Bumpy Terrain Imagine you are halfway up a mountain. Half an hour ago you decided to start bushwhacking and now you’re completely turned around and lost. What’s worse is that you’ve also lost your map and compass. It’s getting late and you need to get back to your home at the foot of the mountain.…
Why Memory Cards are Useful Whenever a friend gets a camera, they usually come and ask me “What accessory should I get that will make me a better photographer?”. I’ll answer with two things, spare memory cards , and spare batteries. You don’t get better through better gear, you get better though practice. Practice in…
It’s a Book About Code, no not that Kind of Code While this book is titled “The Code Book”, it is not about computer science. It’s about a different type of science; “the science of secrecy”. How to hide messages and meaning, It’s about cryptography. The Code Book by Simon Singh is a 400-page book…
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…
