# Blog

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## Measurements of the electron charge over time

In his 1986 book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! physicist Richard Feynman writes:

## Iceberg dynamics

Prompted by this tweet and campaign for icebergs to be depicted in their most stable equilibrium orientation, here is a Python script modelling the dynamics of a two-dimensional iceberg which starts in an arbitrary orientation and position and relaxes under gravitational and buoyant forces to its most stable configuration. A cork floats "on its side": with its longest axis parallel to the water's surface (it doesn't bob around with its longest axis vertical), and an iceberg does the same.

## Where are the world's nuclear power plants?

As of April 2020, there were 440 operational nuclear power reactors in the world. They are listed on this Wikipedia page, which can be scraped using the code at the bottom of this post for their important details, including their locations as latitude and longitude coordinates. The result of this scraping is the CSV file operational-nuclear-power-stations.csv, which can be analysed using pandas.

## Cistercian Numerals

The Cistercian numeral counting system used by the Cistercian monastic order in the late medieval period. The digits 1 – 9 are depicted as symbols arranged around a vertical stave. By placing these symbols reflected vertically and/or horizontally into each of four locations the decimal digits in the units, tens, hundreds and thousands positions could be represented, enabling the numbers 0 – 9999 to be defined, as shown below (by user Meteoorkip from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0):

## Old-style Matplotlib charts

Just a quick demonstration of using Matplotlib and Pillow to customize a chart in the style of a 1950s academic journal article.