Reichssieger Von Thanatz Alpdrucken

Morning weigh-in: 170#, 10% BF (Sigh... good times, bad choices this weekend.)

 

The Finger Exercise: I've been playing again with Octave, basically just doing what I'd done before with the Lotka-Volterra equations, but this time using scripts to help automate the process & save it for later -- also, Octave can be run from within emacs, but that's not quite as convenient as it seems so I'm back to running both programs separately. Coupla insights:

 

1. The final steady-state (or rather, periodic) populations seem more dependent on initial conditions than I realized -- I would have thought that the final state would depend only on things like birth and death rates, and that no matter what the initial population it would trend to the same end state for any given set of those rates. Um, not so; I found that where you end up is very dependent on where you start.

 

2. It bothered me for a while that the actual predator-prey equations didn't look the way I thought they should. I expected to find some term for death rates based on starvation, for both predators and prey, and neither one has anything like that. (The prey only die from being eaten, and the predators have a constant death rate.) Another surprise for me was the food-dependent reproduction rate for the predators, but I now remember reading something in Bear Attacks about the overriding importance of food in reproductive success, at least for bears... Anyway, my insight is that I might have to learn some real biology along with my modeling: logistical death rates may not be as important as I once thought, at least compared to other factors.

 

Reading: Gravity's Rainbow, coming to the end of Part 1. Yowza, forgot about that, I thought all the truly crazy-brilliant writing was in Part 4... Imperial soldier of the death-nightmare, don't you know me? Don't you really know me? (Also working my way through those new biomath textbooks, though "studying" would be a better term for that.)

 

Sunday Afternoon, Coming Down: Spent most of the morning yesterday sleeping in, then reading/playing as stated above. Went out in the early afternoon, lunch at the Quadrant, then back home for more reading/playing and laundry. Caught part of the Colts-Ravens game, 2nd & 3rd quarters at Porters while the laundry dried. Boring game. Taco Bell -- D'oh!