In previous articles (here and earlier here) I covered in some cursory way my current research into the California Current and about the technique of Inverse Modeling, so today I wanted to delve into the actual tools and code that I’ve developed.  To review, an inverse model is An inverse model seeks to solve a series […]
Author: Thomas Bryce Kelly
Progress with the Lawn
A couple months ago I mentioned that I was putting down grass seed (here and here), and now there is grass! I admit that it is, as always, a work in progress, but the yard is looking quite nice these days.
Designing a Pergola
Florida has a ton to offer, and so far Tallahassee has been treating me pretty well. The only complaint I have–and it certainly won’t surprise you–is about the bugs. Mosquitoes and flies are plentiful down here and make it a tad tricky to make full use of the great weather down here. One of the best […]
Patio Upgrade: Part 1
Update: The second part of this article can now be found at Patio Upgrade: Part 2. While thinking about the backyard today I realized that there’s been a project that I’ve wanted to do for a while yet it always seems to slip my mind when I have time for it. Before we get to […]
Philosophy Monday: Lonergan Part 1
The following is a series of short essays based on an assignment I had with Dr Braman at Boston College. Since Lonergan’s philosophy has surely impacted me in ways that I know not of, and since so many people have trouble delving into his work, I thought it most responsible to share the following.
Weekend Project: Aluminum Foundry
This morning I found myself on Youtube killing time. While waiting for the temperature to pick up for a bike ride, I stumbled across this video by Grant Thompson. It single handedly changed my Sunday plans. In the video, Grant shows us a simple, DIY way to build a cheap and effective foundry. Melting aluminum cans down […]
Optimizing R Code in my Model
Recently I have been talking a fair bit about my inverse modeling work, so now that it’s summer I finally have time to clean up the code base. Now that the code is working fairly well and offers all of the main features that I can think of, the goal is to get it running […]
Quantifying Error
Being able to appropriately address uncertainty and error is fundamental to the pursuit of science. Without it, results and theory would never match up since theory usually involves a level of abstraction that permits simplification of the problem and observational results are never perfect and include all sorts of uncertainty. Recently I’ve been trying to […]
Spurious diapycnal mixing in z coordinate models
Introduction Diapycnal mixing is a natural process whereby water parcels of different temperature and/or salinity get mixed. Â This process, as opposed to advection, is non-adiabatic (non-reversible) and is governed by diffusive mechanisms. The rate of diapycnal mixing is elevated in coastal waters relative to the open ocean and is responsible for the introduction of nutrients […]
On cooking: or a polemic on over-analysis
Recently I was over at a friends apartment making dinner and I saw what a beautifully well-equipped kitchen she had. It got me thinking, or rather inspired, to take a moment and reflect on my own relationship with cooking. This reflection process got me to: deplore the lack of culinary skills in my generation, challenge […]
End of the Semester
Believe it or not, but it is already the end of the semester for me and my peers. Somehow nearly four months have disappeared once again into that historical accident that we call the past. Since each of my three classes have required a project to be done for the final, I figure that I may […]
Golfing
Today was the first biannual Tsunami Invitational Golf Tournament which is to say that a group of oceanographers and meteorologists got together for a round of golf. The game was best ball and there were ten people including me. Everyone there was considerably older than I which actually worked out quite well since I really haven’t […]
Paper of Note: Re-designing Distance Functions and Distance-Based Applications for High Dimensional Data
While it may be argued–and successfully so–that this is an article pertaining to an esoteric subset of computer science that few people will ever find practically useful, you may actually find it quite intriguing. I’ve found the article quite eye-opening and I’m certainly no computer scientist. What this article does do, which I feel is critically […]
Remote Sensing Part 2
In a previous article I described a technique to determine the dye concentration from drone images, and I hope it sounded like a reasonable plan. Nevertheless, this plan did go ary when less than ideal conditions arose and the results got jumbled with the imperfections of the real world. So to make amends, I will […]
Saturday Gardening
Since the forecast looks like they’ll be plenty of rain in the near future, I figured that this morning would be a perfect time to fill in some bare spots in my garden out back. Continuing off of my plan from a couple months ago, I had hoped to find some low-maintenance, ornamental plants to […]
Climate Change
When I moved to Florida from Boston, I knew there were be a few cultural differences that I would have to work around. That goes without saying, and one of these differences surrounds the whole issue of climate change and anthropogenic carbon emissions. While I like to think that most people are pretty open minded […]
Philosophy Monday: Einstein v Newton
The source for the tension between Newton’s view of the universe and of Einstein’s stems from each person’s respective choice of axioms. Newton choose to take the most concrete axioms for his mechanics: absolute nature of space and time. These intuitive assumptions mark and define the whole of Newtonian mechanics since all the other definitions […]
Measuring a dye patch from a drone
While my interests are, admittedly, quite broad, I’ve always been fascinated with signal processing and remote sensing. Just imagine the technological marvel that we can accurately measure the amount of chlorophyll, a grove of marijuana or the amount of snow from a satellite whose travelling 1,000s of miles per hour around our planet. If that’s […]
Working with HYCOM
So far this week I’ve been focusing my energies on getting the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) up and running on my computer. For those of you who don’t know what HYCOM is a modeling platform sponsored by the National Ocean Partnership Program which includes–among others–FSU. Simply put, the HYCOM platform is a powerful ocean-atmospheric […]
Cycling down to St Mark’s Lighthouse
Last weekend I decided to try out a new cycling route since I’m not finding the St Mark’s rail trail as novel as I once did. Now don’t get me wrong: I do enjoy the route quite a bit, especially since it makes for a great way to get away from some of the less friendly […]
Inverse Modeling of the CCE
For the last couple days I’ve been busy working on a presentation and write up for some of the modeling work I’ve been occupied with for the last couple weeks. While nothing crazy, the write-up did allow me to step back a bit from the model itself to see the bigger picture. Having perspective is […]
Philosophy Monday: The Role of Instruments in Science
The use of instruments and tools to understand, measure, and record the natural world may be a staple of modern scientific inquiry, but the relationship between the instruments and their validity in describing the natural world has developed over time. This relationship has changed considerably since the earliest recorders of Greek natural philosophy started over […]
How Twitter Improved my Ecological Model
For a last couple weeks I’ve been working on a marine ecosystem model using a technique called Inverse Modeling[ref]I’ll be sure to do a writeup on what Inverse Modeling is and what makes it interesting in the future.[/ref]; and while there’s been lots of progress, I’m starting to get to the point where the model takes some […]
Philosophy Monday: The Baconian Ideal
Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has been–and will continue to be–an infamous individual in the history of science for he managed to influence countless scientists from numerous generations through his keen understanding of human nature and his tremendous rhetorical skill. First in Novum Organum Scientiarum and later in New Atlantis, Bacon establishes his understanding of science along with a new methodology […]
Small Upgrades
I’ve always been amazed at what a small change or minute improvement can do for the aesthetics of a scene. Â Something as simple as clean window or as matching sets of items can really a significant improvement, so it was with this mindset that I decided to take a trip to Lowes and upgrade a […]
A quick upgrade for the Jeep
It’s no secret that I’ve been heading down to Apalachicola National Forest every chance I get, and my jeep will attest that the roads down there are quite “rural”. Depending on how the preceding weather has been the roads will either greet us with clouds of dust or deep-rutted mud. There are ditches, rocks and washed […]
Month in Review
Although I look at my calendar every day, this date still managed to sneak up on me. It has been one month now since I moved into my new house and started a new life here in Florida. One whole month. In that time I have started work towards my PhD, found a love of […]
Kayaking the Sopchoppy River
Catalyzed by my successful visit to Lake Talquin yesterday (post), I decided to make a trek up the Sopchoppy river in the Apalachicola National Forest this morning. I had never really ventured into the park before and my only experience with it has been my cycling visits to the St Mark’s Rail Trail[ref]If you are […]
Computational Fluid Dynamics: Improving FTCS
Today I wanted to share as series of interesting finite difference schema that is much less about the implementation and more about the mathematical underpinnings of the system. This is intended for someone who may be new to finite difference models yet found feel confident with the material I presented last time (Finite Difference Schema). […]
Kayaking in the Winter
Florida, I have to admit, is quite the place to live. Well, I might just be a tad biased considering that this winter is giving most of the country nothing but blizzards and freezing temperatures from coast to coast. Today I headed out from university early[ref]It is a Friday after all…[/ref] to make full use of […]