💾 Archived View for nolanmcmahon.net › projects › projects_home.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:33:31. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I'm not one for watching television and movies, or scrolling through social media. I'd much rather work on my personal projects when I have free time. This website is an example of one of my personal projects! Here are some of my others:
Reading is a wonderful way to entertain the mind. It gives the reader full control over the flow and pacing of the content while leaving him fully open to visualize and imagine the concepts in the way that seems natural to him. Written work comes in a wide variety of flavours, meaning that there is a genre out there for everyone, assuming one has an attention span long enough and sufficient mental energy at one's disposal to bother reading in the first place.
One could externalize the process of thought - that is: idea inculcation, development, and application as reading and writing. To read and write is to think. As such, I enjoy writing about what I've read. The process helps me to work through the ideas that are trapped in the echo chamber of my own head and organize them into a more coherent form. That is the purpose of this project.
Most of the written content that I own is based in the physical sciences - mathematics, statistics, and physics. But I've recently taken an interest in Christian Theology. If any of this is intriguing to you, why not browse my library? All related notes, reviews, and essays are linked to from there.
I went to the University of Calgary and graduated with a BSc. in Honours Physics. I managed to squeeze all of the required study into just four years, but at a significant cost. I sacrificed a true understanding of the topics that I studied for a cursory, temporary knowledge of them. As time continues to pass, I remember less and less of what I learned. This bothers me for a few reasons.
1. I derived a great deal of pleasure from understanding physics. It literally made me giddy when I figured out how some aspect of the universe worked. But that knowledge is fading, and this makes me more and more morose every day.
2. I sincerely believe that God created the entire universe. (My physics education did nothing to dissuade me of that conviction, despite the unbelievably strong opposition I encountered to that point of view.) Thus, I believe that studying physics and mathematics, for example, is a way in which one can peer into the creative mind of God. It's a form of worship. God made all this cool stuff for us to figure out and has given us the brains sufficient to start to understand it.
This project is designed to address both of those concerns. My current plan is to reread and study all of the courses that I took throughout university in both mathematics and physics in an effort to actually understand the concepts as they are presented. To complement my study, I'm also going through them and completing at least a portion of the given exercises and summarizing all of the concepts in my own words. I'm doing all of this work digitally and compiling the results into PDFs, which you are welcome to use for your own purposes.
LINK COMING SOON!
In 2020, when COVID-19 hit the world, everything shut down. There were concerns about how this new disease would spread and what effect it would have on the world at large. Every day, you'd hear about some new model that had come out and about the predictions that it made about exactly how many cases there would soon be and how many people would die as a result. These models were usually found to be hilariously inaccurate (as models often are) but it raised a curiosity for me: how does one model the spread of an infectious disease?
This project is designed to address that question directly. I'm building a model of disease, with a large number of configurable parameters describing how the disease works and how the population responds to its existence. The goal is to satisfy my own curiosity about the spread of diseases and evaluate different responses to them. The project is 100% free software; you can check out the code from my git server.
I've already completed a version 1 of this model with Python, but I found the modelling to be insufficient to satisfy my curiosity. For one thing, the visualization process was way too slow. For another, many important parameters were not included.
As such, I've started a new version of this project which learns from the mistakes that I made with the first version and seeks to expand upon the functionality and feature set substantially. For one thing, the goal is to write it in pure FORTRAN. This will give me both a chance to learn FORTRAN properly and a considerable speed boost to the simulation.