Blog

A Math Question

February 5, 2020

On CodeProject site I found the following question: Hi all, I need help in a math issue: Let’s say I have 3 measuring devices which give me a distance. Mechanically those 3 sensors are mounted more or less in the right position, but we can’t be sure of the angle neither position the measuring devices are mounted. I have 3 Mastering parts (3 circumferences of a known radius) that I can mount into the machine at any moment and that I want to use to calibrate the system. ...

Spell That Number

January 13, 2020
programming

fivethirtyeight.com is Nate Silver’s site of charts and statistics that I visit periodically looking at a certain graph in hope it’s going to change. They also publish occasional riddles and last week’s riddle seemed interesting enough. Here is the short version: spell a number in English and find its value by adding the value of all letters (a=1, b=2, c=3 and so on) – they call this number the “Gemantria” of the word. ...

Detective Story

November 24, 2019
music

The other day I was listening to Serge Gainsbourg’s song La chanson de Prévert while paying attention to lyrics: Cette chanson était la tienne C’était ta préférée, je crois Qu’elle est de Prévert et Kosma I vaguely remembered that I was forced to learn one of Jacques Prévert’s poems back in my high school days, but “une chanson de Prévert et Kosma” didn’t ring any bells. I’m no Maigret but Google is my friend so it didn’t take long to find out that the song was Les Feuilles mortes, composed back in 1945 by Joseph Kosma and Jacques Prévet and first played by Yves Montand. ...

What's With the Jews

April 18, 2018
statistics

What’s With the Jews # Just watched CBC documentary “What’s With The Jews” and one of the assertions seemed counterintuitive. It said that if the average IQ of a population is only slightly shifted from the average, this has a disproportionate influence over the tail end of the distribution. So if the average IQ of the Jewish population is only 10 points above the general average, the number of people with an IQ of 145 or higher is going to be 6 times more than in the general population. ...

Colormaps

October 14, 2014
color maps

While implementing the reader for GGF format I needed some test data and examples. A couple of articles on Wikipedia about bilinear interpolation and bicubic interpolation had examples in Matlab with some nice color maps. I was trying to implement the same examples in Mathcad and wanted to get the same colormap (palette). A question of StackOverflow combined with another article helped me find a Mathcad implementation: Also found a nice colormap - Haxby colormap: ...

Creating a New Theme

September 28, 2014

Introduction # This tutorial will show you how to create a simple theme in Hugo. I assume that you are familiar with HTML, the bash command line, and that you are comfortable using Markdown to format content. I’ll explain how Hugo uses templates and how you can organize your templates to create a theme. I won’t cover using CSS to style your theme. We’ll start with creating a new site with a very basic template. ...

From TDD to TAD

April 25, 2014
testing

DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) advocates for moving on from TDD. Maybe it’s time to replace TDD (Test Driven Development) with TAD - Test Assisted Design. Instead of mandating tests for every piece of code, use tests to sharpen the critical aspects of a design. That can be an algorithm or limit cases of an algorithm, a DB schema or an API use case. TDD is dead. Long live testing. By David Heinemeier Hansson on April 23, 2014 ...