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Animated landscapes with Matplotib

Just a quick experiment in creating animated surfaces in Matplotlib. The distortions to the plane are sine waves applied in octaves with a random phase, $\phi_n$:

Animated contour plots with Matplotlib

A quick project inspired by this tweet by @story645 referencing Jacques Bertin's Semiology of Graphics.

Python Quiz Advent Calendar: explanations

Here are the explanations for the Python Quiz Advent Calender puzzles which appear over December 2020.

Uranium enrichment and the separative work unit (SWU)

Natural uranium consists largely of two isotopes, $\mathrm{^{235}U}$ and $\mathrm{^{238}U}$. The less-abundant (0.72%) isotope, $\mathrm{^{235}U}$ , is important for nuclear reactors and weapons because it is the only isotope existing in nature to any appreciable extent that can sustain a fission chain reaction (that is, it is fissile).

Surface-to-volume ratios of some solid shapes

The shape with the minimum surface-to-volume ratio is the sphere. The code below plots this ratio for a variety of shapes as a function of a characteristic length: