Clowns are evil

It's amazing what Pennywise (not the clown) can do to help motivate you. Come to think of it, if Pennywise the clown was after me I'd have TONS of motivation to get done whatever I was doing to get as far away from him as possible. Can Pennywise be called 'him'? Technically Pennywise is an 'it'. I know, terrible puns, but I'm sure laughing. =D

If you ever do anything with numerical derivatives there's only one piece of advice I have for you: DON'T!!! Okay, that's not entirely truthful. You should if you need them. If you do need them, just watch your units. I know, I know, it's science, of course you're supposed to be careful of units, blah blah blah. What we're told in classes and what is done in practice is usually never the same in most cases. Kind of like the scientific method. Ha! The only thing the scientific method has been good for is to disprove something that lots of people have latched onto as true (did you hear that the main scientist saying drinking red wine is good for you faked almost all of his data?), and never has been used to find new discoveries.Scientists really do a piss poor job of informing the outside community as to what it is we really do. With numerical derivatives though, you need to make sure that the units you use for your input are also the same units you use to compute the derivative, conversions and everything else as well, otherwise you'll end up with garbage. That was one problem I was having. I can now reproduce the same results from another program I know works and generate the same matrix. The only problem now is that when I attempt to diagonalize the matrix to get the eigenvalues and eigenvectors I'm getting junk. The really disturbing part is that I'm using the diagonalization routines in BLAS. I have to be passing it the wrong information, or getting back the wrong info at some point.

You would hope that science would be more interesting than what it seems like from the few posts I've put on here so far. Well, not for me. This is exciting. It's frustrating as all get out when it's not working, but once you get it working, there are few things more satisfying in this life. Punk concerts are one of those few things.