I thought some of you might be wondering about the dimensions on this drawing from yesterday’s post: | Continue reading
Here’s a geometry puzzle from the March issue of Scientific American. If you see the trick, it’s easy to solve.1 After doing it the easy way, I decided to solve it again the hard way, as if I hadn’t noticed the trick. | Continue reading
Yesterday was Chinese New Year and today is the first day of Ramadan. Both of these dates are based on yesterday’s new moon, so I thought it would be fun to write a little script to see how often the dates coincide. | Continue reading
Apple’s *OS 26 icons have been getting some well-deserved criticism over the past couple of months. There was Jim Nielsen’s complaint about menu icons in macOS. Then came Nikita Prokopov’s more detailed criticism of those same icons.1 And a lot of fun has been poked at Tahoe’s ap … | Continue reading
The inability of Claude and (especially) ChatGPT to extract data from the chart discussed in the last post gnawed at me. It seemed like the sort of thing an LLM should be able to do pretty well, but Claude’s table of values needed some careful editing before I could use it. And C … | Continue reading
Paul Krugman included a terrible plot in his Substack post this morning. It’s meant to support his contention that Kevin Warsh, Trump’s soon-to-be nominee for chair of the Federal Reserve, is a political hack. It does, but it’s still terrible. | Continue reading
A few days ago, I was poking around in Apple’s Weather app and came across some interesting stuff hiding behind the sunrise/sunset box. First, there’s a plot that shows the movement of the sun throughout the day, followed by sunrise and sunset times: | Continue reading
In his excessively long speech to the World Economic Forum yesterday in Davos, Donald Trump did some surprising backtracking. Not the stuff about Iceland Greenland, but on his method of calculating price reductions. | Continue reading
The Midwest is expected to have very cold temperatures this weekend, which got me thinking about burst water pipes. Water expands about 9% as it freezes, and a lot of people think it’s pressure from the outward expansion of ice that ruptures pipes, but it’s more complicated than … | Continue reading
At the end of last week’s belaying post, I said we’d look into the condition in which the climber and belayer don’t weigh the same. And we will. But first, I want to talk about stretchy ropes. | Continue reading
My apologies to those of you hoping for another pulse-pounding post on the mechanics of belaying, but I’m going to talk about Apple again. The belaying follow-up should come out this weekend. | Continue reading
I’ve been bothered by this little physics problem for a couple of days. It appeared on Rhett Allain’s Medium site on Monday, and he linked to it on Mastodon. Prof. Allain teaches at Southeastern Louisiana University and writes on physics for Wired. I like reading his stuff, but t … | Continue reading
I strained my right thigh and hip this fall doing something, but I don’t know what it was. Eventually, after several weeks of thinking it would work itself out, I decided it wouldn’t and started going to physical therapy. Several of the exercises I’m supposed to do at home involv … | Continue reading
Do you remember the Acid Tests? Not Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests; even I’m not old enough to remember those; I only read about them in Tom Wolfe’s book. No, I’m talking about the tests that checked browsers on how well they complied with web standards. Back in the mid-aughts, Apple tal … | Continue reading
After writing this morning’s post, I went down to Channahon for a walk along the I&M Canal towpath. On the drive there and back, I thought about redoing the project in Python instead of Mathematica. It seemed like a fairly easy problem, and it was. | Continue reading
As a general rule, I don’t get the fascination mathematicians have with Fibonacci numbers, but I did enjoy this recent Numberphile video. It’s about the Zeckendorf representation of numbers, which I’d never heard of, and it inspired me to build a short Mathematica notebook that r … | Continue reading
If you pay any attention at all to the Apple-centric web, you saw an explosion of links yesterday to this article by Nikita Prokopov, which rightly eviscerates the proliferation of menu icons in macOS 26. I may write up my thoughts on menu icons in a future post (short version: t … | Continue reading
As an alternative to the Writing Tools proofreading macro I showed in yesterday’s post, I built another one, called Proofread With Claude, which gets the edited text through a call to Anthropic’s Claude API. I make the call in Python using Simon Willison’s llm module and the llm- … | Continue reading
Yes, it’s been less than a week since I wrote about LLM proofreading and showed you the “final” version of the Keyboard Maestro macro I’d been using. And that wasn’t a lie because it is the final version of that macro. It’s just that I’m now using two new macros with a different … | Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, Scientific American published this puzzle. | Continue reading
In my recent post on the Keyboard Maestro episode of Mac Power Users, I needed a screenshot of a Typinator window and had trouble getting what I wanted. I tried using my SnapClip macro, but I found that when the macro’s user input window appeared, | Continue reading
I’ve written two posts on using LLMs to proofread my posts before publishing. In the first post, I had a fairly rudimentary prompt and spent most of my time discussing the feedback ChatGPT gave me. By the second post, I had refined the prompt and was using a simple Keyboard Maest … | Continue reading
Yesterday morning, before Christmas got going, I read about the big Powerball win Wednesday night. I figured that was as good an excuse as any to practice my new lotto math skills and wrote a short Python script to work out the game’s odds. | Continue reading
Greg Pierce, top turtle wrangler at Agile Tortoise, posted this to Mastodon last week: | Continue reading
I planned to talk about this post from Mathew Ingram, but things went in a different direction, and I learned something new. | Continue reading
In the most recent episode of Mac Power Users, David and Stephen discuss Keyboard Maestro, a longtime favorite automation app and the main topic of at least three previous episodes of MPU. If you’re an ANIAT reader, it’s reasonably likely that you’re already using Keyboard Maestr … | Continue reading
I’ve talked about area moments of inertia in the past couple of posts. Today, thanks to Phil Plait, resident astronomer at Scientific American, I have an excuse to talk about mass moments of inertia, the kind you learned about in first semester physics class. | Continue reading
At the end of yesterday’s post, I mentioned that axial deformations in framework members are typically two orders of magnitude less than the lateral (bending) deformations. It’s easy to see why. | Continue reading
I’ve been meaning to follow up on the “sense of structure” post I wrote just after Thanksgiving. I don’t have anything profound to say, but I did want to give complete solutions for both the off-center vertical load problem and the horizontal load problem. | Continue reading
I ran into an example of especially bad design on a web page yesterday. Not “how it looks” design; “how it works” design. | Continue reading
Speaking of the equation of time, which I was in yesterday’s post, I wanted to extend some of the work I did in that post to draw my own EoT plot and to be able to adjust it to show the difference between solar time and standard time anywhere on Earth. | Continue reading
Here’s a fun post by Andrew Plotkin. He’s a late riser, so the shortest day of the year, which is on the solstice, means nothing to him. He’s interested in the date of the earliest sunset, because that means his sunlight hours will be increasing after that date. He calls it the N … | Continue reading
I’m in the middle of a three-lecture series on the Wolfram Language and thought the puzzle presented in this recent MindYourDecisions video would be a good problem to practice on. Here’s the problem: | Continue reading
Back in early 2023, I wrote about combining some of my simple command-line date commands into a single Keyboard Maestro macro. This became my go-to system for quickly getting the number of days between two dates. Around that same time, I wrote a shortcut so I could make the same … | Continue reading
I checked out Practical Approximate Analysis of Beams and Frames from the University of Illinois library a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t dug into it deeply yet, but I smiled in recognition of some of the early material. Here, for example, are some poorly reproduced photos of bea … | Continue reading
Thanksgiving is not the last Thursday of November. I mean, it is this year, and it usually is, but that’s not how it’s determined. Since 1942, Thanksgiving—the US one, not the Canadian one—has been set by federal law to be the fourth Thursday in November. The law was passed in De … | Continue reading
While I was putting together my recent post on Maya calendar calculations, I tried to get some information on the Moon from a NASA website. Specifically, a page with the prosaic name Moon Fact Sheet at the URL | Continue reading
I don’t care much about monitoring the traffic here, but analyzing web logs seemed like a good way to practice using Pandas. I used some old data analysis friends, like groupby, and made some new ones, like the vectorized str functions. I also reacquainted myself with rsync, whic … | Continue reading
Longtime readers of this blog know I’m a sucker for calendrical calculations. So I couldn’t stop myself from doing some after reading this article by Jennifer Ouellette at Ars Technica. | Continue reading
I expect Fox News to make bad charts as part of its predisposition to promote right wing views. But today I saw an incredibly bad chart that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t promote its usual awful agenda. It’s terrible for politically neutral reasons. | Continue reading
Except for a short period when its original developers were unable to keep up and the app suffered badly, Castro has been my podcast player for many years. Its triage system of managing podcast episodes fits well with how I listen. Unfortunately, Castro has been giving me trouble … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, John D. Cook wrote a post about minimizing the variance of a sum of random variables. The sum he looked at was this: | Continue reading
Two things came together over the past few days. First was my longstanding belief that winters here in the Chicago area were snowier when I was a kid than they are now. I’m not sure why that popped back into my head, but it did. Second was my concern that I’ve been losing my Pand … | Continue reading
Yesterday, I drove to Champaign-Urbana for the Illinois men’s home basketball opener. Because I’m going to the CSO concert tonight, I stayed here overnight. When I started my car this morning, CarPlay connected to my phone and offered to give me directions home. Snort. | Continue reading
I stopped charting Apple’s quarterly results back in 2019 and don’t intend to return to it, but after seeing the recent posts at Six Colors and TidBITS, I thought I’d try out a new graph. | Continue reading
Before going out for a bike ride this morning, I checked the Weather app to see the speed and direction of the wind. On days with a decent wind, I prefer to ride out against the wind and come back with it. Here’s what the app showed: | Continue reading
I got some good replies on Mastodon after Saturday’s post. Longtime friend of the blog Nathan Grigg said he’s always assumed that GPS-measured lengths would be long because no matter how straight your path, the GPS error would make it zigzagged. Then wherami and thvedt pointed ou … | Continue reading
I did the Fall Color 5k Run and Walk at the Morton Arboretum this morning. I say “did” to downplay the fact that I don’t run races like this, I walk them. I got terrible shin splints 20+ years ago and haven’t run more than a few hundred meters at a time since then. But I do try t … | Continue reading