The golden ratio comes up in unexpected places. This post will show how the sines and cosines of some special angles can be expressed in terms of the golden ratio and its complement.
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Would you rather have a chauffeur or a Ferrari?
Dan Bricklin commented in a recent interview on how the expectations of computers from science fiction have not panned out. The point is not that computers are more or less powerful than expected, but that we have wanted to put…
Posted in Computing, PowerShell
Programs, not just projects
My frustration with personal productivity systems like GTD is that they’re all about projects and tasks. They leave out a third category: programs. GTD thinks of a project as something that can be broken into a manageable number of tasks…
Connecting Fibonacci and geometric sequences
Here’s a quick demonstration of a connection between the Fibonacci sequence and geometric sequences. The famous Fibonacci sequence starts out 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … The first two terms are both 1, then each subsequent terms is…
R package for robust priors
Jairo Fuquene has released an R package on CRAN to accompany our paper A Case for Robust Bayesian priors with Applications to Binary Clinical Trials Jairo A. Fuquene P., John D. Cook, Luis Raul Pericchi
All languages equally complex
This post compares complexity in spoken languages and programming languages. There is a theory in linguistics that all human languages are equally complex. Languages may distribute their complexity in different ways, but the total complexity is roughly the same across…
PowerShell eBook update
I just posted a new version of PowerShell Day 1 that corrects a couple typos.
Plain Python
Perl is cool, much more so than Python. But I prefer writing Python. Perl is fun to read about. It has an endless stream of features to discover. Python by comparison is kinda dull. But the aspects of a language…
High productivity, low productivity
Greg Wilson pointed out an article on productivity by Jason Cohen that makes a lot of sense. Here’s a story that Jason tells to set up his point. You get in your car at home and head out towards your…
Management mythology
The Management Myth is a wonderfully cynical perspective on management theory from former management consult Matthew Stewart.
Posted in Business
Highlights from Reproducible Ideas
Here are some of my favorite posts from the Reproducible Ideas blog. Three reasons to distrust microarray results Provenance in art and science Forensic bioinformatics (continued) Preserving (the memory of) documents Programming is understanding Musical chairs and reproducibility drills Taking…
Tagged with: Biostatistics, Programming, Reproducibility, Science
Posted in Science, Software development
Posted in Science, Software development
Blogging about reproducible research
I’m in the process of folding ReproducibleResearch.org into the new ReproducibleResearch.net site. I will be giving the .org domain name to the folks now running the .net site. (See the announcement for a little more information.) As part of this…
Cinco de Mayo and the world’s largest cake
Today is Cinco de Mayo, the holiday that celebrates the Mexican army’s defeat of French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. Cinco de Mayo is unusual in that it is a Mexican holiday more popular in…
A surprising theorem in complex variables
Here’s a strange theorem I ran across last week. I’ll state the theorem then give some footnotes. Suppose f(z) and g(z) are two functions meromorphic in the plane. Suppose also that there are five distinct numbers a1, …, a5 such…
Rules for computing happiness
Some time ago I ran across a blog post Al3x’s rules for computing happiness by Alex Payne. I agree with the spirit of the list, though I disagree at least to some extent with most of the points. It seems…
Posted in Computing
