Herd immunity and why it matters

We’ve all encountered someone in our lives that’s been royally freaked out by vaccinations. Be it a friend who just can’t stand needles or a hardcore anti-vaxxer, a certain fear of vaccinations exists in our society and the deadly consequences of this fear have been growing. We’re all in our own ways susceptible to the scare-tactics rolled out b... Read more 27 Sep 2018 - 3 minute read

Running Fluid Simulations in WebGL I - Simple Convection

Years ago I worked my way through Lorena Barba’s 12 steps to Navier-Stokes in Python, but recently I’ve been getting more and more into GPU programming and figured that it would be an interesting exercise to redo the steps in WebGL. Really when I say GPU programming I mean using general purpose tech like CUDA, but CUDA and WebGL are similar enou... Read more 29 Jul 2018 - 11 minute read

Mr. Julia

Going on my theme of wonderfully fractal images, I wrote a little simulation to introduce myself to webGL. Go have a wee play about with it here. The Maths You can find lots of information about Julia fractals all around the web so I won’t go into much detail at all here. All I’ll say is that the fractals, named for Gaston Julia, come about by ... Read more 08 Jun 2017 - 1 minute read

Regularly Expressional Fractalations

There’s something about fractals that humans find fascinating. They manage to contain a beautiful impression of infinity despite being not very difficult to create. These fractals have been produced by a very simple recipe: Split a big square of pixels into 4 quadrants and label them 1 to 4 Repeat this process for each of the smaller squ... Read more 01 Jun 2017 - less than 1 minute read

How I lost a Day to OpenMPI Being Mental

So at Glasgow Uni we have this little cluster for the maths department which happens to including about ten machines set up to work with torque (a job scheduling system). I discovered that these machines hadn’t had anything run on them for literally months, what a waste of resources! To rectify this atrocity I decided to try and run my MPI enabl... Read more 19 May 2017 - 2 minute read

4 Tips on Making Simulations Bug Resistant

Having written and used a decent number of simulations over the past few years I’ve come to understand that preventing bugs in scientific software is just a wee bit different from how it’s usually done in more standard software development. For one thing, many of the simulations come under the category of high performance computing (HPC) simula... Read more 19 May 2017 - 8 minute read

Parallelising Wondrous Numbers in C++

The Collatz conjecture, named for Lothar Collatz, goes as follows. Take any positive integer \(n\). If \(n\) is even, half it, or if it’s odd, multiply it by three and add one. Repeating the process will always bring you back to 1. The sequence of numbers generated by repeating the process is sometimes called the hailstone sequence due to ... Read more 14 Feb 2017 - 10 minute read

The Making of the Fiddle Synth I

My idea for a violin synthesizer came about from a Lau concert I recently went to. Before the concert there were a few different workshops, one of which was a synthesizer making workshop run by Martin Green, the accordion player from Lau. Unfortunately I didn’t make it along, but I did manage to see the concert where he uses synthesizers in jus... Read more 29 Jan 2017 - 3 minute read

Setting Up This Site

First there was a purely html site. I was about eleven. Then, there was the Wordpress blog (or maybe Blogger). I was probably about thirteen. After that came the social networks, Myspace, Bebo, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and then I decided I needed an actual blog for some reason. In my naivety I went for a full blown CMS stack, Mezzanine... Read more 09 Apr 2016 - 3 minute read