Rundown of Current Projects

James P. McMillan | June 9th, 2019

Hi, welcome to JPM Plots, a website for showcasing my various pet projects. This being my inaugural blog post, I wanted to give an overview of various projects that will be on the site. Much of my work derives from my hobbies, such as hiking and running. I've posted a link to the four, fully finished, Sway presentations which detail my 2018 road trip to the Teton Crest Trail, Yellowstone National Park and Several US States' Highest Points.

In the future I will expand the hiking section to include a peak by peak review of the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club's GATC4000 challenge, a challenge to summit the 32 highest peaks in the state of Georgia. I've sumitted 30 of the 32 peaks and plan on knocking out the last two sometime after Thanksgiving 2019. These reviews will include: the GPS record of my summits; trail hints and suggestions; parking and road considerations; topographical maps; and pictures should I have any. All of the things I wish I had *before* attempting each summit.

Moving gradually from hiking into straight data analysis, there is my GPS Project. The heatmap in this post was generated from GPS data collected from repeated hikes over a single, poorly mapped, trail. In that project I generated a more accurate representation of the trail by utilizing the improved statistics of repeated hikes. The analysis is already done but needs to be cleaned up for presentation on the website.

I have two articles on running that are being developed for this site. The first is a meta-analysis of 10 K running times trying to get at the question of “What is a good 10 K time?". The second is a simple, but useful, graphical argument for a certain type of heart rate training.

On the physics front, I'm looking to get out an old C++ project where I created some fun graphics illustrating the temperature dependence of magnetic spins interacting on a lattice. Currently, my 9 to 5 work is publishing scholarly work in peer-reviewed journals. When those works get published, I'll post a general audience friendly summary of them here.

The final form of these projects will take some time. With this blog I'll give regularly (to be read: weekly) updates on those projects and announce changes to the website. In the About/Contact section of the site I've posted links to the Twitter, Instagram and email address for this site. I'd love to hear from you if you have any suggestions.

-JPM