My annual review of blog stats and traffic might feel obligatory, but 2025 shows 2026 will likely ring in a new normal. Word Count The sum of all keys hit in 2025: 45 posts 26,253 words 583 words per post Compared to 2023 and 2024, the number of posts and words decreased, but the density increased. This slight … Continue reading 2025 In Review
Category: Random Bits
Modeling Is Always Nonlinear, but Not the Response
As a narrative device, an ellipsis omits events that are unimportant to a story and that an audience can easily understand and reconstruct if necessary. For example, a movie montage is a narrative ellipsis. In Bull Durham, we don't need to see every game in the Bulls' road winning streak. We just need to see … Continue reading Modeling Is Always Nonlinear, but Not the Response
Making Sound Waves
While enjoying ZeroPoMo, I've spent a little time over the last few days with the OpenAI API. To make a long story short, with a lot of help from ChatGPT I built a small LLM that generates blog posts written in the voice of my already published blog posts. I used the text-embedding-3-small model for … Continue reading Making Sound Waves
OpenSees Malapropisms
Whether it's Yogi Berra describing switch hitters or Charles Shackleford remarking on his ability to sink shots right-handed or left-handed, "amphibious" was not the word these athletes were looking for to describe ambidexterity. This type of humorous mistake, from the misuse of similar sounding words, is known as a malapropism. The best malapropisms come from … Continue reading OpenSees Malapropisms
OpenSees Pirate Jokes
Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day, a "holiday" that originated in 1995 just up the road from Eastchester. Corollaries between OpenSees and pirate speak be plenty. Whether you are a landlubber getting your OpenSees legs or an old salt who doesn't need documentation, Google, or ChatGPT to define a 3D model of RC … Continue reading OpenSees Pirate Jokes
Scribbled Lines
Like many people who were, have been, or will be around for long enough after 1973, every listen of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon amazes me. The album covers themes ranging from greed to existentialism. My standout track is Time. Most of the song's lyrics hit right on the nose: The sun is … Continue reading Scribbled Lines
Hold on Loosely
Today I was setting up some GitHub Actions involving private repository A checking out and doing some stuff with private repository B, which happens to be home to BennySparse. After spending a couple hours generating personal access tokens and creating GitHub secrets then attempting to use the tokens and secrets in a .yml file, I … Continue reading Hold on Loosely
The Emperors of OpenSees
A drabble is a piece of micro-fiction that is exactly 100 words long. Drabble can also mean to make dirty by dragging through mud or to fish with a long line, i.e., to troll. Herewith, I present my first drabble, The Emperors of OpenSees. Self-ordained during a void in the before time, the Emperors of … Continue reading The Emperors of OpenSees
Egg-Centric OpenSees Jokes
As far as I know, OpenSees has no Easter eggs. But perhaps we should hide a few, e.g., to congratulate users who reach exactly zero for the norm of the residual or to deride those who use more than two integration points in a dispBeamColumn element. While you're waiting for OpenSees Easter eggs to be … Continue reading Egg-Centric OpenSees Jokes
2024 In Review
2024 is coming to an end, so it's time for the obligatory review of blog stats and traffic for the year. The summary below is based on how WordPress keeps statistics. Word Count Published in 2024: 59 posts 30,991 words 525 words per post Assuming a journal article is 10,000 words, this year's word count … Continue reading 2024 In Review
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