What’s a Finite Difference and Why do we Want it A common situation in real world problems is you have to take a derivative, but you don’t have the underlying function. You might be measuring some natural phenomenon and then only have discrete data points. Another time you wont be able to get a general…
The Klaxon Starts Ringing Imagine it’s the year 2300. Earth and Mars are at war. You’re an Earth warship, blue, based on an asteroid in the asteroid belt. A martian drone, red, lands on the opposite side of the asteroid. It’s out of line of sight so how do you aim your rail-gun to destroy…
What is Newtons Method? Let’s say you had some function f(x), and you wanted to find where that function is equal to zero. If that function is a polynomial like the following we can plug it into the quadratic equation and find that the roots are -2 and -1. What about if the function is…
What is Orbit Determination When we are dealing with two bodies, we can determine their orbital paths exactly using a certain set of orbital elements. If you want to learn more about these orbital elements you can find my post on them here and how to use them to determine an orbital path here. If…
How I Came to Read Kelly Back when I was writing a review on Ben Rich’s Skunk Works, I was trying to find a way to procrastinate. On the bookshelf in front of me, was an unopened copy of Kelly: More than My Share of It All. This book is an autobiography of the life of…
So You’re Thinking about Graduate School I got into graduate school this year, and a lot of friends in their sophomore and junior year keep asking me about the process. I figure if so many people in real life are asking me about grad school, people online would probably also benefit from hearing about the…
Why I Chose to Read Skunkworks This last week I’ve been on vacation hiking in Yosemite. I brought Ben Rich’s Skunk Works with me as a way to entertain myself during the flight to California as well as during any downtime that might pop up on my trip. Skunkworks is an autobiographical account about one…
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…
Running out of Time When I started my blog, I wanted to post every Monday. I worried that I might not have enough good ideas to post every week, but that turned out to be the wrong worry. As the weeks went by, my ideas list of articles to write, just like the books on…
Review of the n-body Problem The n-body problem is when some number of bodies are interacting with each other gravitationally, and you want to figure out what their movement will be at some arbitrary point in the future. I wrote a full post on the problem and it’s difficulties here. I highly recommend that post…
