1 Year
Exactly 51 weeks ago, the first real Gereshes post came out. As of posting, 57 people have viewed it. In comparison, the most popular post from this year was viewed over 9000 times. It’s been a long year and a lot’s changed between those two posts. I figured I’d take this time between Christmas and New Years to go over a few odds and ends that just don’t warrant a full post.
Revamping the website
When I started Gereshes, It was originally going to be just a repository for different project’s I worked on. An online portfolio of sorts, where blog posts would be infrequent updates in my projects. The static pages were designed to be the main substance. I want to spend some time in the future, maybe over the current winter break, re-doing, and expanding some of the non-blog portions of Gereshes.
I still have a massive backlog of blog posts that I want to write. It’s grown to ~150, which would take me about 3 years just to write them all. I’ve held off on doing a few of them purely because they require 3D graphics, and its hard to visualize things in 3D. A 2D orthographic image, will always limit the amount you can see. A well made 2D GIF, allows you to see the entire structure, but doesn’t allow you to explore it on your own, which makes an intuitive understanding hard. An interactive graphic, is the best solution. Unfortunately, my current workflow doesn’t allow me to create interactive graphics. So, I’m going to try to change my workflow. Over the next few weeks, the new graphics may begin to look different. That’s because in order to get interactive figures working, I’ll be switching from MatLab, to Python so I can take advantage of Plotly’s interactive plots.
Journal Club, What happened?
Earlier this year I started a series called Journal club, where I would read 5 papers and review them. Because I already read so many papers because of my PhD, I figured I could just reuse my personal notes and this would become an easy way to have a second weekly post. Unfortunately, as I wrote up the second post, I didn’t find that I was adding anything useful to the papers. My commentary was mostly on presentation and figures, not about content and so each write up for different papers sounded almost identical. It’s something I want to try again, but I didn’t like how the second one turned out so I’ve put the series on ice for now.
First semester of a PhD
Speaking of me and my PhD, I just finished my first semester! 1 down, *mumbles* more to go. It’s been a great semester, and I’m trying to decide if I want to do a post on my first semester, or wait until my first year is done. If you have any thoughts or questions, let me know at ari@gereshes.com !
My classes this semester were
- Advanced Astrodynamics
- Advanced Linear Control
- Space Systems
My classes for next semester are
- Graduate PDE’s 1
- Nonlinear Control
- Fundamentals of Abstract Algebra 1
Off of Gereshes.com
If you want you want more Gereshes content, we have a
I don’t know why, but I have a strange love for email newsletters. It’s why I send one out every week with the newest Gereshes post as well as some interesting links. You can sign up for it here.
Numbers
Akin’s first law is that engineering is done with numbers, so let’s explore the numbers of this year
- Over the last 3 month’s we’ve averaged around 500 people per day. That’s over 45,000 views from over 33,000 visitors
- At an average of 1155 words per post, I’ve posted over 50,000 words. That’s about 1.25 times the average length of a dissertation in Aerospace engineering
- The most popular time to read a Gereshes post is Noon, and the most popular day is Monday.
- We’ve been retweeted by Steven Strogatz, Alan Stern, Vsauce, Matlab, and 3Blue1Brown!
2018 has been an interesting year, here’s to 2019 being even better!
Have a good New Year’s, and stay safe!
-Ari