Lorenz Attractor

I wanted to test out Google's skia 2D library so I wrote a simple interactive Lorenz attractor app over the weekend. Source code and binaries at 

https://github.com/hsauro/Lorenz_fmx

Binaries are only for Windows at the moment but hope to have a Mac version in a couple of weeks.

I used Object Pascal to write it but it should be easily translatable to something like C# and WinForms which were modeled after Object Pascal and the VCL. Looks like skia does a better job at antialiasing lines and also it's quite fast.

I use a simple Euler integration scheme to solve the Lorenz ODEs, nothing fancy but it seems to work perfectly well. 

Analogmachine reborn

I decided to rebuild my blog on blogger. Originally I used my own WordPress site but discovered that maintaining it was quite time-consuming. The main problem was stopping the site from being hacked and corrupted.  This happened again recently and it prompted me to move to a more resilient and less demanding platform.

Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life by Andrulis

 Ars Technica has an interesting article that I can't avoid bringing up here. The title of the article is:

"How the craziest f#@!ing "theory of everything" got published and promoted"

The Ars Technica article describes a paper (Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life) published by an assistant professor from Case Western. The author of the paper describes a theory of everything which because of a press release from Case Western manages to get amplified out of all proportion even though the content is highly suspect. Just reading the first sentence is enough to raise a big red flag. That sentence is:

"How life abides by the second law of thermodynamics yet evolutionarily complexifies and maintains its intrinsic order is a fundamental mystery in physics, chemistry, and biology [1]."

There is no mystery here as the author suggests. If he had bothered to read up on Prigogine's and Nichols well-known work on non-equilibrium thermodynamics published decades ago he would have an explanation for this "mystery".

Testing Code Formating using hightlight.js

# Python Program to find the area of triangle

if x == True:
   pass
   
a = 5
b = 6
c = 7

# Uncomment below to take inputs from the user
# a = float(input('Enter first side: '))
# b = float(input('Enter second side: '))
# c = float(input('Enter third side: '))

# calculate the semi-perimeter
s = (a + b + c) / 2

# calculate the area
area = (s*(s-a)*(s-b)*(s-c)) ** 0.5
print('The area of the triangle is %0.2f' %area)