The Onset Of Chaos

Morning weigh-in: 180#, 14.5% BF

Got home last night, checked on car: almost but still not quite ready, should be done today. Went home, played with computer, cooked dinner: stir-fry of (boiled) tempeh in onions, ginger, thai chilies and broccoli -- I really must go shopping, I'm just tossing junk in a frying pan. Tasted good though.

It was pretty late after that, but I went out for a run anyway, two miles in a little over twenty minutes. I think the "evening run" concept is a pretty good way to go, much easier to accomplish than the morning version.

Thirty-two thousand generations in the blink of an eye: So anyway, I got home from the run, and decided to play around with some more population dynamics stuff, specifically, this form of the logistic equation. I am less than enamored of that particular equation; I have my reasons which I'll maybe get into someday (really, it's just that it's not as emotionally satisfying as some other forms), but this one does have the advantage of being easy to play with, and it does exhibit fractal and chaotic behavior. Mmm, buzzwords... math buzzwords...

Since it's pretty simple, I set up a Gnumeric spreadsheet, a thousand iterations for each of thirty two different values of the reproduction rate, from 0.125 to 4. Copy, paste, blink -- and it was done! The calculation is admittedly pretty lightweight, but I expected at least a second or two for crunching. The results were pretty much what you'd expect from the article; I'll probably graph a few samples and post them tonight.

Other stuff for tonight: get the car, surrender the rental car, go to physical therapy, hit the gym; I'll be leaving work a little early to get it all in. Next week starts overtime.

Meantime, I see that Wikipedia is in a little hot water...