It's been a long ass time since I've done anything here. I found this text file in my file manager though, it's a python program for simulating solar system formation from a random collection of particles representing a dust cloud. It was the first real program I wrote in python, which has since become my favorite way to write programs, though I never gave it enough effort to really learn (I can still write better games in game maker than I can in python) because I'm a chemistry student, not a computer student, and crap gets in the way. I was so inexperienced with python that I didn't even know how to define a function at the time, when I needed to do something more than once, I would copy and paste whole sections of code. The damn thing took 24 hours to run on my laptop, and the output was a series of numbers that had to be entered in a spreadsheet for data analysis, so animations were out of the question. I did it for an independent research physics course and took it the state academy of science meeting and got the best poster award in the undergraduate division. Now I am a grad student and my posters don't win awards.

For those few of you who remember, I also wrote an even earlier gravity simulator in game maker where you made a satellite orbit a planet. It was only slightly higher quality than most of my crap.

With the new layout and such I don't know If I'm breaking some rule about short blog posts or whatever, so I will try to fill some space. In fall 2009 I started a medicinal chemistry phd program. I am in the summer of my second year there and am in the middle of the predoctorate examinations, which I need to pass to continue in the program, I will pass, but it's still hard work. I got married a year ago too, so that's pretty cool.

Other than that my time is mostly wasted on minecraft. I have even written a couple programs for it, not mods, but programs. One takes a list of coordinates and places labels on an oblique angled cartograph, good for marking landmarks, but most servers have some google maps based program for that. I did it based on math from my isometric map engine, and you had to identify two points by their pixels in the cartograph to calibrate the map. Using the same math and calibration, I wrote another program for getting the minecraft coordinate from a pixel in the cartograph, so you could see something interesting and teleport there. I also made a program that makes a schematic that is supposed to be a 100 cube block of smoothstone surrounded by bedrock, and inside this bug cube are smaller cubes that could be empty, or have grass and trees, or lava, or buildings, and it was meant to be fun for SMP, but the small cubes are distorted and I can't figure out why, it's like someone just shoved the top half of the cubes over by a block or two.

I have referenced several things in the post, and I will try to link to as much as I can to provide proper context, lets see if I remember how to do that.

Solar System Simulation

Satellite Orbit Mimicker

My god, it's been over 5 years since I joined. That's more than 20% of my lifespan,