Leif and Natalie

This article is post-dated Being a grad student, I'm not allowed outside much, and living in Colorado, the paddling is also a little scarce in the winter, so when spring break rolled around, I was ready to take full advantage of the opportunity. Typical Colorado winter paddling After another all-nighter trying to finish my math methods homework thursday night, I was really energized to start the solo drive from Fort Collins to California. It went a little faster than usual, or at least seemed to. Upon arrival in the Sacramento area, I met up with my old friend Stoner and my new friend Martin. I say new friend because Martin sports a mullet, just like I do, and any kayaker with a mullet is my homeboy. Of course, Martin is a miniature little man, so his mullet is much smaller than mine, but still, it takes a certain kind of person to rock the mullet. Stoner and Martin Stoner, Martin and I had come to Sacramento to run Pauley creek. Well, Pauley creek was almost dry. So we roc...

That's right - this post has nothing to do with kayaking. In my free time, I am working on my Ph.D. in theoretical physics at CSU. I am studying chaos. In the course of my research, I often recreate figures from papers that I read, and the results are sometimes interesting to see. Here is a collection of the more exciting pictures. KAM torii: These figures are recreations of those shown in "Amplitude Instability and Ergodic Behavior for Conservative Nonlinear Oscillator Systems" by Walker and Ford, Phys. Rev. 1969. Conservative systems are a huge pain in the butt. These figures are Poincare sections of 4d torii. Without going into too much depth, each closed loop is a numerically solved solution to the Henon-Helies system. Each frame below shows the intersections of these trajectories with a 2d plane in this 4d phase space. With higher and higher E, more of these torii "break" and start to wander through the spaces between unbroken torii in a chaotic manner. I ...

The Ice Cream Game is basically a rolling game. A full set of rules can be found in the newest Colorado guidebook; Whitewater of the Southwest Rockies . What the rules boil down to is that the person who rolls the most times during a run buys everyone else ice cream. To help with the shame and heckling associated with losing the Ice Cream Game, we will be keeping a running score of the people we paddle with, and provide a public area for degrading comments. A note on the scores. The "ties" are ties for last place. Sometimes the rules have to be flexed a little, in confusing situations. The "Winning %" is calculated by taking the number of wins plus half the number of ties, and dividing by the total number of runs that person has been on. Basically, a tie is half a win and half a loss. Name Wins Losses Ties Winning % Most Recent Win/Loss Leif Anderson 13 3 8 71 Clear creek of the Ark Natalie Kramer 7 6 8 52 Clear creek of the Ark Conor Flynn 3 2 1 58 Big Thompson Gna...