Author Archives: admin

Are you interested in learning how to solve a simple atwood machine? Well, thanks to Allen Brown, we have a screencast version of our “writing hand” atwood machine problem.  

Several of my mechanics students, those in Phy 262, asked about how to make their matlab homework look better. I honestly didn’t know. I learned Matlab without the GUI and have just exported figures and such. However, my TA learned how to use the publish feature for his own work, and we now have a […]

Allen Brown is working on screen casting some of the introductory physics problems we did “writing hand” videos of last semester.  Much higher production values!  Hopefully they will see great use. We have: Finding the magnitude and direction of a vector. Adding force vectors together and using F=ma. Projectile motion explored by throwing darts. and problem […]

Well not really, but in Physics 262, we simulate the dynamics of mechanical systems. We did Euler and Euler-Cromer’s in class, and next week we will do leapfrog, which is illustrated in this video by Ryan Melvin. 

The two Ryans in the Salsbury group, Melvin and Godwin, were asked to give the first physics seminar of the new semester since Godwin had won a fellowship and Melvin a Best Talk award. One of the better seminars, in my oh-so humble opinion, and here are lightly edited slides from it from figshare.  Good […]

My first class of the new semester starts in 30 mins, Phy 262 Mechanics. Since part of this course is on solving numerical problems and now that I have TA support for videos, Ryan Melvin has nicely created a basic intro to matlab video for the course!. 

Another semester is basically done at Wake Forest; all that is left is grading finals and posting grades; a solid bit of work, but not too bad. My 113 physics class — aka introductory mechanics — entered the final exam very strong; many more A’s than normal, and from skimming over the exams, it looks […]

Last week, we noted that Ryan Melvin won first-place for his talk at the 2nd Workshop on High-throughput Molecular Dynamics in Barcelona. Here is a slightly edited version of his talk, which can also be found on figshare.  

We use catdcd all the time for trajectory manipulation and Ryan Godwin decided to make a graphical interface for us to use. (I am still more command-line oriented than most of my students, but that’s habit.) We are now sharing it on figshare, in case anyone else finds it useful.

One of our graduate students, Ryan Melvin, won best talk at the 2nd workshop on high-throughput molecular dynamics in Barcelona. More details to come !