second iteration, screen magic, new line search

First thing I did this morning was install the AntiBotQuestion mod in my phpBB3 forum for whatisnuclear.com. Spam bots were getting in so I had to shut them down. Unfortunately it didn’t stop guest posts, but I went to the forum and found an extra few lines to add and now it seems to work. Only issue: if you get the captcha wrong, the anti-spam question doesn’t show up in the re-try page. I’ll try to narrow that down later.

I got a nice plot of the 2nd iteration search direction for case 3. It didn’t yield any improvement, however. That’s too bad, or good. Apparently my linesearching is phenomenal. Maybe I should run a few cases of CORTANA BEFORE doing BDT.

Concerns about the BP search not doing anything persist. As expected, the class 1 enrichment increases each time I add BPs. This increase obviously counteracts the effects of the BPs, but it should at least bring the peaks at BOC and EOC closer together. Ope, I noticed the HF concentrations are all identical. Let’s make them natural. Which Hf isotope is the best absorber? Off to the NNDC. According to my chart of the nuclides, Hf-174 is 0.16%, 176 is 5.%, 177 is 18.%, 178 is 27.&, 179 is 12%, and 180 is 35.% Here are all their cross sections:

Hafnium isotopes absorption cross sections
Hafnium isotopes absorption cross sections

Jeff talked about Europium a lot. Here’s a comparison of The two natural isotopes with some of the better Hafnium ones:

Absorption cross-sections of Hafnium and Europium
Absorption cross-sections of Hafnium and Europium

Yeah that Eu-151 is pretty rocking. Given more time, I would put that in. For now, I’ll either admit that the BP searches didn’t do anything, or leave them out completely.

Time to give Professor his slides. If you import EPS into GIMP, make sure to turn the anti-aliasing filters on. OK sent them off. I went up and talked them over with him and he gave me a few tasks:

  1. Switch TRU enrichment one high means add and low means take out. I thought this was done already. Check negative jump. Yeah, in positive jump parameter cases, the search direction is switched by the line search, but the plots will still be wrong. Need to swap them in plotting too for intuition.
  2. Do a fly-by animation. YES! This is going to be hilarious. It’s rendering now. I’ll put it on youtube soon. (here it is)
  3. Remove empty hexes in the core map image.

While doing this, I realized that the BP search and TRU searches shouldn’t be switched from each other. It just worked out that way because they’re both accomplishing the same work. It’s on the 2nd iteration that the BP search might make more sense. All I have to do is work on my line search parser, making it that it reads old controls and updates them rather than making a whole new set each time. hmmmm. Exciting. This also explains why the BP search isn’t doing much. It’s not changing things in the right places. Let’s design a new line searcher

New Line Search Ideas

Currently, we have binned regions based on search directions to have values centered around 1.0, with min and max of  0 and 2. Additionally, the BP line search has the capability of setting any value less than a certain cutoff to zero. Both TRU enrichment modification factors and BP EF priorities get set directly to whatever is in these bins. This makes good sense for the first iteration, where everything is set to 1.0. But in subsequent iterations, these values should represent percent changes in the current value. So if we have a 1.05, increase the current value by 5%. That’s pretty easy.

I’m starting these changes on revision 10. Will start with BP search because it doesn’t work well anyway. Hmm, it’s not so simple as to just doing this multiplication though, because if I want to just increase the size of the feed each time, I don’t want the priority distribution changing. Obviously, I want to separate increase feed size into a different function. Duh.

Linux screen utility wonder

I did learn that I’ve been using screen wrong the whole time. You should only start a screen session once! Not once for each window. Press Ctrl+a, A to name your window, Ctrl+a, c to react a new window, Ctrl+a, ” to list all windows…. etc. How great is that. Productivity just increased. Here’s where I read about it.

Too much information

I do a lot of stuff each day, and then forget most of it. Sometimes I learn something, sometimes I get a thesis topic, sometimes I do a fun project or have a nice thought. I think a wordpress page might help me organize and remember what I do with my life. That’d be nice.

Today, I spent most of the day making a new webpage for whatisnuclear.com. You can find it at http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/recycling.html

Since Obama zeroed out the funding for Yucca mountain, Prof. Fleming, Kearfoot and I think it’s a great time to start recycling. I made this page to help explain exactly what that means and why it’s good.

I then went to Sweetwaters and got some Chai with skim milk. It was delicious! I opened up the lappy laptop and worked on my single goal of the evening: plotting search directions in a manner similar to the input maker. I searched for some kind of wxPython colormap, but didn’t find anything and then luckily found that Matplotlib has all the capability I need. Using the scatter function, you can specify hexagon symbols with arbitrary angles. Excellent. Check this plot out:

Burnable poison search direction for timestep 0
Burnable poison search direction for timestep 0

Yeah. That’s excellent. Now I just have to figure out how to get it to size automatically.

Ceris brought a recent The Economist over with some legalization of drugs propaganda. They’re position has been to legalize the drugs, and spend the billions on treating addiction instead of jailing recreational users. I agree. It had other articles that caught my interest, specifically some on the clean coal myth, solar collecting balloons, and devices that charge wirelessly. That got me thinking that my camera batteries never charge anymore. So I went online and bought a well-reviewed charger, thinking that maybe my Ni-MH chargers are both defective, since all 12 of my batteries don’t last in my camera anymore.

I watched the rest of RENT last night with Adrienne and dumpster girl. I never knew what it was about. I kind of liked it, although I don’t have much profound thought about it. It’s been a lazy weekend. The most important accomplishment was the completion of the hot tub controller project. More on this once my camera works again.