First Published: 2022 April 21
As should be fairly unsurprising to most of my readers, in my research I1 need to graph a lot of things. Historically, I’ve graphed in either Excel2 or Python3, but I’m not really happy with either. It’s been suggested to me that I should learn Igor, which I feel notably unhappy about.
“Why”, you might ask, “do you have strong feelings about graphing? More to the point, what strong feelings do you have?” you might continue.
I have strong feelings because I think things should be done well. Python fails for graphing in my opinion because it takes far too long for me to load my data, and I don’t love the way that the graphs look automatically.4 Excel is worse on that front, and is awkward to manipulate graphs in. Excel is also bad for a major reason I mislike Igor: neither is FOSS5
If as I scientist I believe that information calls to be shared6, then I fail to see how I can justify using proprietary software any more than is utterly essential. Now, I admit some amount of hypocrisy here. I do not run on Linux or another FOS operating system, but I try hard to make sure all the software I use is runnable on those systems if possible. And, while I accept that there are circumstances where closed access programs may be essential for research,7 plotting data should not be one of them.
Of course, I also mislike Igor for other reasons, mostly dealing with the complete dearth of help available for it on the internet, its complete lack of user friendliness, and its absolutely baffling choices to be different than every other system I’ve worked with in handling x and y data. Is it powerful? I have to assume so, though I have no intention of learning how.
So, 118 words later, time to finally get to the title of this post. Yesterday I saw a groupmate working on GNUPlot, and realized that it could likely solve a lot of my issues. It’s super fun and easy, if I want to plot sin of x, for instance, I just say “plot sin(x)” and I get a pretty little graph. As I learned fairly quickly, you can make really fun arbitrary graphs, for instance using the commands:
set xrange [-1:1]8
plot for [i=1:30] x**i lw i/2
This plots 30 lines of increasing thickness. Why did I do this, you may ask.
There’s an argument for color where setting the color to -1 results in black. I was curious how many colors there were, so wanted to plot an arbitrary number of lines. Then I quickly got distracted after learning there were 8 and played around more.
Now, that isn’t to say that GNUPlot is without its issues.
One thing that Python and Excel do really well is allow you to edit and manipulate your data. GNUPlot doesn’t support doing that. However, when I need to manipulate my data, I’m probably going to be doing so inside of the spectral fitting software we use,9 rather than in either program, which makes that less of a concern. I still don’t know how to export the graph10 or plot an existing piece of data, but those both seem simple enough, and the documentation available online is really incredibly useful and prevalent.
So, moving forward I hope to switch over to GNUPlot for my plotting needs.
will↩
natively↩
using matplotlib.pyplot↩
though it can export to a format that makes the figure text readable in my LaTeX documents.↩
Free and Open Source Software.↩
and if I don’t, why am I doing research?↩
though I can’t think of many outside of government-enforced secrecy, which is its own bag of worms↩
this limits the plotting range so you can actually see the pretty things↩
which you can download the source for↩
an immediate google search seems to suggest the use of it with LaTeX is common and well-accepted, which is nice.↩
First Published: 2022 April 20
Crocheting is something I’ve blogged about once before. I didn’t talk much about it, which is fair.
The biggest project I’ve ever worked on for crocheting is a blanket that I began in December 2019. I’m currently about 1/3 finished with it, though it’s been at least a calendar year since I’ve worked on it, so I should get back to it.
Currently, I’m in the habit of making hats.1 I’ve been averaging one a week for the two and a half weeks I’ve been crocheting them. This week’s hat reminded me that I really prefer to crochet using yarn rated for a larger hook than the one I use, because otherwise the material ends up feeling too flimsy to me. But, I neglected to realize this until I had finished an entire hat, so to make it thicker I’m now going through the entire design backwards and adding another layer of thickness. In many respects, the way I make hats makes this much easier than it otherwise could be.
The way that I crochet hats is by making a circle of 10 double crochet in the round.2 I then, rather than adding a discrete row, just keep crocheting onto the first stitch again, making a spiral. In the second “row”, I put 20 stitches in. There are 30 in the third and so on until I get to the 70 stitches that’s been working for me lately. I should mention that I crochet into the back loop only, which adds a pretty spiral pattern into the hat. This also worked well for me working backwards, because it gives me an easy place to crochet into. Anyways, once I’ve reached the 70 stitches, I just keep going in the spiral without adding stitches until the hat gets long enough.
For this hat, I ended the string, because I thought I wanted to crochet from the top down again. However, upon consideration, it appears that bottom up works better for the second layer, so I could have saved two ends by just going backwards from the bottom.
As I should say more often, c’est la vie.
First Published: 2022 April 18
Sorry for the sudden disappearance, but it’s relevant to the post I promise.1 One thing that’s been a positive from these crazy few years is that I haven’t really gotten sick as much. I feel like I got the flu or something every winter and spring, and I think I’ve maybe gotten sick twice since it began.
On the other hand, I feel like I used to bounce back from illness immediately, and now it takes me a little longer. Maybe it’s the whole “I don’t sleep for 12 hours normally anymore” or “I don’t eat as well anymore”2, but I got sick over the weekend, and I felt a lot sicker than I feel like I remember I used to normally feel when I was ill. I’m very much on the mend now, but it meant that I didn’t really have the mental or emotional capacity to really do much of anything, especially writing a blog post.
First Published: 2022 April 15
Despite my claims about needing a while to adequately learn the telestich, I’m happy enough with the speed I wrote yesterday’s that I’m going to move on to the double acrostic. I feel like this is going to be really hard because the way that I had to modify my word choices was very different in the two single acrostic forms. But, you know what they say: nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Attempt
Attend to the pleasant aroma
That wafts from an effort since past
Take heed of the slow-moving draft
Each time that it comes to your side
Meet the day with outward calm
Pass times until all used up
Together with every attempt
So not the best poem I’ve ever written, but I think it’s not horrible for a stream of conscious writing. According to the book of forms, the poem’s content should center around the word being built. I don’t know if I’ve done a particularly good job with that today, but there’s always tomorrow.
First Published: 2022 April 14
As I mentioned last time, I’m writing through a book of poetic forms. I wrote my first telestich, and it’s a much different experience than writing a typical acrostic. I can think of lots of words that start with almost any letter of the alphabet, but very few words ending in certain letters. The first poem I worked on was based on “church”, which meant I needed two c-ended words and a u-ended word. It took a lot of searching for both, so I think that to make a good telestich the word choice is far more important than in an acrostic. Future poems will hopefully go better as I figure out good words. Below is today’s poem, rough as it is.
Begin and End
In watching water flow and ebB
Or daylight turn to evE
Unlike that last and bitter dreG
Which ends the alibI
I start and hope to wiN
First Published: 2022 April 12
As I mentioned yesterday, I’m writing through a book of poetic forms. The first of these forms listed is the acrostic. There are apparently four kinds of acrostic:
normal acrostic: the first letters of each line spell out a word, with stanzas forming the spaces
telestich: the last letter of each line spell out a word, otherwise the same
double acrostic: acrostic+telestich, but using the same words, I assume, because
coumpound acrostic: spells a different word in the first and last letters
According to the book, acrostics tend to have meter and rhyme, but it specifies nothing further, which kind of makes sense. Any other restrictions added probably just make it an acrostic and a rhyme or what not.
Yesterday I wrote a standard acrostic, which went easily enough. Since my goal is proficiency1 in the different forms, I think the single one was enough. Today is going to be a telestich, and hopefully that goes well as well.
if that’s a fair or valid term↩︎
First Published: 2022 April 11
I may be about ten days late for this, but better late than never.
As with my March reflection, I will start by reflecting on last month’s goals. My goals for the month of March were:
Blog daily. I think this is still a helpful thing for me to do
Write music or poetry daily. I would like to do this, even if it is hard
Do the pushup/squat thing and stretch daily. I liked how I felt when I did this
Listen to BiaY Daily. I like making progress on it.
Reach 50000 words in my book. I’m currently at more than 20K, so this should be very doable.
I accomplished none of these.
I blogged for about half of March, before I gave it up. I don’t think I wrote poetry more than a few times in March. I stopped the pushups almost immediately. I did not listen to BiaY. I got to approximately 40000 words, which is fun, because it means that a sustainable pace is apparently 20K words a month, though I guess it’s always possible to draw a line with two data points.
My goals for April are:
Blog daily (starting now). I think that the reflection it makes me do is really useful. I do think that I need to find a better way to ensure that I have time for it, though.
Write a poem a day. I just bought a book of poetic forms, so it would be good to start working through them.1
Stretch daily. I tried to stretch this morning and was shocked at how inflexible I am.
Listen to BiaY daily. I really don’t like how far behind I am, and I’d like to catch up sooner than later.
Reach 60K words in the book. If past months are indicative, that’s a goal I can accomplish. I think I may need to do some more planning, rather than writing by the seat of my pants, because I’m starting to get into a bit of a rut in terms of writing. Maybe it’s just that I have continued this section of the book for far too long.2
A secondary goal for the book is to write every day, even if only a few words. I think it’s good to develop good habits, though I guess I should think about balancing doing something because I enjoy it with getting work done. That’s another thing to think about I suppose.
Practice guitar every day. I like the sound of guitar, and I would love to be able to play longer without my fingers hurting.
I hope these are plausible goals, though only time can say for certain. I know that I am about to write the poem, so that’s at least four things off the list today.3 Hopefully I can make it through all six tasks each day, especially since most of them are so short.
First Published: 2022 April 10
Philippians 2:9 “Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.”
Today marks the final Sunday of Lent, and what is apparently in the top four most attended Masses in the year. Today we celebrate both the arrival of our Lord to Jerusalem, and also mourn his death. The congregation I was a part of had a part to speak in the Gospel.
We played the role of the disciples and the random members of the community. The lines that we speak were coursing through my mind today, though differently before and after the Mass. Before the Mass, I thought about how we shout “Crucify him”1, because our sins are what led Christ to be crucified. After the Mass, though I have been reflecting on how we also say that we have lacked for nothing from the Lord. That line stays with me more, because the idea that we are sinful and Christ died for our sins is not something that I’m currently struggling with in my faith.
The idea that, despite all of our faults, and despite what common sense would tell us, we can, in fact, rely solely on the goodness of the Lord to protect us and preserve us is something that I’m struggling with. Even those closest to him, who he had just eaten with, and who he founded his Church on betrayed and abandoned him, just as we do when we sin. Still, the Lord forgave Peter and the Lord forgives us.
Another image from the Gospel that struck me today was the image of Jesus praying in the garden. It’s the first of the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, which is the set of Mysteries I’ve found I can pray the most easily. The line that struck me today was “He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground.”2 What does it mean to have sweat like drops of blood?
Is it that the sorrow he felt was so piercing and distressing that the drops of sweat fell as painfully as a dripping wound?
Is it that the sweat itself was bloody and red?
Is it that the sorrow he felt now on our behalves was going to be mirrored soon in the blood of the Cross?
Ultimately I don’t know, but all of the three feel like plausible enough explanations to me.
As I write this musing, though, I am struck by the two verses immediately before. Our Lord prays that he might be spared the trial he is to undergo, and an angel appears to strengthen Him. I don’t know if I’ve ever remembered that verse before. Normally, I’ve seen the verse used solely to remind us that even in the midst of suffering, the human person of Jesus was fully subservient to the Divine Will. The inclusion of the second line, though, really speaks to me. Even the Lord, who had perfect knowledge of his eventual resurrection and ascension, found solace and comfort from an angel. How are we to live through the struggles in our own lives if we refuse to be comforted?
That’s certainly something I’m thinking on right now. An angel came to strengthen Him, because the Lord will always support us in doing His will. That doesn’t make the trial any easier, though.
Anyways, this is a long and rambling way for me to say that there are a lot of really deep and meaningful things that I think I could pull from this reading if I really gave it the time it deserves.
First Published: 2022 April 9
Yesterday I fully intended to write a monthly reflection post, for all that it would be a full week late. Instead, through a series of coincidences, I found that I was without my computer and away from home until far too late to write a post.
The story for those interested will be below.
We had a small birthday celebration for a group mate, which I left to go to a Fish Fry at a local church with friends. While at the fish fry, I got to see another one of my group mates, who asked if I could come back to their home to help jump a car. From there, I went to go catch up with a friend, which ended up resulting in me also catching up with a few other friends. By the time I finally got to bed, it was well past one, but I felt very well socialized.
Tomorrow I will be posting my reflection, so I guess I’ll reflect on the month on Monday.
First Published: 2022 April 7
It’s been about 3 weeks since my last post, when I said I was going to take a break. I don’t regret the break, because I still believe what I wrote then, that “for whatever reason, writing this blog isn’t really making my heart sing like it used to.”1 I claimed that I’d keep up with weekly reflections and my readings of books, and I technically did the latter, though only because I haven’t been doing any of that reading.
As I look back on the past few weeks and months, I realize that I had been doing fewer and fewer creative hobbies. I wrote in January about how creating is important, and I don’t think I realized quite how true that was. I said in that posting that I felt that physical hobbies were better, and I am now moreso sure that’s true for me. Without something disconnected from my computer, I find that I grow ungrounded and disconnected from my time. Days flow by without any real differentiation, and I don’t like that.
Now, this isn’t to say that I don’t think my digitally creative hobbies are worth pursuing.2 I am planning to restart my book and this blog, but I also need to make sure that I am making music on my own, crocheting, and writing poetry. I know that I need a reason to keep writing, and for now I’m going to hope that the reason can be keeping a record of thoughts for my future self.