My Blog is not Dead

I know I have not been posting on my blog a lot lately, but this is because I have spent so much of my writing time on my research, writing papers, and my dissertation. That has been occupying my time, and when I get home after spending 8+ hours reading, writing and computing, the last thing I feel like doing is writing a blog post, and I am not into writing fluff.

When I write something for my blog I try to research it fully to make sure I know what I am talking about. This means that many of my posts never make it to a final product. I have 30+ drafts from the last year alone that never made it past the initial research stage, several of which I am planning on finishing. But my first major research paper, my dissertation, and now a second major research paper are taking up all my time and writing effort. Sometime in the next few weeks I may have more time to write, after I get my second paper submitted. Stay tuned.

A sample of posts I am working on:

• Philosophical Fallacies in the Wild: They do exist!
• Actual Legal Controversies Involving Religion
• Chiasmus in Moses 2
• Side-by-side comparison of Moses and Genesis
• The Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Exodus
• The Hypostasis of Faith
• Returning to Hamlet's Mill
• The Fallacy of the Incomprehensibility of God
• Why Troy?
• God as a Gardener

What are the most commonly sung LDS hymns? DATA NEEDED

[Link to hymn form.]

This year is the 30th anniversary of the current LDS hymnbook. Because I love playing with data and numbers I was wondering what were the most commonly sung LDS hymns. There are a few people who have looked at the most commonly sung hymns at General Conference, but the hymns sung at Conference aren't always the same hymns we sing in church every Sunday. Someone at BYU did do an informal poll, but I wanted a slightly larger sample.

I plan on keeping track of which hymns are sung in my ward every week, but to get a larger sample I need data from other wards. So if you want to help out, at the very top of this post, and also below, I have a link to a Google form where you can enter which hymns were sung in your ward. You only have to enter hymn numbers to make it easier. So this Sunday when you go to church take note of the hymn numbers and enter them into the form. It should take no more than 15-20 seconds.

http://goo.gl/forms/NhCyYa9tXV

I am looking for hymns sung in any meeting. That includes Sacrament Meeting, Stake Conference, and Priesthood or Relief Society meetings. If you sing a hymn for Seminary or Institute you can enter that as well. If you can only enter data for one Sunday that is just great. But if you feel like contributing more to the data collection you can keep coming back every week and enter more hymns. I'll put a link to the form in the sidebar, or you can bookmark the link (like me), so you can find it easily. You can also collect the data in a text document or spreadsheet (maybe you are the person in your ward who chooses the hymns) and send it to me. I got 6 months worth of data from a ward in Australia because the ward music director kept a record of it and sent it to me. So what ever is easiest.

I plan on collecting data from my ward for at least two years (I have been collecting data for the past month and a half already). This ensures that I get data from Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Pioneer Day and everything in between. I want to augment this a larger sample from other wards. I realize not everyone is a data nerd like me, so I set it up to make it simple so anyone can contribute, even if it is only for one Sunday. If you want to contribute more that would be great.

So why am I doing this?

Like I said, I like data, and I like numbers. Sometimes those numbers tell us things we didn't expect. I love the hymns, and this is one way that I can learn more about them and how we interact with the hymns. Some people may be curious just which hymns are sung all the time, and which one we never sing. This is intended to answer those questions. At some future date the church may decide to redo the hymnbook and it might be helpful to know which ones we sing all the time and which ones we never touch.

In a broader sense, and anyone who loves data and numbers like me knows this, if the data is there we will find some use for it, but if we never gather it we will never know what we can discover.

I should point out that the most commonly sung hymns may not be the most popular. There are constraints on time, or ability which may skew the numbers (one year in seminary we sang "Choose the Right" nearly every day because only one person could play the piano and that was the only song she knew well enough to play). Just because a song is not sung frequently doesn't mean people don't like it, or it isn't popular. So this may just tell us which songs are easy to sing and commonly known.

I hope you choose to help out. If you have any questions just leave a comment or email me at [the title of this blog]@gmail.com.

I will provide, or link to any updates to this project. Like I said, I plan on this being a long term project to get enough data. Please share this with friends and family (but try not to duplicate data with more than one person per ward), so I can get as much data as possible. Please.

Yes I have been neglecting my blog

It is true, I have been neglecting my blog. I have plans for brief reviews of ancient astronomy in the Book of Abraham, more posts about names in the Book of Mormon, and ancient rituals of conversion detailed in the Book of Mormon. But right now my time has been consumed with getting my code to work for my research. The other day I cleaned up two files that I had been working on for some time and I removed all the lines of code that I didn't need. All together I think I removed over 4,000 lines of code. It took me a few days to work through it and determine what I need and what I don't need.

In the meantime I uploaded a video of one of my simulations that I did as a proof of concept. I did this simulation to show my advisor that my fixes to the code are working and that more time should be devoted to the approach that I have been taking. He was impressed.

Here is the description that goes along with the video:

This is a short video that I made of a simulation that was done as a proof of concept. It shows a fractal distribution of density in the center of a star forming galaxy. This simulation is done using the MHD code Athena. The box size covers 1 kpc in each dimension and has a grid size of 128 in each dimension. The star forming region injects mass and energy into the center region of the simulation.

The proof of concept is for a flux fixer that allows the code to handle high kinetic energy situations where the total kinetic energy is a significant fraction of the total energy.

The visualization was done using Paraview.

My Plan

I thought that I should layout my plan for research in the near future. Part of my research for my senior thesis included looking into a way of explaining flat rotation curves without including dark matter as a generating gravitational potential. I was looking into a claim that by using GR the flat rotation curves could be reproduced without including dark matter as a correcting term. While the particular method I looked into had some problems there was one paper that I stumbled across that showed that using GR they could give a slight correction to the rotation curves before they needed to include dark matter.

In conjunction with this there was a paper published by several astronomers giving a correction to the amount of normal baryonic matter present in a galaxy. They did this using surveys of the number of face of galaxies versus the number of edge on galaxies and saw that there was a discrepancy, there were more face on than edge on. Thus they concluded that there must be more dust in the galactic halo than they previously thought. This added another correction to the mass, and the assumed amount of dark matter, in a galaxy.

So my plan is to take all these corrections and add them up and see if it amounts to a significant correction to the amount of dark matter that must be present in a galaxy. If this holds then it will also add a correction to the amount of normal and dark matter in galaxy clusters. This will additionally change everything else.

There is also a theory out there that attempts to explain dark energy in a new way. Essentially the argument goes that we might actually live in a "cosmic bubble" of low density space. If this were true then it would create the illusion of an accelerating universe. So it would be possible to explain what we see in terms of what we already know instead of making an appeal to some unknown type of matter. The idea that lead to the introduction of dark energy was the Copernican idea that the universe is for the most part homogeneous, that is, where we live does not have any unique properties that makes it different from the rest of the universe. This idea continues on with the statement that the universe is homogeneous on a large scale.

But what if there is some local inhomogeneities? This leads me to think of another guiding principle. Always try to explain what we see in terms of what we know, without making an appeal to some unknown stuff with unknown properties. What we know is stronger than what we do not know. A known is (almost) always a better explanation than an unknown. So if we make an assumption that leads us to conclude that there is something unknown governing the universe and determining what we see, then perhaps we need to rethink that assumption or how we are applying that assumption.

So I plan to investigate these things and see if I can't make sense of what we see in terms of what we already know without making an appeal to things unknown.