In my numerical methods class last night, I was teaching the 2D Ising model – a really good starter model for understanding how magnets works (and other things as well). I had built the model in Matlab and was walking through the logic with the students. Optimized for understanding and not for speed, my model was slow. I wanted to show them the phase transition in a clearer manner, so I searched the web for an online tool that was faster. https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/software/demos/isingmodel.html

I ran it for a but of conditions. And then at zero temperature, the darn thing converged to something similar to the Ukrainian flag. (I was wrong though because the Ukrainian flag only has two stripes not three.)

In physics class, we often try to avoid the hot button geo-political issues. But what happens when your monte-carlo calculation generates them for you…