Open Letters

Dear AUTO/whomever wrote the program AUTO (Eusebius Doedel, thanks Scholarpedia!),

I get that your program is ridiculously useful. So useful, in fact, that it's been in use since the days of DOS and it's still probably one of the best programs around for finding bifurcations. Congratulations to you Dr. Doedel (hee hee). However, there are a few minor issues I have with AUTO and it would be wonderful if you could rectify them.

1. Why bother putting a 'find periodic solution' option on there if it never works? I have not once gotten your program to work when starting from a limit cycle and I always have to change my paramaters so that I'm starting from a stable node so I can run a steady state solution.

2. Unfortunately, for each of the models I'm working with when the parameters are at (0,0) I have limit cycles. This means I have to run the steady state solution both forwards and backwards because I'm not starting at the begining. If maybe your program could handle both these calculations without accidently making one disappear or forgetting to do one of them it would be splendid.

3. When I finally do find a bifurcation going backwards could you maybe not freeze. That's not helpful. All it tells me is that there's a bifurcation, I have no idea what kind or what it looks like and then you just freeze and I can't find out. In social circles that's called being a tease and nobody likes a tease AUTO.

4. When I lower the number of iterations so that you'll stop freezing and I finally get a chance to try and plot bifurcations, could you not crash... thank you.

5. After everything is finally all figured out and I have what both plots look like together and they even look like how I would expect them to and I go click on 'Postscript' so that I can save it in a nice pretty looking graph format it would be absolutely splendid if you didn't freeze because then I wouldn't have to start everything all over again.

6. I know this isn't your fault but could postscript files maybe actually print instead of just crashing whenever I try to print them. Thanks.





Dear Lotka-Volterra population model with a generalist predation term added in/Matlab,

1. What the fuck. When gamma and eta are zero, your equilibrium point is a center. That means the populations orbit around one point like a planet. So why, WHY when I change the amount of time in the simulation does the amplitude change? THAT'S NOT FUCKING POSSIBLE. All that should happen is you maybe go around the orbit a couple more times, your maxes and mins should stay the same.

2. Can your phaseplanes in XPPAUT and your amplitude in Matlab maybe give me consistent answers?

3. How is it that you're the hardest one to non-dimensionalize? I mean, you're the simplest model I'm working with so how does that work out. I'll tell you why, it's because you're a dick and aren't limited by a carrying capacity so there's no handy (1 - n/k) term. Well guess what. THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, animals have carrying capacities and you're just living in a deluded fantasyland .





Dear Little Wayne,

Please stop. I can understand why you would want to play guitar - it's fairly obvious. Any rockstar is about a billion times cooler than you could ever be. However, holding a guitar in your music videos while someone else plays the song and then putting a hilariously pitiful 'solo' at the end to showcase your truly horrendous 'skillz' is not the right way to go about it. Frankly I find it insulting to all of music that people actually buy that shit. You played two different notes without any rhythm and about half of those notes were dead anyways. There are actually talented musicians out there who are struggling to get their next meal and yet you get money for being basically retarded. I can fucking play guitar better than you and I'm terrible so why don't I have the best selling album of 2008? This is why I don't like the vast majority of music being made nowadays. It's all vapid, undertalented, overproduced, hollow, emotionless tripe. Lastly, Mr. Wayne I recommend you actually learn how to play your instrument. Do not record anything with it or play it at live shows until you are able to do this.





Dear roomate,

Please go and die. Preferrably in some manner that results in unimaginably excrutiating amounts of pain. Feel free to be creative and come up with all sorts of interesting ideas but I, for one, feel that it should involve fire in some manner or another and maybe a little bit of acid as well. Is acid flammable? If so you should light it on fire and then drink it. If not, just mix some gasoline in with it and drink that.


Also: would it kill you to maybe leave the apartment every now and then. If so, please do it. If not, do it anyways because I'm pretty certain that I haven't been alone in this apartment since the first night I got here.



Much love,
Breck