What is a Core Dump
A core dump is when you make a permanent note of a computers high-speed memory at a certain time. It’s a term carried over from the early days of computing when magnetic core tape was used as the high-speed memory in computers. A core dump is an extremely powerful debugging tool and is often done when a computer crashes or an abnormality triggers an automated dump.
Don’t worry, there was no computer crash or abnormality. My computer is still chugging along to produce plots and gifs of nonlinear systems. I just wanted to start a new series where I make announcements, post small things that wouldn’t make up a full post, and just combine some different stands and give them a home. This series will be me, core dumping my brain.
What is Gereshes
Something that a lot of people keep asking me is, “what is gereshes?”, “Is it some made up word?”. Kinda. In hebrew, you put two apostrophes like symbols, “, inside a word to signify that it’s an acronym. How do you chose where inside the word they go? It’s simple, they go before the letter of the last conjugated word. For example, CIA would be CI”A and if you were designing a High Altitude Telescope for a supervillain; its acronym would be HA”Te instead of HATe, which makes it a lot less threatening.
Each line individually is called a geresh. Two together are called gershayim, which is the Hebrew plural form of a geresh. My blog is not in Hebrew so I chose to use the English plural gereshes. I figured it would be a fitting name because in aerospace engineering there are a lot of acronyms.
Half a Year
Three weeks ago I made my 26th weekly post. That means I’ve been doing this blogging thing for half a year. Now I’ll save a full update on the website for the 1 year anniversary but wow. Thank you for reading, emailing, and commenting!
How my Life is Changing
This past spring I finished my undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). This fall I become a Ph.D. student at the University at Alabama with a focus on Astrodynamics. A lot of friends in sophomore and junior year have been asking about the application process for grad school so I’ve been thinking of writing a series about grad school as seen by someone going through it, where the first post in the series is about the process of applying to grad school. If there are questions you have about the application process email me at ari@gereshes.com and I’ll try to respond and work your question into the post!
Things I’m Thinking About
As I’ve been writing this blog I’ve been coming up with ideas for new posts and series faster than I can type. Most of the ideas are bad, lots are too short for my 1000 word per post goal, but on average I will come up with about 4 good ideas per week. With 4 new ideas and only 1 blog post a week, I’ve developed a bit of a backlog. My backlog of ideas is currently longer than 80 posts. I’ve divided this list in two, one set of posts with equations (hard), and one set of posts they are completely text and photos (soft). I’ve been having this itch to try increasing my posting schedule to twice a week, where one is a hard post and one is a soft post, in the hope of cutting down on the backlog. (Knowing me, my backlog would grow even faster). The main reason I haven’t started up this double posting schedule is that I want to start grad school first and settle into a routine before I possibly double my work for the blog.
Note: I’ve been thinking of increasing my words per post goal to 1500 so get ready for some longer test posts. If you like the additional content or feel posts are already too long let me know at ari@gerehses.com
A Presence off of gereshes.com
Depending on how you found Gereshes, you’ll probably know of at least one of my alternate accounts. If you came from Reddit you’ll probably know my subreddit and if you came from twitter you’ve probably seen one of my tweets. While all lead to my blog, each account hosts different types fo content because of the community it’s around.
Twitter – While Twitter will have the weekly post, it also hosts Articles I find cool, bad puns, my ruinous coffee addiction, behind the scene looks, and even some images/animations I didn’t have room for. When I get cool new rocket stickers, I post pictures of them there
One of my first posts on Twitter, stickers from ULA
Reddit – My Reddit account doesn’t just post articles to relevant subreddits, it also tries to be a good member of the community. It answers questions and tries to provide advice about dynamics and controls. I also have a subreddit that acts as a place where I put all of my posts but as of right now does not get its own unique content.
Youtube – I use youtube to store and distribute all of my video media. It is the least active of my accounts but it has some videos of rocket launches that were never placed up on Reddit, Twitter, or this website.
Monetization
A few weeks ago you may have noticed that ad’s started appearing on this website. They were more of a test and are gone at the present time, but you might be asking the question “is this site going to get monetized?”
Kinda; this website costs me about $8 to maintain every month and that’s before I factor in my time spent working on it. While I enjoy writing posts, I’m also about to go into grad school which I expect to be a major draw on my time and energy. You’re not rich in grad school and I’m hoping to remove the financial burden of the site so that it’s self-sustaining. Because it’s only $8, that means I don’t have to monetize the site a lot. If I start getting more than my monthly costs there are also a few things I want to try out that requires some capital. Modeling real-life dynamic systems in Matlab are cool, but creating hardware demo pieces of them are even cooler. Hardware, unfortunately, costs money. I’ve been experimenting with different ways to monetize Gereshes without it being too invasive, and that’s why you saw the ad’s come and go. I felt they were too invasive for the amount they brought in.
A much less invasive method that I’ve been using is the Amazon affiliates program. If you see a link to amazon it’s a monetized linky where I get a small percentage (average of 6%) of the sale. The product doesn’t cost anything extra for you so we both come out ahead. I’ve also been looking at starting a Patreon in the next few months so people can support the blog in a convenient and regular basis in exchange for early and extra content, but more on that soon.
Want More Gereshes?
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If you can’t wait for next weeks post and want some more Gereshes I suggest