I watched this Numberphile video a few days ago and learned not only about Harshad numbers, which I’d never heard of before, but also some new things about defining functions in Mathematica. | Continue reading
Although I complained last year of the Sports app’s deficiencies, I’ve been giving it another try. I do like having the score of a favorite team continually updated in the Dynamic Island, but just this morning I learned of another problem. | Continue reading
This morning, as I was scrolling through Apple News, I came upon this article from the Wall Street Journal about how NFL teams are punting less than they used to. It included this terrible graph: | Continue reading
After getting my new iPhone 17 Pro last Friday, I decided I should update my system for framing iPhone screenshots. This should have meant just downloading new templates from the Apple Design Resources page and changing a filename in the Retrobatch workflow, but I decided to effe … | Continue reading
Alex Chan published a post today that struck me immediately as something I should s̸t̸e̸a̸l̸ adapt for my own use. It’s a bookmarklet that creates a URL linking to the selected text within a web page. The selected text is called a text fragment, and a link to it will typically ca … | Continue reading
As I often do, I thought it worthwhile to put up a quick post showing how I made the graphics in my previous post. The images were made in Mathematica, mainly through the Graphics3D command. The exception was the plot of 10,000 random points; that was done through ListPointPlot3D … | Continue reading
This morning, John D. Cook posted an article about generating uniformly distributed points over the interior of a triangle. He offered three options, one that failed to distribute the points uniformly and two that succeeded. I want to talk about the failure. | Continue reading
I was in Cedar Rapids Wednesday afternoon to see the final Louis Sullivan jewel box bank in Iowa. It was kind of disappointing but still had some nice details. | Continue reading
This morning I visited the Louis Sullivan jewel box bank in Grinnell, Iowa. Built in 1914, this one is known as the Merchant’s National Bank. | Continue reading
With the Labor Day weekend behind me, I drove from Minnesota down into Algona, Iowa, to see the first of three Louis Sullivan jewel box banks in the Hawkeye State. | Continue reading
Today’s Louis Sullivan jewel box bank is the National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota. I stopped here on the way up to the Twin Cities, where I’ll be visiting my daughter and going to the Minnesota State Fair. | Continue reading
You may recall my post from earlier this summer about the Louis Sullivan jewel box banks and how ChatGPT gave me the wrong information about the best way to tour all of them. Today I started a trip that should hit five of the eight banks. Oh, I’m also doing some other stuff, like … | Continue reading
As I said back in June, one of my goals for my library search system (recently updated) was to be able to check on whether I already owned a book while in a used bookstore. I got to use it for that very purpose a couple of days ago, and it worked just as I hoped. | Continue reading
Last year, I complained about Apple’s way of calculating and presenting trends in the Health app. Today I’m going to complain about how it handles trends in the Fitness app. I like to spread my complaints around. | Continue reading
Something Kieran Healy wrote several years ago has stuck with me: If you want to measure change, you can’t change the measure. Kieran attributes that pithy bit of advice to Tom Smith of the General Social Survey, but my Google and Kagi searches always lead to Kieran. Regardless, … | Continue reading
After a couple of months of using my library search web page, I decided it needed a small upgrade, which I added today. It’s a new button that resets the search form. | Continue reading
I don’t want to give you the impression that I get all my blogging ideas from Jason Snell, but here’s the second one this week. It was inspired by his post this morning about using the new folder automation feature in macOS 26. After bookmarking the article so I can refer to it a … | Continue reading
Nobody comes here for Apple news, so I assume you’ve already heard that Apple has started activating the blood oxygen sensor on all Apple Watches with the sensor. Until today, watches sold in the United States after January 2024 had their sensors deactivated because of the Masimo … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, I published a post about a Shortcut I made to help me c̸h̸e̸a̸t̸ play the NY Times Connections game on my iPhone. It’s called “Play Connections,” and it takes a screenshot, crops it to just the game grid, and saves it to Photos. I then use the highlighter tool … | Continue reading
I was mentioned in the Snell Talk segment of yesterday’s episode of Upgrade. Jason was asked if he had a paddleboard, and he talked about how he’d like to have a kayak to go paddling in the bay near his home. The downside of owning a kayak is that you have to store and transport … | Continue reading
This Scientific American article (web | Apple News) about new hydrogel adhesives is interesting, but I have one small nit I need to pick with it. | Continue reading
As a companion piece to the post on the moment-area method, today we’ll go through another way to solve the differential equations of beam bending without doing any serious math. This is called the conjugate beam method, and it was developed by Harold Westergaard in this 1921 pap … | Continue reading
I started a new notebook last week and thought it worth writing another update on how I’m using it. | Continue reading
This morning, I checked the iPhone Health app to see how long I’ve been sleeping recently. I wanted to look at the past month but mistakenly tapped the 6M button instead of the M. This is what I saw: | Continue reading
My last few posts have involved the solution of differential equations. Structural engineers tend to avoid using the solution techniques taught in math class, partly because we’re not that good at math and partly because people who were good at math figured out ways for us to get … | Continue reading
In retirement, I’ve taken to going through old engineering textbooks to fill in holes that weren’t covered in my classes. These aren’t necessarily the assigned texts, but they’re books I heard about. Recently, I’ve started on Mathematical Methods in Engineering by Theodore von Ká … | Continue reading
Leon Cowle asked Claude Sonnet to solve the same beam bending problem that I recently asked ChatGPT to solve, and he sent me Claude’s answers. Like ChatGPT, Claude started off giving the correct answer, but fell down when trying to explain it. What surprised me was the difference … | Continue reading
A couple of years ago, I asked ChatGPT to solve two simple structural analysis problems. It failed pretty badly, especially on the second problem, where it wouldn’t fix its answer even after I told it what it was doing wrong. Earlier this week, I decided to give it another chance … | Continue reading
I mentioned on Mastodon how much I enjoyed Myke Hurley’s interview of John Gruber on the most recent episode of Cortex. One part that particularly resonated with me was when Gruber spoke of all the online bookmark managers he’s used over the years and how none of them have stuck. … | Continue reading
Bruce Ediger, who blogs at Information Camouflage, has been doing some interesting numerical experimentation recently; first in a post about estimating population size from a sample of serial numbers (you may have seen this Numberphile video on the same topic), and then a couple … | Continue reading
Last week, I was going to be out with my MacBook Pro all day, and I wanted to make sure it was fully charged. I had noticed that it was typically charging up only to about 80%, and I assumed that was because Sequoia was doing some clever battery-life-lengthening thing. I wanted t … | Continue reading
I had a touch of insomnia last night and tried to cure it by watching YouTube videos. The algorithm suggested a compilation of quiz questions from Richard Osman’s House of Games, a British game show that I used to watch regularly back in 2020, when I was trying to take my mind of … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, I asked ChatGPT to plan a driving route for me to visit all the Louis Sullivan jewel box banks. My goal was to make an Apple Note with all the banks and their Apple Maps links so I’d have everything I needed in a single document, but I didn’t have time righ … | Continue reading
I recently realized, after including code from interactive Python sessions in recent posts (this one and this one), that I have more to say about my use of the Jupyter console than I covered in this post back in December. | Continue reading
I’ve noticed that many programmers have a phobia about floating point numbers. They see something like this (a Python interactive session, but a similar thing could be done in many languages), | Continue reading
A few month ago, I wrote about three short Python scripts I could run from the command line to search for books in my technical library. The information on the books and authors was kept in an SQLite3 database, and the SQL queries built into the scripts were originally written wi … | Continue reading
The NBA season ended last night as the Thunder beat the Pacers 103–91 in the seventh game of the Finals. I read this morning that this was the 20th Finals to go seven games in the 79-year history of the NBA, and I wondered what the distribution of game counts was. | Continue reading
I’ve mentioned here before that I was on a dietary program to keep my Type II diabetes under control. The program and its associated app also kept track of my blood pressure with a Bluetooth-connected cuff that I used once a week. I left the program at the beginning of the year ( … | Continue reading
I read this article from Scientific American about the GBU-57/B, the “bunker buster” bomb that Donald Trump will… or won’t… or will… or won’t allow Israel to use on Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility. The facility is buried deep within a mountain, and the GBU-57/B is the only non-nucl … | Continue reading
This is another post about a puzzle in Scientific American. I confess that this and my previous post have just been placeholders, things that I’m putting here because the post I really want to write is giving me trouble. It started when I read this article in Ars Technica about d … | Continue reading
Looking through the June edition of Scientific American this morning, I saw this puzzle (that’s an Apple News link; here’s a regular one): | Continue reading
I checked out a copy of Raúl Rojas’s The Language of Mathematics: The Stories behind the Symbols at my local library this morning. As the subtitle says, it covers the history and eventual standardization of many many mathematical symbols. The book is several years old, but the En … | Continue reading
I forgot to mention in yesterday’s post another way (apart from looking at the FediDB directory) to check how much an instance is being used. That’s the activity API call. Running it on Fosstodon this morning via | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, I expressed some concern about staying on my current Mastodon instance, which is Fosstodon: | Continue reading
As part of a flurry of posts on Daring Fireball yesterday afternoon, John Gruber said something that really seemed directed at me. It was a sort of throwaway comment in the post about Apple Stores: | Continue reading
I opened this article in Apple News+ this morning to see if, as I suspected, it was Long COVID that kept Kristaps Porziņģis from playing as much as usual during the NBA playoffs. It wasn’t, but before I even got into the story, I was taken aback by the headline. | Continue reading
I recently realized that although switching my search engine to Kagi has been a boon for search in general, it’s disrupted the way I search leancrew.com for old blog posts. But I’ve fixed the problem through Kagi Lenses | Continue reading
I meant to embed a Mathematica notebook into last week’s post about generating random points on the surface of a sphere, but I was having trouble with the Wolfram Cloud. Those problems have been fixed, so here’s a Mathematica notebook that does the various calculations necessary … | Continue reading