I think I’ve mentioned here before that sometimes I’ll run into a computer problem and Googling for the answer leads me to a post I wrote (and forgot about) years earlier. I had a similar experience today in the physical world. | Continue reading

Earlier this month, I got an email from Anthony SEROU about my post on the golden ratio and converting between miles and kilometers. They suggested using consecutive Fibonacci numbers as a quick way to do the conversion, e.g., 5 miles is 8 kilometers. And if the amount you’re con … | Continue reading

The Matplotlib code in the last post was initially generated with a Typinator abbreviation that I tweaked to make the final script. After writing the post, I decided it would be nice to have a second, similar abbreviation. This post shows you both. | Continue reading

The business pages of the Chicago Tribune usually have a little graphic showing a plot of some economic data. There’s no story to go along with the graph; it’s meant to stand on its own. In yesterday’s edition, it was a graph of unemployment over the past decade or so: | Continue reading

November’s issue of Scientific American has a fun little puzzle about houses of cards. I solved it one way and SciAm solved it another, so I thought it worth a quick post. | Continue reading

A recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast, “Brilliantly Boring,” covers a topic near and dear to my heart: reinforced concrete—more specifically, the rebar that does the reinforcing. The show does an excellent job in a short period. I just want to fill in some details. | Continue reading

Here’s one last bit of followup on my Finder/Terminal tool posts. In the first post on the topic, I mentioned that I had created a bunch of zero-length JPEG files using the touch command. And in both the first and second posts, I talked about how long the sel command took when th … | Continue reading

The popular “Is my blue your blue” game is questionable as a test of color perception, in that monitor settings and lighting conditions differ, but it presents its results in a way that I really like. | Continue reading

One of the best things about not being an Apple blogger is that I don’t feel compelled to comment on everything Apple does. I was reminded of this when I read Stephen Hackett’s roundup of yesterday’s event. It was my favorite post of the day, and he came up with a great angle on … | Continue reading

After the last post, I had a conversation with ondaiwai on Mastodon about the to_markdown and agg functions in Pandas. After seeing his example code here and here, I rewrote my script, and I think it’s much better. | Continue reading

People my age1 like to talk about how our education was superior to that of these kids today. I can say with absolute certainty that one aspect of my education was terribly deficient: how the Electoral College works. | Continue reading

For reasons I don’t recall, I was looking at this post recently and realized that I’d missed something. Let’s rectify that. | Continue reading

I meant to write this post a couple of weeks ago, right after Presh Talwalkar published this video: | Continue reading

I’m finding Tot to be a really good app for shopping lists. It has checklists for items, bold formatting to separate the lists for different stores (I often go to more than one store on a shopping trip), and its seven-note limitation encourages the reuse of notes for ephemeral st … | Continue reading

Against my better judgment, I decided to write a Shortcut today. Even worse, I wanted it to be able to run on my Apple Watch. After several iterations, all of which looked to me to be functionally identical, I finally hit upon one that worked. | Continue reading

The one rule of plotting that every newly minted data scientist can repeat without fail is that your graphs should always start at zero. A graph that doesn’t start at zero is misleading, dishonest, and possibly nefarious. This rule is, of course, bullshit. Not a rule at all. | Continue reading

I was thinking about calendar conversions the other day and remembered that it had been years since I used my date-convert script. I wondered if it would still run. It didn’t, but it was easy to fix. | Continue reading

Continuing with John D. Cook posts, I should write up a little thing that I meant to post about a month ago. It was in response to this post of Cook’s in which he considers solutions to the equation | Continue reading

If I told you to go read Stephen Hackett’s post about a problem with Apple’s Reminders app, you might think I’ve suffered a blow to the head and am living in the past. But I’m not talking about his multipart complaint in 2019, his badge complaint in 2021, his continuing badge com … | Continue reading

I bought a kayak a couple of weeks ago. It’s one of those fold-up jobs by Oru, and I got it instead of a more traditional kayak because it’s very light and can easily fit inside my car instead of being strapped to the roof. | Continue reading

Yesterday, I was thinking about what textbook I would move on to after I finish Adventures in Celestial Mechanics. Because I’ve been thinking about gravity, I pulled Oliver Kellogg’s Foundations of Potential Theory off my shelf and started leafing through it. I soon came upon a g … | Continue reading

As I was making tea this morning, I was reminded that many people on the internet think I’m an idiot. I’d like to defend myself. | Continue reading

Some time ago, I wrote a little shell script called next, which used the date command to output the date some number of weekdays after the current date. So if I ran it today (Thursday, May 2, 2024) with this invocation, | Continue reading

After writing the last post, I decided to do the calculations necessary to make Newmark’s influence chart. | Continue reading