Posts filed under the 'Blog' category


Henning Mankell: L’homme inquiet (The Troubled Man)

When we were in Paris back in April, I picked up the latest (and final) Inspector Wallander novel. Yes, a Swedish book translated into French and read by an Englishman. There was method to my madness (just): the first Wallander book I read, I’d picked up as a French translation (it was Firewall, or, La muraille invisible) in Montreal in order to try and recover some of the French I’d known and learned when a child. Fairly successful, except I then read the rest of them in English translations. So, when I saw this in the bookshop on the Champs Elysées, I picked it up along with a couple of other books to celebrate the end of the series as I’d started it, dictionary at my side (this time with a Larousse French-English dictionary app on my iPhone rather than the physical Oxford I’d used last time). […]

READ MORE

Random sample algorithm

Raymond Chen’s post this morning was about one of the most bizarre uses of GUIDs I’ve ever heard about. I’ll quote the relevant bit: […]

READ MORE

Checkerboard problem

I know the answer to this conundrum, but I still have problems recognizing the answer. If you’ve never seen it before, it is really baffling. […]

READ MORE

Pikes Peak and the Supermoon

I was getting coffee from Starbucks this morning when I looked at Pikes Peak in the early morning sunlight. There was the waning moon setting over the snow-clad mountain. (Yesterday was a day of drizzle and damp; obviously this settled as snow at higher elevations.) I laid down some rubber to return home and get the camera to take a shot. […]

READ MORE

Visualizing four million digits of pi

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 MORE

“The Islanders” by Christopher Priest

While 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 MORE

More TVM–calculating the IRR

My 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 MORE

Fake magazine renewal notice

As 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 MORE

A birthday shock

Today 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 MORE

Tightening the feedback loop when writing LaTeX expressions for MathJax

A 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 MORE