Monstrous fish photos A Helen Keller-like story Brave New World versus 1984 in comics The value of attacking hard problems Free and low-cost software for entrepreneurs
Monthly Archives: August 2010
What distribution does my data have?
“Which distribution describes my data?” Variations on that question pop up regularly on various online forums. Sometimes the person asking the question is looking for a goodness of fit test but doesn’t know the jargon “goodness of fit.” But more…
A Geography of Color
If you’re looking for visual stimulation, check out Colors of the World: A Geography of Color. I found it while browsing a library the other day and have thoroughly enjoyed looking through it.
Weekend miscellany
Photography Color photos of America circa 1940 Ghosts of World War II Humor Surreal flight Computing No e-books allowed IronPython tools for Visual Studio Math Thirteen mathematically-inspired products Carnival of Mathematics #68 Science Craig Ventor: We have learned nothing from…
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Timing software
When measuring how long it takes to execute a program, people often report the best time out of several runs with the same input. That seems odd at first. Why report the best time? Why not report the average time?…
Emacs command to add HTML tags
A while back I asked Jason Fruit how to add HTML tags to text in Emacs, something like the format painter in Microsoft applications. He said he didn’t know of anything and wrote the following macro for me. (defun tag-word-or-region…
The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones
According to Richard Sears, the world hit peak oil in 1985 in the sense that oil accounted for 50% of world energy in 1985 and the percentage has been declining since then. By that same measure, we hit peak coal…
A tale of two espresso machines
This post tells the story of two espresso machines: one in Los Angeles and one in Brenham, Texas. But it’s more about deciding what you do and do not want to control. *** In his book Made by Hand, Mark…
