Week 4: Voronoi, stochastic L-systems, set theory

Trying, and miserably failing, to create that plot

But you know that when the truth is told

That you can get what you want or you can just get old

–Billy Joel, “Vienna”

As I mentioned in the previous entry, I was eager to try my hand at OSMnx plotting to draw a map of the city in a Voronoi diagram sort-of-way… but I failed. You see, I searched for previous work — a.k.a. someone who’s dunnit already — and I found Sabrina Chan’s 2019 blog post. It was quite alright, though it seemed to use Python 2 (instead of Python 3, released in 2008), and wasn’t as plug-and-play as I would have expected. In the end, I tried to tweak their Jupyter Notebook to do the exact same thing for my use case, but it was quite hard. Tomorrow, if I feel like it, I might give it another go. If not, maybe next time around.

On the bright side, EMB gave me a Wall-E keychain.

Zac Garby’s introduction to stochastic L-systems

I started watching a Computerphile video on the creation of plants using L Systems, presented by doctoral student Zac Garby. He published the source code for generating drawings of L-systems using turtle in Python.

First guitar lesson

I had my first guitar lesson on Tuesday. We learnt about the notation, the metronome, the parts of the guitar, how to hold it, and we struck some basic chords. (Also, I don’t know if I’m using the right terminology here.)

English Wednesdays

Another instance of English Wednesdays. It was fine. We even ventured so far as to make jokes in English during lunch. That’s progress.

Yoga

EMB invited me to a yoga lesson. Me, being a total noob, said yes. It was quite a strenuous session. I felt tired afterwards, but enjoyed it to some extent.

Talking with JDAC

Right after lunch, I met with JDAC to talk about the subproject we’re working on. We agreed on meeting once per week to discuss two chapters of a book by Michael Batty called Cities and complexity: understanding cities with cellular automata, agent-based models, and fractals.

Talking with professor Guarín

On Friday, professor Guarín came around to chat. Our conversation ranged from the personal aspects of the internship (i.e. how am I feeling towards it) to the more professional, strictly work-related matters. In all, we talked for almost two hours, according to EMB.

Zutilo

I downloaded the Zutilo extension for Zotero. It lets you copy direct links to Zotero resources on the desktop client.

Attending a set theory lecture

I attended professor ASR’s Thursday evening lecture on set theory. I’m planning to take the course informally. Just for the sake of it.

A comeback to the Voronoi map problem

Professor Guarín had dropped by on Thursday to give me a couple pointers on how to create the public libraries Voronoi plot thingy. He suggested I use scipy.spatial with matplotlib. I scoured the internet to find a Keyhole Markup Language-like file of these public libraries and I found it.

Groundhog Day

We watched the 1993 classic Groundhog Day. They enjoyed it, I heard.

Football for fun and no profit

On Valentine’s Day, we played football from 7 to 9. My legs still hurt. Football is not my cup of tea.