I recently got a new GPS running watch, a Garmin Fēnix 5. As well as tracking runs, cycling and swimming, it does “activity tracking” – number of steps taken in a day, sleep, and so on. The step goals are set to move automatically and I wondered how it worked. With a quick number crunch, […]
Tag: IgorPro
Esoteric Circle
Many projects in the lab involve quantifying circular objects. Microtubules, vesicles and so on are approximately circular in cross section. This quick post is about how to find the diameter of these objects using a computer. So how do you measure the diameter of an object that is approximately circular? Well, if it was circular […]
Parallel lines: new paper on modelling mitotic microtubules in 3D
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The people This paper really was a team effort. Faye Nixon and Tom Honnor are joint-first authors. Faye did most of the experimental work in the final months of her PhD and Tom came up with the idea for the mathematical modelling and helped to […]
Adventures in Code V: making a map of Igor functions
I’ve generated a lot of code for IgorPro. Keeping track of it all has got easier since I started using GitHub – even so – I have found myself writing something only to discover that I had previously written the same thing. I was thinking that it would be good to make a list of […]
Realm of Chaos
Caution: this post is for nerds only. I watched this numberphile video last night and was fascinated by the point pattern that was created in it. I thought I would quickly program my own version to recreate it and then look at patterns made by more points. I didn’t realise until afterwards that there is actually […]
Elevation: accuracy of a Garmin Edge 800 GPS device
I use a Garmin 800 GPS device to log my cycling activity. including my commutes. Since I have now built up nearly 4 years of cycling the same route, I had a good dataset to look at how accurate the device is. I wrote some code to import all of the rides tagged with commute […]
Colours Running Out: Analysis of 2016 running
Towards the end of 2015, I started distance running. I thought it’d be fun to look at the frequency of my runs over the course of 2016. Most of my runs were recorded with a GPS watch. I log my cycling data using Rubitrack, so I just added my running data to this. This software is great but […]
Tips from the blog X: multi-line commenting in Igor
This is part-tip, part-adventures in code. I found out recently that it is possible to comment out multiple lines of code in Igor and thought I’d put this tip up here. Multi-line commenting in programming is useful two reasons: writing comments (instructions, guidance) that last more than one line the ability to temporarily remove a […]
Bateman Writes: Eye of the Tiger
I don’t often write about music at quantixed but I recently caught Survivor’s “Eye of The Tiger” on the radio and thought it deserved a quick post. Surely everyone knows this song: a kind of catchall motivational tune. It is loved by people in gyms with beach-unready bodies and by presidential hopefuls without permission to use it. […]
The International Language of Screaming
A couple of recent projects have meant that I had to get to grips more seriously with R and with MATLAB. Regular readers will know that I am a die-hard IgorPro user. Trying to tackle a new IDE is a frustrating experience, as anyone who has tried to speak a foreign language will know. The speed […]