Take 4 at a stable blog
My general rants and speeches
After finishing VVVVVV, I downloaded Mini Metro from the Humble Bundle. It’s really a fun game to play, with very nice aesthetics and soundtrack. If you want a nerd’s opinion, there’s even some graph theory I reckon that one needs to fully optimize the game.
For all the advancements in medical science, the lower back still seems to tread in the Dark Ages. I sprained my lower back three weeks ago, and all the resources online seems to indicate to be extremely careful as there’s no surefire way to treat the pain. That’s scary.
I’ve never really considered how aging will affect my physical health till now. From a tweaked shoulder, to now some back pain, I really need to watch out when I exercise.
I initially intended to blog to make tons of money. That didn’t pan out well, so I’ve changed my goals to things more manageable. For one, it’s a tool for me to survey my mental fortitude at the time of writing. Posts tend to get depressing as I go through rough phases of life. Otherwise, it serves as a tool to memorialize my life.
Recently, I’ve realized my writing skills are decaying. Forcing myself to write helps to sustain what I’ve built up in my undergrad years. But this is all in English, and does little to help with communicating in Chinese. Truth is, the vast majority of my family only really speaks Chinese. Isn’t it ironic that the children of immigrants gradually lose the language that connects them with their roots?
I’m glad there are others who voice this opinion. I hope your rest is peaceful.
Two notes
Overall, the book just seems to move along so slowly with a writing style that’s not as beautiful as I wanted it to. Oh well.
Verifying a stiffness matrix isn’t too hard. See the following PDF file. Otherwise, once a stiffness matrix have been verified, the mass matrix can be too with a few lines more code.
Instead of a Poisson problem, discretize the heat equation such that the steady state is our Poisson problem with an easy time stepper (say Euler). Note that we will have to invert our mass matrix at each step and have a mass matrix multiply. Then we should see that the solution dotted with the force vector approaches the same value as above.
As it turns out, the DG homework wasn’t that ridiculous. If you stripped everything down, and use a little bit of built-in numerical quadrature, then it was actually pretty fun. It turns out that programming all these solvers naturally lends itself to a abstract class with abstract methods paradigm with a few main functions (i.e. solve) that seems to be shared between all the problems.
On another note, I really fucked up meatloafs today. Didn’t season well (bland as ever) with too little bread and zero eggs (whoops, lesson learned). In the end, it was a bland piece of beef which fell apart very easily.
Finally, my god was the Aussie final spectacular. Federer’s backhand was immaculate, arguably better than 2006-2010 levels. Nadal’s passing shots were insane, forcing Federer to hit from the baseline.
I’ve wanted to watch “Kubo” for a few weeks now, but with the recent gif popping up… it just makes it so much cooler. How many people in the world have the technically and modelling know-how to do this… it’s mind blowing.
No, this post isn’t going to be mainly about Trump. I must say it is ironic that the title of the book I chose contains the capital of that mysterious country (and somewhat premeditated). The politics of the situation honestly scares me a little, with massaged information (to put it lightly) being tossed around.
But the book was a delight. The disappearance and death of a few characters really dampened my mood (but what does one expect of a story set in Soviet Russia?), with N’s being the most tragic. Even the ending is bittersweet with a certain tree promising to meet wisdom, with an uncertain outcome as the novel came to a close.
One shouldn’t dwell on the sorrows of life though; at least that’s what Rostov would’ve done, and boy was he a wise man.
I was riding the Silver line bus on the way back to Providence today. Something must have went awry with two passengers. The first thing I heard was “I’m going to punch you in your ****ing face.” Turns out an inconsiderate women bumped into an unforgiving man and ruined the mood of ten other passengers.
On an unrelated note, I’ve been going through “A Gentleman in Moscow.”