Math
Wed, Nov 11, 2026 - 7400 Words
How pictures should be resized, rotated and dithered, and how to judge the result. Three articles: expert notes with the mathematics, measurements and references; a plain-language summary
; and a checklist of best practices and gotchas
.
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Wed, Nov 11, 2026 - 13900 Words
What the numbers in a picture mean, from the CIE observers to HDR formats, and how they go wrong. Four articles: expert notes with computed figures and references; a general-audience summary
; a guide to best practices, gotchas and recognizing errors
; and reference tables
with formulas.
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Wed, Nov 11, 2026 - 2800 Words
What the sampling theorem promises, where each of its assumptions fails, and what replaces it. Three articles: expert notes with error budgets and references; a general-audience summary
; and a checklist of best practices and gotchas
.
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Sat, Sep 12, 2026 - 1300 Words
A monospace vector font for debug overlays: 95 ASCII glyphs of lines and quadratic beziers in 1.8 KB of data, a decoder you can read over coffee, and an anti-aliased pixel writer. Public domain.
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Fri, Jul 26, 2024 - 2700 Words
Derivation of a minimal size tree for playing perfect tic tac toe
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Mon, Aug 28, 2023 - 2700 Words
This is a note on the correct usage of alpha blending, pre-multiplied alpha, gamma correction, and linear colors for image processing.
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Sat, Aug 27, 2022 - 700 Words
A robust algorithm for computing roots of quadratic equations, much better than common code.
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Mon, Dec 7, 2020 - 4000 Words
I built a RTK-GPS gadget and wrote enough software to do basic GNS tasks such as finding distances, decoding GPS NMEA and RTCM messages, finding intersections, and doing boundary detection.
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Thu, Jun 6, 2019 - 2300 Words
Summary
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Thu, Jun 6, 2019 - 900 Words
Summary
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Mon, Feb 25, 2019 - 200 Words
These slides are from a talk I gave on many aspects of computing, starting with classical computing (Hilbert’s 10th problem, Church and Turing, Godel, boolean functions, complexity theory, transistors, Moore’s law and demise), then going through physics (relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum field theory), and finally into quantum computing basics (qubits, superposition, entanglement, no cloning, basic gates) and quantum algorithms (Deutsch, Simon, Shor, Grover).
Then I cover advanced quantum topics, such as quantum machines,quantum complexity theory, the Quantum-Church-Turing-Deutsch principle, graph isomorphism, quantum error correction, and quantum security. A final speculative section covers even weirder computation ideas (closed timelike curves, string computing) and how computing seems intertwined with the nature of reality (It from Bit, Simulation Hypothesis, Free Will Theorem).
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Sat, Jul 21, 2018 - 200 Words
This talk is an intro to wireless communications, starting with the basic physics of EM waves and how they interact with materials, then how antennas work, then on to antenna properties and design. Next modulation schemes are discussed, showing how data is encoded and transmitted over noisy channels via modulation, spread spectrum, time and frequency division, and other methods. Noise in the form of doppler, intermodulation, and other causes is covered. Information theory (channel capacity, Shannon entropy, error correction) is covered. Finally specific protocols are analyzed under this framework: FM, NTSC, remotes, WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee, satellite radio, GPS, and cellular formats.
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Mon, Apr 2, 2018 - 100 Words
This talk covers cryptography best practices as of April, 2018. Background on each area is covered, with each section ending with a best practices slide. Sections are Symmetric Encryption, Asymmetric Encryption, Key Lengths, Hashing/HMAC, Password usage, Key Exchange, Random number generation, Digital Signatures,
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Sun, Nov 19, 2017 - 100 Words
The Cosmic Distance Ladder is how mankind has determined the distances to various astronomical objects, basically by deducing closer “rungs” on the ladder and using them to determine farther distances (higher rungs on the ladder).
These notes are from Terry Tao, modified by me to suit my audience and to add other topics.
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Wed, Nov 1, 2017 - 300 Words
Here’s a math puzzle.
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Mon, May 1, 2017 - 8100 Words
Here’s FRACTRAN, a weird fraction based programming language, written in FRACTRAN.
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Sun, Mar 5, 2017 - 1500 Words
How does one generate uniform random numbers in [0,1] using IEEE 754 floating point formats? It’s tricky.
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Tue, Feb 21, 2017 - 900 Words
Here’s bit tricks for efficient divisibility testing.
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Tue, Aug 23, 2016 - 900 Words
What’s the average length of a segment chosen uniformly by area on a unit square?
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Tue, Aug 23, 2016 - 2300 Words
This is a nicely hard problem in the common prisoners and warden format.
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Tue, Aug 23, 2016 - 200 Words
Here’s a result that is completely non-intuitive.
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Fri, Jul 1, 2016 - 100 Words
A post to test site features such as tables, math, code…
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