Other (Non-research) Projects
A collection of miscellaneous (non-research) projects from over the years.
NASA APOD
Automatically set NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day as your desktop. GitLab repository.
Boulder Coffee Shops
A satirical piece ranking coffee shops in Boulder very scientifically. Highlights:
- Espresso quality increases with distance from JILA.
- Productivity increases slightly with distance from JILA.
Details on this work can be found in this Google Drive folder, which includes my raw data, the analysis scripts, and my write-up (detailing the very robust research methods). For the curious (or the concerned advisor), I tracked how much time I spent on this project. The total was 5 hours and 15 minutes. Enjoy!
Public Talks
In spring 2023, I gave a talk oriented towards undergraduate physics students through the CU Prime student group. That talk was recorded and is now posted on YouTube.
Using AI
I like to play with AI occasionally to see what it can do. For example, in building this website most recently, I used Copilot in VS Code to help me interface all the css/Hugo/html, none of which I really know how to use. I didn’t use it to write any of the content in my website, just to help with formatting.
Dog Sports
Recently I’ve been having a lot of fun working with my dog Blob and learning cool tricks together. We’ve even been doing some rally and agility work – no competitions (yet!).
Ideas for the future
Mostly for myself, some fun (non-work) things I could try in the future.
- Foundry model to analyze encounter rolls. Separate by player, enemy type, compare to $N\to\infty$ distribution. Motivated by session where 9 out of 33 attack rolls by GM were 19s and 20s.
- Habitica script to pull equipment stats, order by highest per stat.
Last updated: 2026-11-08