Second Post

Most difficult part: On the whole, I found the trickiest part to be understanding May's explanation of the existence of two cycles once a>3. I'm not completely sure why the slope of F^2(x) is the square of the slope of F(x), and I think Figures 2 and 3 might have been switched (it looks like Figure 3 has one point of intersection with the 45 degree line, whereas Figure 2 has two), unless I've misread this section.

Also, I found the derivation on Strogatz pg. 350 of the deviation near a fixed point to be a bit confusing; does the O(n) (not the actual symbol, but close enough) term refer to standard big O notation, or does it mean something else? If the former, where does that term come from?

Reflective part: This section seems quite similar to the information on bifurcation covered in my Differential Equations class last semester. However, this seems a bit different since it deals with plotting a variable against itself, with a time variable being implicit (I think; if not, I really got thrown by the reading and/or my differential equations abilities are rustier than they should be), and this was enough to throw me off a bit.