After a bit of tinkering I was able to compile "Hello World!" programs in Fortran and C++.  Now I need to figure out which one would be better to use for the upcoming programs and I need to learn more about Python.

I discovered that Phil Hopkins is a year younger than me and he is now a post-doc at Berkeley. He and many of the other people in this field use the same code called GADGET-2: www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/gadget/.

I began reading about the application of kinetic theory to gravitationally bound particles today. I already had an introduction to the subject when I was reading for my proposal assignment, so it was nice to see the theory presented more thoroughly. The most interesting feature, theoretically speaking, is the negative heat capacity caused by gravitation. Removing energy from a system with negative heat capacity makes the system's temperature increase!

As with much of the rest of the book, this section contains some silly attempts to derive analytic approximations for things which can only be studied properly through simulation.  Analytic arguments in systems as complex and asymmetric as clusters and galaxies seem to only be useful for building a vocabulary with which to describe phenomena.

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