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Salah Kouhen

Salah Kouhen

A PhD student at Oxford. Interested in turbulence, physics generally and a mix of many other things.

Kills 99.9% of germs

Kills 99.9% of germs

You have likely seen this marketing phrase on disinfectant before, but what does it mean? Does it mean that of all the germs that exist, the product can kill 99.9% of the varieties? Not quite. Let’s indulge a little and dive into this. First of all, what’s

Creating a novel chaos game

Creating a novel chaos game

The concept of self-organised criticality (SOC) was invented in the late 80s. The idea is that a system can naturally evolve towards a critical point and then stay there. The example first used to introduce the idea was called the sandpile model. The sandpile model is a cellular automata with

Magnetic pendulum choice maker

Magnetic pendulum choice maker

Chaos is fascinating. Where a released pendulum will end up around magnets is incredibly complicated. You can explore this in a fantastic interactive visualisation from Ingo Berg. I decided a decision-making app where each magnet represented something you wanted to decide between, would be a fun project. Click the black

Game of life writer

Play This JavaScript app converts text into cells and plots them on a canvas. These cells then evolve according to the classic rules of the game of life. The game of life illustrates how complex behaviour can arise from simple rules, a key concept in chaos theory. In this case

Fractal portal VFX idea

Fractal portal VFX idea

A while ago I was watching Chris Danforth's lecture series on chaos. During one of the lectures he showed the Julia sets, which you can play around with here. I thought that moving along the negative real axis would make a really cool portal opening effect. I made

Julia set explorer

Julia set explorer

A few weeks ago I wrote a bit about how Mandelbrot zooms are created, check that out here. Today's article is about that fractal's relatives, the Julia sets. To refresh ourselves, the Mandelbrot set is generated by asking whether zero will explode or not when you

Lake from a dream: the Fresnel effect

Lake from a dream: the Fresnel effect

I made a lake in unity! You can scroll down to walk around it in your browser. The lake is achieved by combining a few different effects. Reflections, small waves on the surface (generated by layering noise at two scales that shifts in time), waves that emanate from the player