Since working in the large-scale Molecular Dynamics team at Los Alamos National Laboratory 1992-1999, Niels Grønbech-Jensen has been interested in a variety of algorithms relevant for materials modeling, electrostatics, and self-assembly in soft matter. Now at UC Davis, he has for the past several years been revisiting Verlet-type algorithms for controlling temperature and pressure with an aim to ensure both accurate and efficient thermodynamic measures with simple and practical methods that can be easily implemented into existing Verlet-based simulation environments for computational statistical mechanics. Further, the work is an integral component in several instructional efforts in the mathematics and engineering courses that Niels is teaching at UC Davis in, e.g., numerical analysis, dynamical systems, and statistical methods.