It’s a Fine Line

The OpenSees Twitter bot started in December 2019 but didn't "like and retweet" #OpenSees tweets retroactively. So, out of curiosity, I searched Twitter the other day for the first use of the #OpenSees hashtag. This tweet from 2011 came up as the winner: https://twitter.com/drescolano/status/45099760868274176 Not an uncommon sentiment. Now, ten years later, I asked David … Continue reading It’s a Fine Line →

Tcl as a Front End for Python

I know I'm not the only one who enjoys converting between scripting languages or between structural analysis programs. I've had fun writing bespoke Tcl middleware between OpenSees and MATLAB, but now OpenSeesPy makes all of that obsolete. But, let's say you have an OpenSees Tcl script that you'd like to run in OpenSeesPy. There's a … Continue reading Tcl as a Front End for Python →

There’s Three, Actually

The displacement-based and force-based formulations garner a lot of comparisons for simulating nonlinear frame response. My Google Scholar alerts tell me so. And I even wrote a post comparing the two formulations. Doc Ock from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse There is a third formulation--the mixed formulation. Alemdar and White compared three frame element formulations (displacement-based, … Continue reading There’s Three, Actually →

Random Bullets on Blogging

It's 2021. So, why blog when peak blogging was like 2007? Here are some random bullets on why blogging works for me. The more you write, the more ideas you generate. Usually it's ideas for more blog posts, but sometimes it's new ideas for research.Blog posts have a direct, conversational tone. Like I'm talking with … Continue reading Random Bullets on Blogging →

The Rayleigh Quotient

Eigenvalue analysis wasn't giving me what I wanted the other day. So, to make a long story short, I decided to try Rayleigh's method. I won't go through all the details of Rayleigh's method, but the basic idea is you can obtain a very good approximation of the fundamental frequency of a structural model by … Continue reading The Rayleigh Quotient →

Discretized Members Only

I wrote a DiscretizeMember procedure in Tcl many years ago--I don't know exactly when, definitely after the 1980s and definitely before moving to Eastchester. "Members Only." by The Semi-Frozen Trombone is licensed under CC BY 2.0 After carrying the function around for years, and probably spawning more variations than uniaxial Concrete models, the procedure went … Continue reading Discretized Members Only →