Manuel Almagro Rivas.

Manuel Almagro Rivas.

Physicist & systems integration developer. Based in Granada (Spain). Interested in data science, languages and literature.

The Game of Life

1 minute read

Published:

John Conway’s famous Game of Life is a “zero player game”, as he calls it. There exists a great deal of literature exploring the intricacies that can emerge from its very simple rules. Citing Wikipedia:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

I’ve been handling lattice plots lately, and given that the data-plotting part was already worked out I thought it could be fun to try and recreate the Game of Life. After two coffees and accidentally skipping an online class, I got my code to work! Here’s a square 128x128 lattice generated using the code and plotted using an R script:

Some of the most famous structures can be seen, especially gliders! I think it could be fun to add options like starting the grid with well-known self replicating structures, but that’s for another day. I think it would also be cool to recreate Langton’s ant, which has an even simpler set of rules and is probably more interesting computationally.

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On using wrong tools

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About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.

Some useful customizations for macOS.

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I started using a Mac back in 2018. My computer, an fairly standard HP laptop I’d bought back in 2013, was beginning to become a source of troubles. The charger wouldn’t charge, the keyboard wouldn’t hold the keys in place, and generally the computer wouldn’t compute. This was a problem, given that I was a destitute student. To my surprise, older MacBooks (the white poylycarbonate MacBooks made back in 2010) where dirt cheap, even when bought from overseas and thus with shipping and custom costs included in the price. I bought one for about 130€. It lacked the Euro (€) key and I couldn’t type words containing an ñ directly, but it felt like a small inconvenience and I quickly found workarounds. That little laptop proved hardy and powerful enough for my daily tasks, and it carried me through a computational physics course during which the rubber in the bottom peeled due to the excessive heat emanating from its dying processor. It was a pretty nice machine.

PAULA: Protein Analysis Using a Least-squares Approach

4 minute read

Published:

Last year, I took a physical chemistry class which had to do with the behaviour and analysis of biomolecules (mainly proteins and nucleic acids). It was fun to step outside of my comfort zone and being in a chemistry lab again, and I had a great deal of fun learning about bio-stuff again. The course worked by alternating theory classes (where we learned the formal aspects of the techniques we would later apply) and lab sessions. We were given a small sample of the problem molecule which we wanted to characterise over a period of two-or-so months, which in this case was hen egg-white lysozyme, a cheap and common protein. One goal was to pass polarised ultraviolet light through a sample of this protein, and measure how well the protein is able to twist the plane of the incident light rays. This technique is called far-ultraviolet circular dychroism, and it turns out that learning about the way a protein interacts with these particular wavelengths in this very particular sense yields a great deal of information about its structure!

Exporting your FilmAffinity profile to a .csv file using R.

5 minute read

Published:

Updated May 14th 2024: the code stopped working after FilmAffinity changed the way ratings are shown. A small change in the code was needed to take this into consideration. Thanks to those who emailed me about it!