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   Rusty Dotson   

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Who am I?

My name is Rusty, and I was born and raised in a coalmine town called Hurley, Virginia. My father was a coal miner, and so were many others in the area at the time. I felt that I shouldn't have to follow the footsteps of my ancestors, and instead wanted to invest my time into computer science. My hard work paid off, and I was admitted to Berea College from 2016-2020.

Berea College is a liberal arts school, and students are expected to invest much of their time into subjects outside of their major. On top of that, all students must work a part-time job on campus, which pays for everyone's tuition.

NO STUDENTS PAY FOR TUITION AT BEREA COLLEGE

Even though I studied computer science, I also put many hours into learning about art, history, languages, writing, religions, and cultures. As you can see in my header toolbar, there is an Artworks page. many of those works are directly from one of my art classes at Berea. However, I saw the frustration in myself and many other students during my time in college. "Why do I have to learn about art when all I want to do after college is code?!?!," many students would question. On top of that, the time spent in these other classes took time away from students' majors, which caused them to be academically behind students in their field of study from other colleges.

The answer is that these other life experiences build skills that easily transfer into any other role, and my time in college helped me branch out into other topics that had potential to stick with me for life. The things I learned from these classes are things that I probably wouldn't have learned any other way. In fact, some of the things I learned completely changed my future.

My Interests

I have many interests, but here are some of them:

programming:

SPFFH

SPFFH is a hybrid of two models on the concept of self-organized criticality, a physics model that is used to represent models that progress consistently until a certain variable becomes what is called a critical point. After one piece of the entire structure reaches a critical point, it creates an "avalanche-like" effect that topples over to other surrounding variables.

For example, a sandpile with grains of sand being poured consistently on it is a typical example of self-organized criticality. It slowly builds up until it reaches a point to where an avalanche (a drastic change of events) must occur for the physical system to maintain equilibrium. A forest fire is another good example, where a forest gradually grows in size until the chance of a strike of lightning hitting a tree in the area becomes probable. Once lighting successfully strikes, the result will be a fire spreading throughout the forest and burning a large chain of trees.

SPFFH stands for Sand Pile Forest Fire Hybrid, and vizualizes a fusion of the two models. It takes the aspect on analog value as represented in the depth of a sandpile, and a critical point resulting in the instant change between a node being dead or alive as represented in the forest fire model. After making these changes it presents a new model that makes use of the rules that are present within self-organized criticality.

Please keep in mind that this is a process intensive python program running in a browser, so the speed here will definitely not be as quick as desired. To view the original repo, go here: https://github.com/RustyDotson/SPFFH

Below are some tracks I have created: