I came across this remarkable image a couple of days ago. It shows four million digits of π encoded as colored pixels, with one pixel per digit. Each digit has a slightly different color. […]
READ MOREWhile we were away last week in Paris for the Marathon, I finished The Islanders, a novel by one of my favorite authors, Christopher Priest. […]
READ MOREMy insurance company allows me to pay for our car insurance by monthly premiums instead of the usual premium once every 6 months. For this option, they just divide the total six-monthly premium by six to give the monthly premium, and then charge a $5 “processing fee” per month on top. I decided to take a look at how much this actually cost me. (For background on the Time Value of Money – TVM – see parts 1 and 2.) […]
READ MOREAs a household, we subscribe to a few magazines. Hence we get renewal notices for those magazines regularly, and, the magazine subscription industry being what it is, we usually get two or three renewal notices per magazine subscription. On average maybe a couple per month. All well and good, no problem. […]
READ MOREToday is my birthday. For the first time ever, my sister Nicola sent me a text to say Happy Birthday. Yay for modern technology, especially international texting of birthday wishes from England. […]
READ MOREA couple of my recent blog posts have been about the Time Value of Money (one, two). They’re full of mathematical expressions, but I was tired of writing these expressions out in Microsoft Word’s equation editor, taking a snapshot of the result, and inserting the result as an image in the post. Instead I decided to try out MathJax, a quite remarkable JavaScript library that renders math expressions at run-time in the client. […]
READ MOREOK, I’ll admit it. This one is dead weird. Even when writing it, I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with it so it turned into this essay on what happens when you boot a PC and why the BIOS is antiquated beyond belief. I then threw in a bit about memory management and file systems. I guess you’ve just got to read it to, er, gain the full perspective. […]
READ MORELast time we discussed that money has a time component to it, that it changes value with time. We derived the basic formula for TVM (Time Value of Money): […]
READ MOREBack in a previous life, I used to write swaps and options software for traders and brokers. Of all my jobs, I’d have to say that writing this kind of software was practically the only one that utilized my mathematics degree to any great extent, which I must admit is kind of depressing in a way. You’d think that programming is all about mathematics but, in reality, not so much. Sure, understanding lambda calculus is all very well, but you tend not to have to use it in your day-to-day work. (My friend and colleague Seth Juarez is perhaps the only other person I know who regularly uses “proper” mathematics in his work: he’s a fan of machine learning, and you can get his open-source library here for C# and .NET.) […]
READ MORESo it seems there’s this TV show in England called Wheeler Dealers. The premise of the show is to find a classic car in need of some TLC, buy it, do it up, and then sell it on. It’s presented by a duo: there’s Mike Brewer who does the buying/selling and Edd China who does the repairs. I’d never heard of the show before, but I was doing some surfing regarding Volvo 1800S parts and came across a particular episode that featured a white P1800 (a 1968 1800S, F reg, as it happens). I decided to add the links here for later. […]
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