Scientific scribblings

Science is both my work and my play. That doesn’t mean I’m particularly bright or hard-working, just that I’m curious. Because that’s the main ingredient for doing good science. (A healthy dose of skepticism helps, too.)

  • Models

    I’m interested in the patterns that can emerge when many (often simple) elements interact. It is often required to build models of these kinds of systems to study their behaviour.

    • Escape from Goblin-town! (2025)

      This simulation is inspired by the Goblin-town chase scene in the film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012).

    • Conway's Game of Life (2020)

      This NetLogo model implements Conway’s Game of Life, a cellular automaton John Horton Conway designed to be difficult to anticipate the dynamics of starting patterns. This implementation incorporates some ideas I focused on in my research: finite-size effects and asynchronous updating.

    • Axelrod's tournament (2018)

      In the early 1980s Robert Axelrod invited colleagues to submit strategies to a series of round-robin tournaments to see which strategies would do well playing an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. This NetLogo model allows you to try Axelrod’s tournaments yourself by creating some strategies and testing them in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma.

    • Aquaworld Radiation Balance (2018)

      This simple radiation balance model shows the greenhouse effect that an atmosphere can have in warming a planet. By trapping some of the radiation emitted by the planet the atmosphere can cause the surface to become warmer than it otherwise would be.

    • A Trojan horse approach to medical intervention strategies (2017)

      I recently read an interesting review paper that explores the possibility of fighting a bacterial infection with Darwinian medicine through the introduction of a “cheater” strain of bacteria into a wild population. I extended the analytic model in the paper to an agent-based model with explicit spatial structure.

    • Flame (2017)

      I got thinking about how fires work today. Why do flames curl into whorls and some tongues lick up so high? I built this model to see how hard it was to reproduce the phenomenon. This is the result. I don’t think it captures much of the underlying mechanism but it looks pretty hot 🙂

    • Mandelbrot Set (2017)

      Explore the Mandelbrot set and some related fractals.

  • Since I was born (2022)

    The world’s spinning fast. Sometimes I forget about how much science and technology have progressed in my lifetime. Here are some advances to help remind me.

    • The curious skeptic (2008)

      Here’s what drives me as a teacher.

      • The onion of Science (2002)

        I often have people ask me what I do for a living. Because my research projects are so varied I like to give a different answer each time. Nevertheless, the question has forced me to evaluate my role as a scientist. This page is an attempt to explain what I believe science is all about and where my work fits in…