Technical Reports and Papers from my work. Message boards: Muon1 Project Forum Software here General/Rubbish Discuss things. Miscellaneous: Black hole images Obtained by tracing light through curved space, something I did during my final degree year at Oxford. |
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Browser Wars 4-in-a-row where your team is your web browser Colunms Columnar entertainment... Tubetris Tubular Tetrominoes. NCGi website An experimental Asteroids game. | ||||||
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2026-Jul-01 14:08:02 I was curious about the shape of an 40-variable optimisation problem with multiple minima, so I took a 2D plane through the three best local minima I'd found. The first frame of this animation plots the score on that plane, while the later frames show what happens when I run ten optimiser steps starting from each of those points. There is a small basin of attraction around the three minima but a lot of chaotic-looking behaviour in between. This plot is analogous to the Newton #fractal.
#maths #physics #optimization |
2026-Jul-01 13:44:02 This #asteroid has an effective equatorial surface gravity of -1.1m/s^2 and is rotating at 20m/s there. The surface might be interesting or clean, as a lot of dust will fall off upwards. #space
https://rubinobservatory.org/news/rubin-record-breaking-asteroid-pre-survey |
2026-Jun-30 22:58:44 https://opensourcelowtech.org/ is an interesting idea. |
2026-Jun-30 21:20:02 |
2026-Jun-30 21:18:51 The deer is more interested in the camera. |
2026-Jun-30 21:17:23 I decided to leave some water in the garden for the wildlife because of the hot weather. |
2026-Jun-30 21:06:26 Proposed new rule change to allow civil #supersonic air travel. #aerospace
RT https://x.com/mkratsios47/status/2072009940302975207 https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/ARM-260115-001_Supersonic_NPRM_06-10-26.pdf |
2026-Jun-30 21:05:14 Explanation of #BlueOrigin's new launch operations concept on repaired pad. #space
https://www.blueorigin.com/news/new-glenn-return-to-flight |
2026-Jun-28 23:33:32 Forgot your password? Log in with Meta Implant. |
2026-Jun-27 21:15:45 There was a CORMORANT drying its wings. |
2026-Jun-27 21:01:14 It was drizzling at the beach, the sky was almost the same grey as the sea.
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2026-Jun-26 04:56:28 Why is it always a ball in sport and never a cube? |
2026-Jun-26 00:23:51 Now there are two rabbits. |
2026-Jun-25 22:36:50 Turned cellular data off in my car. It no longer has the stupid warning box "we are uploading your data etc." every time I start it. Long term plan is to also disconnect the relevant antenna (have to find out which is AM/FM radio, which I still want). |
2026-Jun-24 23:00:30 I was standing on the steps yesterday thinking "there's usually a rabbit here in the evening" and it was under the steps. |
2026-Jun-24 00:19:44 I nearly trod on a rabbit! |
2026-Jun-22 19:58:17 Lunar #solar #power tower. #space #Moon [video]
RT https://x.com/blueorigin/status/2069146585787781276 |
2026-Jun-22 18:08:40 Support for spyware technologies usually hinges on the assumption that the one doing the spying is benevolent and the one being tracked is the criminal. But it could be, and often is, the other way around. |
2026-Jun-22 18:08:25 An overhanging piece of rock at the beach had lots of holes made by tiny #birds.
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2026-Jun-22 18:07:49 |
2026-Jun-21 00:43:25 Some quite big deer have been passing through my garden. This evening one came and sniffed at the bird feeder. |
2026-Jun-20 18:33:04 Mowed the lawn, not much growth over the last 12 days, it's been dry. Some is going yellow with dusty soil. |
2026-Jun-20 17:16:30 A second trans-Neptunian object may have an atmosphere (after Pluto). #space #astronomy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(612533)_2002_XV93#Atmosphere |
2026-Jun-20 01:22:44 Interesting #GLSL has partial support for double precision (genDtype) in its built-in mathematical functions. sqrt, abs, max, dot can be double precision, but not exp log pow sin etc. #OpenGL |
2026-Jun-19 21:15:10 Scotland fans fly 22 hours in tiny plane to World Cup
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cx2j75vg4p1o |
2026-Jun-19 17:43:08 Was going to vacuum 75% of the floors but ended up removing cobwebs etc. too because once you clean to one level of detail you see other stuff that is dirty by comparison. I was also in the mood to do something but only requiring minimal levels of thinking. |
2026-Jun-19 04:01:18 I've got a simulation running over the long weekend at work, although the last version the bunch fell out of the accelerator after 6-7 milliseconds (10 hours real time), so it might only do slightly better this time. |
2026-Jun-18 23:54:36 Five-mile-long peanut-shaped #asteroid. #space #NASA [video]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/nasas-lucy-reveals-wobbling-peanut-shaped-asteroid/ |
2026-Jun-17 23:09:33 Ah, so the massive queues I noticed at Copenhagen Airport weren't a coincidence, they're because of the EU's new passport system.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20yxd790k5o |
2026-Jun-17 22:20:26 A tubeworm embeds itself into Lego grids lost at sea. [photo]
https://x.com/LegoLostAtSea/status/2067328952029335862 |
2026-Jun-17 22:19:04 #ESA launches new variant of Ariane 6 with four solid rocket boosters.
https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Transportation/Ariane/Ariane_6_launches_with_more_powerful_boosters_a_new_record_for_Europe Gets off the pad fast. https://x.com/Arianespace/status/2067226215916638377 #space |
2026-Jun-17 00:21:49 I actually saw my first fireflies of the year during the power cut on Friday. |
2026-Jun-15 23:14:11 When I've run out of something and need to remember to buy it again at the supermarket, I leave the empty container in a particular place in my kitchen, it's a good reminder. |
2026-Jun-14 02:31:29 I got the Arduino IDE working on Debian #Linux! Why is this worth announcing? Well, to let it upload stuff over the USB serial link, I had to add myself to the "dialout" group with
sudo usermod -a -G dialout user ...but this change only takes effect after a logout or reboot and I can't be bothered to do that because I don't like restoring all my windows back to where they were. However, last night I had a 90 minute power cut so had to reboot. |
2026-Jun-13 20:51:14 Went to see the Backrooms movie, I quite liked it. They didn't seem sure whether to do supernatural, psychological or visceral horror so hedged their bets and put in some of each. 😆 But it's by A24 so it was shot well, had some pretty effective scenes too. |
2026-Jun-11 23:14:26 Now it's soaked but the sun has come out.
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2026-Jun-11 22:49:00 I wanted a simple but smooth electromagnetic field model of an RF cavity for use in particle tracking. I didn't want to design the whole cavity yet, so assumed a particular on-axis field function and then used Maxwell's equations to give a power series in radius. (I loosely based this on a similar note for magnet fields that I wrote in 2013).
https://stephenbrooks.org/ap/report/2026-9/rffield.pdf #accelerators #physics #electromagnetism |
2026-Jun-09 23:39:10 2 mSv (200 mrem) is the dose you receive by ingesting a gas mantle. #physics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_mantle |
2026-Jun-09 22:41:20 But did I get The Rabbit? |
2026-Jun-09 22:37:26 Got one of these. |
2026-Jun-09 22:27:32 Got a raccoon on the trail camera last night. |
2026-Jun-08 22:28:16 I bought two new #Arduino UNO R3's (only $17 each) because I'd lost my existing ones. But now I find one behind my computer monitor with an RGB LED stuck in it. I think the other one is at work somewhere. |
2026-Jun-08 20:37:44 A Falcon 9 booster has now been reused 35 times. #space #SpaceX [video]
RT https://x.com/SpaceX/status/2063932254460494191 |
2026-Jun-08 00:15:19 Last night I had a dream where I had to get to another town by bicycle, but the bicycle was at my old school, but I'd forgotten the layout of the town so needed my phone GPS to walk there, but the GPS was powered by a mouse I'd trapped with some Lego bricks and then the mouse escaped onto the floor. |
2026-Jun-08 00:05:15 The rabbit is back. |
2026-Jun-07 20:06:20 Got my home-made interferometer half-working again. Was picking up some low-ish frequency interference and it turned out to be vibration from the fan of the laptop I was recording the data with. |
2026-Jun-07 18:53:26 Using the online shopping to figure out what exactly they have in the store because it's confusingly arranged. |
2026-Jun-07 18:47:13 My rose was cut back to a stalk 2 years ago. Last year it didn't flower, but this year it's produced so many flowers they're making bunches and rings of roses (even though it's not a multiflora rose!)
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2026-Jun-07 18:45:25 I know it's week late but welcome to the heady future world of June 2026. |
2026-Jun-05 00:15:25 Looked out of the kitchen window this evening and there was this rabbit.
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2026-Jun-03 17:15:01 Omega+_cc baryon observed at LHCb at #CERN:
https://lhcb-outreach.web.cern.ch/2026/06/03/observation-of-the-doubly-charmed-baryon-%CF%89cc/ #particle #physics #accelerators |
2026-Jun-02 22:05:19 #BlueOrigin damage report - not as bad as it could have been, cryo infrastructure OK. #space
RT https://x.com/davill/status/2061655383610114124 |
2026-Jun-02 14:48:46 When I visited the European Spallation Source last week I was lucky enough to see some of the workings of the rotating segmented tungsten target, which will be hit by initially 3MW and eventually 5MW of proton beam. The target 'wheel' hangs from the shaft in the video, which you can see rotating to align a different one of 32 sectors with each 14Hz proton pulse, taking just over two seconds per rotation. Of course when the proton beam hits it will generate a lot of heat, which is removed by high speed helium gas (the hissing noise) as well as a lot of radioactivity, so it might not be possible to stand here after the target has been used. #physics #accelerators |
2026-Jun-01 21:20:54 3-frame video of a planetary system forming. #space #astronomy
https://www.eso.org/public/videos/potw2622a/ |
2026-Jun-01 00:00:37 Ah! You can see the #rocket #explode multiple times in HD.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7yNQuNSGBw |
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