The ancient Greeks (and pretty much everyone in the art world from the Renaissance onwards) were kind of fascinated with the golden ratio, or φ (phi). To see why it might be seen as interesting, let’s take a look at a geometric view of the golden ratio. Consider a rectangle: the sides of this rectangle are in the golden ratio if you can subtract a square based on the shorter side and are left with another smaller rectangle which is also in the golden ratio. Inception! […]
READ MORENo, this blog post is not about that. This blog post is about the removal of frustrations, of deep embedded wrongs, and about aiming for something better and further out than the middle of next week. It’s also about this happening in 2012. […]
READ MOREA couple of months ago I purchased The Body Farm on DVD from Amazon.co.uk. In theory it sounded promising enough: a series spinoff of Waking the Dead, with one of the characters from that series moving on from the break-up of Boyd’s cold case crime unit. It stars Tara Fitzgerald as Dr Eve Lockhart. […]
READ MOREAs it says in my bio for this site, I’m a calculator collector. Mostly Hewlett-Packard LCD calculators it must be said, but every now and then I pick up something from another manufacturer. […]
READ MOREBack in my days at Kings College, there was a movement to try and make sure that we mathematics students could write. There was a general worry that because we expressed ourselves tersely and symbolically in the language of mathematics we would forget how to express ourselves correctly in the language of English. So, while I was there, we had to write two essays, one at the end of our first year and one at the end of the second. The essays should be on a mathematical subject, maybe even with a proof or two, but it had to be preponderantly a narrative. (If you think about it, this is the same worry that developers might not be able to express themselves clearly and concisely to their users, which is why there’s so much emphasis on “written and verbal communication” in job descriptions.) […]
READ MOREI’ve been playing around a bit with Kickstarter recently. One of the projects I offered to fund was originally called Red Pop, a gizmo that attached to your iPhone to (a) give it a better grip like a normal camera, and (b) have a nice physical button on top to take photos. They reached their funding, got asked by Red to rename it to avoid any confusion (which they did, to POPA), and then eventually released it. (The following photo is courtesy Beep Industries.) […]
READ MOREI came across this mathematical problem the other day: […]
READ MOREJust recently I’ve been watching the first series of both Shoestring and Kidnap and Ransom on DVD. The former is a BBC TV series from 1979 and the latter an ITV one from 2011, and both star Trevor Eve. […]
READ MOREApologies to all if you saw a whole bunch of posts appearing and disappearing in the past hour. I’m having – all of a sudden – extreme problems with publishing a blog post from Windows Live Writer to this blog, which is hosted on GoDaddy. This first happened on November 5, but I thought it was a transient issue and ignored it. And then over the weekend I wrote the “adding parentheses” post but it would not publish, no matter what. I finally published it just now with Graffiti’s admin app, which is not nice. […]
READ MOREOnce upon a time (all right, it was in May 2010), I wrote an article for PCPlus about generating all possible arithmetic operations with the standard four operators. You can read the article here. After I’d written it, I wrote a blog post about how easy it was to convert the RPN form (Reverse Polish Notation) of the expressions I was generating into the standard algebraic or infix form. You can read that post here. (Note that this post will make more sense if you read these two articles first to get some background.) […]
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