A few days ago, Rhett Allain, professor of physics education at Southeastern Louisana University and Wired columnist, posted a video in which he wrote a short Python script that used mediants to convert real numbers into fractions. I thought it was worth a few comments. | Continue reading

Back in March, my doctor prescribed a new pill for me to take every day. That brought the number up to six—five in the morning and one at night—and I decided to give the medication tracking feature of the iOS Health app a try. This was a new addition last fall when iOS 16 came ou … | Continue reading

Sometimes I realize I’ve been doing something the slow way for a really long time, and it’s kind of embarrassing. A few days ago, I needed to take a column of numbers from a spreadsheet and convert it into a comma-separated list for pasting into Mathematica. I pasted the numbers … | Continue reading

A few days ago, Steve Mould posted a video about the rolling spool problem. He explains the problem well but not in the traditional engineering way. This problem, or a variation on it, is commonly taught to students in elementary engineering mechanics courses, and it’s taught in … | Continue reading

There’s an internet law that everyone must blog about ChatGPT, and I’m way behind, so here we go. I think what I have to say is something new. | Continue reading

Yesterday, I listened to the most recent Mac Power Users episode, “20 Mac Apps Under $20.” Although MPU is probably best known for its deep dive episodes, I always like these more rapid-fire discussions. As usual, this one has a good mix of apps that are new to me and those I alr … | Continue reading

If some of the equations in my posts look a little off—poorly spaced or, more likely, with a wobbly baseline—there may be something you can do about it. I learned this on Mastodon through a combination of Andy Napper and Mimmo. | Continue reading

I don’t want this place to turn into a Matt Parker followup blog, but there are things in his recent Pi Day video that fit in with comments I made on his Runge video, specifically the part about engineers embedding unit conversions within formulas. So go ahead and watch the video … | Continue reading

This morning I was adding an entry to my homemade wiki when I became acutely embarrassed by how convoluted the entry was becoming. I stopped writing, created an automation that made the process I was describing much simpler, and rewrote the entry feeling much better about myself. | Continue reading

This morning, I learned from Paul Kafasis that major league baseball will be going to a pitch clock, something they tried out in the minor leagues last year. The idea, of course, is to speed up our interminable national pastime. | Continue reading

Underscore David Smith wrote a post earlier this week that I had trouble with. Part of the trouble was that the code he wrote was in Swift, but that was a minor problem, as UDS’s code was clear enough to understand even though I don’t know Swift. The bigger problem was how he man … | Continue reading

I’ve been sketching out a post on the ChatGPT/Bing/Sydney fuss, but I’m not sure I’ll finish it. It’s kind of meandering and not deliberately so. One thing I’m sure of is that I want to start by quoting this Mastodon post of mine: | Continue reading

I found Matt Parker’s recent video a bit confusing, and I’d like to talk about it. According to the title, it’s about the Runge phenomenon, and while it certainty covers that topic, it starts out pretty far away and takes a sudden swing.1 | Continue reading

This morning, I was composing a nice email to a client, and I needed to know how many days it had been since September 23 of last year: This invoice is 137 days old. When the fuck are you going to pay it? I used my ago script, which worked fine, except I needed to switch from Mai … | Continue reading

Last week, as a followup to my most recent Wordle/grep post, John Gruber sent me an email in which he told me about a script he wrote to do the same thing but with less fuss. Inspired by this, I wrote my own script. | Continue reading

I canceled my Tweetbot subscription a month or two ago and don’t go to Twitter anymore—the former followed from the latter—so I haven’t been caught up in the recent mess. But it was a reminder that I wanted to share a simple tip for fellow Twitter-leavers on the off-chance you di … | Continue reading

Earlier this month, John D. Cook posted a nice little article about using a determinant to get the area of a triangle. The method was both familiar and unfamiliar. I knew I’d once learned about getting a triangle’s area from a determinant, but I was sure it wasn’t the same way Co … | Continue reading

I’ve been planning to write this post for some time, but things kept coming up. Today, though, Jesse Grosjean is running a sale on Bike, his outlining app for the Mac, and it seemed like the right day to finally push this out. The sale is a pretty good one—$10 instead of the usua … | Continue reading

With lots of people, including me, either starting up new Mastodon accounts or dusting off the old ones they created during a previous Twitter crisis, I decided to write a script that would autotoot to Mastodon whenever I publish a new post here. It didn’t take long, as the Masto … | Continue reading

When using any computer algebra system, there comes a time when you wonder why the result produced by the program isn’t as simple as you could make it by hand. To get good at using such a system, you have to learn its tricks of substitution and simplification. | Continue reading

This morning, after 108 straight wins, I lost at Wordle. I got to four correct letters by my fourth guess, but there were too many possibilities for the remaining letter, and I didn’t guess right in either of my last two guesses. | Continue reading

Last week’s Apple Event didn’t give me the push to get a new watch that I was expecting. Yes, my Series 3 won’t accept watchOS 9, but I’ve known that since WWDC. And while both the SE and the Series 8 are clear improvements over the Series 3, I’m not sure what I will get out of t … | Continue reading