My Shenanigans

A menagerie of passions!

Vector Logos for Research Triangle Transit Operators

For whatever reason, only GoTriangle supplies publicly a vector version of its logo; GoRaleigh, GoDurham, GoCary, and Chapel Hill Transit supply only a raster image, and there is no vector logo available for the Go+ BRT services. I spent an afternoon semi-manually creating vector image versions of each logo. They're not quite perfect, but I think they came out pretty well. Please use them in any projects you're working on! As a fair use note, I believe this use is appropriately transformative and is purely educational, but if any of the relevant agencies would prefer that I not circulate these vector images, I can certainly take my version of their logo down; just reach out to me at admin@fruitofthefirehose.org. :)

A Proposal to Logically Renumber GoRaleigh Bus Routes

Raleigh's growing bus network will soon welcome a deluge of new riders, as future BRT services, additional intercity rail traffic, a shiny new Union Station, and an integrated bus terminal drastically reshape the face of transit in Wake County. While this is great for the people of Raleigh, there are a few elements of our legacy transit system that might be daunting to new riders, including our bus route numbering. Currently, buses are numbered haphazardly, seemingly without regard to any detail. I made a map that offers an alternative, displaying what GoRaleigh's bus network could look like if each of its route numbers were dictated by their location and frequency. This logically driven scheme, mimicking some of the World's greatest transit cities, could help new riders navigate our bus system. I'd love to see GoRaleigh implement something like this; it makes my brain very happy!

The Shohei Ohtani Sweepstakes: An Autoamted MLB Free Agent and Trade Tracker Website

This year's MLB off-season contains countless phenomenal free agents whose signings will represent huge news stories. For fun, I made a website that pulls MLB news from ESPN and parses those articles with ChatGPT, determining whether any of the tracked players have officially signed with a team. If the AI confirms that an article reports a trade, and the manually programmed sanity checks return positively, the website will automatically update. It seems to work reasonably well in testing, but might not be perfect in deployment. This project taught me a lot about AI, how to use ChatGPT's API, and informed a lot of my mixed feelings about generative AI and its ethics. At the end of the day though, this was just a fun little project that made a decently cool final product. Because it's using ESPN APIs, you should be able to adapt this for other sports that ESPN reports on, but I haven't tried that.

Parallel Quartering of Squares Research Paper

In the summer of 2022, I worked on an original research problem in Euclidean incidence geometry, ultimately culminating in writing and submitting a 13-page research paper. The research concerns the distance between three parallel lines necessary to divide a square into four quarters of equal area, with the distance expressed as a function of the angle of those lines to the sides of the square. The research is legitimate mathematical research that's accessible to anyone with a high school level of math understanding. My findings have potential applications in aesthetics, design, and education.

Triangle Refugee Student Project

For my Eagle Scout Service Project, I organized a school supply drive called the Triangle Refugee Student Project. The project collected school supplies for local refugee students, with 11 collection sites across the Triangle and across public, private, and civil sectors. In the end, we assembled those school supplies into ready-to-use backpack kits which contained enough school supplies for one student to be succesful for a year. With an initial goal of 20 backpacks, we assembled 42 complete backpacks, with thousands of dollars in surplus materials. Given the enormous success of our first year, we've expanded the scope of the project this year, reaching even more (15) collection sites across the county and raising even more for our community. For more information, visit an archived version of our website at http://trianglerefugee.org/.

Standard Model of Particle Physics Educational Video

The Standard Model of Particle Physics is a scientific theory describing several elementary particles that make up everything in the Universe. It is the closest thing we have, at present, to a unified theory of everything. In 2021, I made a little video explaining it!

The script for this video is available here.

(UPDATE: As of 2022, some new information has come forward that may jeopardize our entire understanding of the Standard Model. As far as I'm aware, this video is still up to the standards of modern science, but that may be prone to change.)

Titanocracy

Titanocracy is a sci-fi board wargame which I created in 2020. The game is a sci-fi miniatures game, drawing much inspiration from the amazing board games X-Wing and Dune, as well as the novel, The Atlantropa Articles. The game is available as a print and play or as a mod for Tabletop Simulator here. An archived version can be found on the Wayback Machine.