This post will take a look at simple bidirectional text, such as a bit of English inside an Arabic document, or a few words of Hebrew inside a French document. If you want to explore the subject in all its complexity, see Unicode Standard Annex 9. You may not need to do anything special to […]
I ran across someone recently who says the way to move past object oriented programming (OOP) is to go back to simply telling the computer what to do, to clear OOP from your mind like it never happened. I don’t think that’s a good idea, but I also don’t think it’s possible. Object oriented programming, […]
If you know one numerical method for solving ordinary differential equations, it’s probably Euler’s method. If you know two methods, the second is probably 4th order Runge-Kutta. It’s standard in classes on differential equations or numerical analysis to present Euler’s method as conceptually simple but inefficient introduction, then to present Runge-Kutta as a complicated but […]
Around this time last year I wrote about the entropy extractor used in μRNG. It takes three biased random bit streams and returns an unbiased bit stream, provided each input stream as has least 1/3 of a bit of min-entropy. I’ve had in the back of my mind that I should go back and run […]
Goodhart’s law says “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” That is, when people are rewarded on the basis of some metric, they’ll learn how to improve that metric, but not necessarily in a way that increases what you’re after. Here are three examples of Goodhart’s law related to […]
I looked back to see what posts I had written on this date in years past. January 14 doesn’t have any particular significance for me, so these post are a representative cross section of the blog. Some years I didn’t write anything on January 14, and some years I wrote posts that are not worth […]
Last night I was helping my daughter with calculus homework. I told her that a common mistake was to forget what the original problem was after getting absorbed in sub-problems that have to be solved. I saw this over and over when I taught college. Then a few minutes later, we both did exactly what […]
There are variations on Newton’s root finding method that use higher derivatives and converge faster. Alston Householder developed a sequence of such methods of the form where the superscripts in parentheses indicate derivatives. When n = 2, Householder’s method reduces to Newton’s method. Once Newton’s method is close enough to a root, the error is […]
If something is outside your grasp, it’s hard to know just how far outside it is. Many times I’ve intended to sit down and understand something thoroughly, and I’ve put it off for years. Maybe it’s a programming language that I just use a few features of, or a book I keep seeing references to. […]
If someone tells you repeatedly that something isn’t hard, maybe it’s just hard. Monads A post by Gilad Bracha got me thinking about this. He says Last time I looked, the Haskell wiki listed 29 tutorials on [monads]. … Could it just be that people just have a hard time understanding monads? If so, what […]
