Holiday Hiatus...

As the holidays approach, a number of other family responsibilities have arisen which severely limit my ability to do weekly updates to this blog.  I also have a number of blog-related projects which are almost complete yet are being delayed by an increasing number of comments which I am dealing with though the comment system which limits the use of graphics and equations.  Many of these comments will be far easier to refute with some of the demonstration projects I've had under development.  I'm tempted to avoid significant postings again until I'm ready to release Project 1 (described below).  There may not be significant activity here again until January 2011.

Some of these projects are, in order of highest to lowest priority:

1. Redshift quantization demonstration:  This has applications to many creationist and plasma cosmology claims.  I've made considerable progress on this and am now concentrating on some of the introductory material needed to explain why just about ANY non-zero distribution produces a power spectrum with 'peaks'.  Basically, I start with simple distributions WITHOUT periodicities installed in the data and show they generate peaked power spectra similar to those reported by supporters of redshift quantization.  Then I do the test that redshift quantization supporters never do - actually install the reported periodicities in the data and demonstrate just how different the power spectra appear.  This project will probably be a long series of posts which I have started mapping out.
2. GPS relativistic corrections: Definitely needed considering how many relativity deniers in the Electric Universe and creationist communities make totally false claims about the size of the relativistic corrections in the GPS system.
3. The Physics of Lagrange Points: More than the Inverse Square Law.  I've done a lot of work on this recently in my day job, so I should assemble it while it's fresh in my mind.
4. Follow-up to instrument teams on the Michelson interferometers operating on-board satellites: Michelson interferometers are routinely used for precision wavelength measurements.  I've even used one in undergraduate physics optics labs.  Another problem created by the geocentrists claiming c is really c+v is for high-frequency resonance cavities in space, of which there are many!
5. N-body code demonstration:  I already have a really nice demonstration code that does non-interacting particles in electric and magnetic fields.  I even have the interface generating output to nice renderers like POVray to generate movies.  My next step is to install particle interactions and to expand the for gravitational simulations and gravito-electromagnetic simulations.
6. Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulation: This is a follow-on to the N-body code.   I also have a need for a generalized capability for this in my day job.

I'd like to make the codes for doing this generally available, but after the flack from the  "ClimateGate" code (Guardian.co.uk: If you're going to do good science, release the computer code too) I'm trying to upgrade my coding habits to install regular unit testing, etc. rather than using comments to control test cases.  I'm better than many scientists when it comes to programming (I had a decade of business programming experience before I went into science), but I do need to adopt some of the newer programming tricks, even for my hobby projects.

I'm also in the process of configuring a new multi-core desktop computer system which will be more dedicated to simulation runs (running these codes on a laptop just sends the cooling fans into overdrive).  It's a real headache to get everything installed 64-bit so I'm currently in a configure-build-test-delete-change configure-... cycle.  I'll probably post some configuration details on the blog so others can possibly reproduce the work AND see that this work does not always require high-end supercomputing resources (a common complaint by pseudo-scientists is whining that they can't test their ideas because they are blocked from access to the types of resources of professionals).

I will probably post responses to some existing comments on the site but new comments will be let through as I have time to deal with them.  Those who insist on posting their long tomes, usually poorly referenced, which often trigger the Blogspot posting bug, may find themselves waiting a while.

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Happy Holidays! (just to piss off the fundamentalists and militant atheists bothered by those things :^)