improvement. |
2026-Jul-25 23:29:48 Everything good in my garden. There's a rabbit, there's some mushrooms. |
2026-Jul-25 23:19:50 Japan has hosted its first full-contact humanoid robot fighting event. [video]
RT https://x.com/AtomsNotBits/status/2081154382855651386 |
2026-Jul-25 18:33:32 #Starship flight 14 is likely to attempt a ship catch on the tower. #space #SpaceX
RT https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2080876967839031712 |
2026-Jul-25 00:01:10 Haha the Starship landed in the sea and survived. It's floating on the water right now.
RT https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2080804682918764619 |
2026-Jul-19 21:29:19 My tree hollyhock is flowering, it has grown quite tall.
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2026-Jul-19 20:57:05 Spent a while trying to find a bug in a complicated routine, only to discover it was a bug in a much simpler routine that I'd *assumed* was correct because it was simpler. This happened twice. #programming |
2026-Jul-19 20:52:33 The 40000 M_sun intermediate mass black hole postulated to exist in the Omega Centauri globular cluster is large enough that a human being can get to the event horizon without being pulled apart, although they *would* feel the tidal forces (comparable to +/-1g over your height).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Centauri#Evidence_of_a_central_black_hole #space #physics #astronomy |
2026-Jul-19 20:43:58 RT https://x.com/CatsGiant/status/2078918531987431627 |
2026-Jul-18 19:51:05 Interesting that the Beta Pictoris system is sending a dust stream our way. #space #astronomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_Pictoris#Dust_stream |
2026-Jul-18 19:27:27 #BlueOrigin launchpad being taken apart for repairs. [video] #space
RT https://x.com/davill/status/2078442058717569385 |
2026-Jul-17 23:25:56 #Asteroid mission flies by #Mars. [video] #space #NASA
RT https://x.com/NASAJPL/status/2078181331453055101 |
2026-Jul-17 00:16:03 Some of the engines didn’t start
RT https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2077890013841310149 |
2026-Jul-16 22:00:05 #Starship flight test 13. #SpaceX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYpQwwf1XNw |
2026-Jul-16 21:25:44 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_window |
2026-Jul-16 20:32:52 Correcting the initial conditions for the crystalline beam acceleration simulation delayed the onset of heating a bit but it still went through the solid->liquid->gas phase transition as you can see on the temperature plots. The peak in relative heating rate (dT/dt)/T as a function of T is known in the literature.
#accelerators #physics
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2026-Jul-16 15:28:47 Caught the solid->liquid->gas transition in this crystalline beam simulation. I also corrected my initial conditions since the last one, so you can see some "adiabatic shrinkage" while it's still accelerating in the solid state. BUT it still melts, so I think I'm not following the stable region correctly for higher energies. #accelerators #physics |
2026-Jul-16 14:58:00 Is frogurt made with real frogs? 🐸 |
2026-Jul-16 03:37:19 Pringles are just quadratic. Tostitos Scoops are based on an eighth order polynomial. |
2026-Jul-16 02:56:37 I fixed a bug in the experimental version of my infinite ordinal number line. (There's also source code for this version). #maths
https://stephenbrooks.org/archive/ordinals/ |
2026-Jul-15 21:56:34 Everything's a bit brown right now with the wildfire smoke. |
2026-Jul-14 22:03:35 They want to go to #Venus. #space #NASA
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/planetary-expeditions/2026/07/14/utah-helicopter-flights-test-nasas-davinci-mission-to-venus/ |
2026-Jul-13 22:34:34 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/06/hate-algorithm-rss-one-tools-youve-been-looking |
2026-Jul-13 21:37:37 Two planes joined together launch tiny baby plane. [video]
https://x.com/Stratolaunch/status/2076672665524609353 |
2026-Jul-13 21:36:56 What happens if I put my whole wallet near a wireless reader, does it select a random card? |
2026-Jul-12 00:49:42 Found a giant dandelion.
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2026-Jul-11 22:54:31 #Starship test flight 13 could be as early as this Thursday. #SpaceX
https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-13 |
2026-Jul-11 22:38:18 🐝link system has Intel 18A processor with 5 cores. #CPU #PC
https://fudzilla.com/beelink-mini-pc-comes-with-intels-wildcat-lake/ |
2026-Jul-11 22:35:34 The AVX-512 situation. #CPU #PC
https://fudzilla.com/nova-lake-may-bring-avx-512-to-all-cores/ |
2026-Jul-10 15:48:46 China has landed a reusable rocket booster: #space [video]
RT https://x.com/Osinttechnical/status/2075441909078598084 |
2026-Jul-10 00:43:55 #Starship flight 13 booster is moved to the launch pad for testing. #lunchpad #rocket #SpaceX [photos]
RT https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2075353490713432440 |
2026-Jul-08 17:33:09 https://x.com/LegoLostAtSea/status/2074904212761174473 |
2026-Jul-07 18:35:11 Here's the crystalline beam seen from the side as it accelerates. You can see its height (shown horizontally here) does start shrinking as the acceleration progresses, but the width does not, making me think the parameters aren't scaling quite right with increasing energy. |
2026-Jul-07 18:32:06 This simulation took three and a half days to run but represents 55ms in real time. I'm applying RF acceleration to the crystalline beam in the BNL Booster accelerator. It stays in the milli-Kelvin range for thousands of turns and nearly doubles in energy (the orange text shows the Ca+ temperature) but towards the end it starts heating again. I think this is because I need to tweak how the magnetic fields scale up as the energy changes. Right now they're all exactly proportional to beam momentum but in this case, with electrostatic repulsion also affecting the optics, some things might not scale with momentum.
#accelerators #physics |
2026-Jul-06 22:15:07 Loading F-Droid and other apps on a Kindle tablet:
https://mastodon.social/@jonathonschuler/116872949121355605 |
2026-Jul-06 22:08:53 Extremely Large #Telescope
#space #astronomy RT https://mastodon.social/@esoastronomy/116871790208171810 |
2026-Jul-06 22:01:54 International Space Station captures fireworks in Los Angeles. [video] #space
https://x.com/Space_Station/status/2074192118747398573 |
2026-Jul-06 22:01:12 Aerial acrobatics in an F-35.
#aerospace [video] RT https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2073932424413585664 |
2026-Jul-06 16:01:17 Here's what happens if, after each optimisation step, every point is averaged with its neighbours. This encourages the formation of basins around various local minima and the colours at the borders give some idea of the barrier heights between them. This is a little too dynamic at present, it looks like a bubbling cauldron, and I forgot to anchor the original 3 local minima so one of them disappears under the bubbling, but it looks like it could be a promising visualisation of part of a 40-dimensional optimisation landscape.
#optimization #maths #physics |
2026-Jul-05 20:29:30 Got a thunderstorm alert with 80mph gusts on my phone last night. My car had a near miss with a branch but seems fine. I spent this afternoon dragging tree debris around and then mowing the lawn.
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2026-Jul-05 01:23:00 RT https://x.com/NewsAirshow/status/2073538262828716406 |
2026-Jul-03 20:45:43 https://blackhole.plav.in/
#space #astrophysics #blackhole |
2026-Jul-03 00:53:03 https://noirlab.edu/public/images/noirlab2616a/
#astronomy #space #zoom |
2026-Jul-03 00:33:37 Browser plugin that removes all images captioned "Artist's impression". |
2026-Jul-02 23:50:11 Some animals in my garden today. |
2026-Jul-02 19:46:19 I wanted a source of 10^4-10^7 elementary charges to test a diagnostic (Faraday cup) for the ion trap. It turns out charging an insulated metal plate with a small voltage (2.5V and 0.25V shown here) leaves enough static electricity on it to produce this small charge!
I triggered the scope on the small "shark fin" that appeared when I touched the probe to the plate and the charge drained through the scope's 1MOhm resistor. It can even integrate the area. For 0.25V applied, the area was 3.2e-6 V.s, corresponding to 3.2pC of charge, or 2×10^7 electrons. To get less, I would apply even smaller voltages to smaller plates, although the main purpose of this is to test an amplifier that will boost the signal. #physics #accelerators
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2026-Jul-01 14:08:02 I was curious about the shape of an 40-variable optimisation problem with multiple minima, so I took a 2D plane through the three best local minima I'd found. The first frame of this animation plots the score on that plane, while the later frames show what happens when I run ten optimiser steps starting from each of those points. There is a small basin of attraction around the three minima but a lot of chaotic-looking behaviour in between. This plot is analogous to the Newton #fractal.
#maths #physics #optimization |
2026-Jul-01 13:44:02 This #asteroid has an effective equatorial surface gravity of -1.1m/s^2 and is rotating at 20m/s there. The surface might be interesting or clean, as a lot of dust will fall off upwards. #space
https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-record-breaking-asteroid-pre-survey |
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