Just last weekend a record high of 100 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded… within the arctic circle! While some would say this is something to panic about, that might point to the same confusion of long term climate vs short term weather confusion and pretending a cold day disproves global warming.
Continue reading “Energy of the future”Possible ABC Proof Conjecture brings Primes into Prime time news again!
Recently a possible proof of the ABC Conjecture has been in the news. Although the proof of this is hundreds of pages long and not really a fun read for most people, this reminded me of the prime spiral, “Ulam spiral” which we explored years ago at a meetup.
The interesting thing about ABC Conjecture is that no matter what examples or counterexamples you find to the inequality, it does not prove or disprove the theory as to where there are only finitely many specific triples to solve the inequality.
Ulam’s spiral is also a look into prime numbers, but from a visual perspective. Nothing to “prove” here but to see an interesting pattern within numbers. It was supposedly thought of by Stanislaw Ulam during a meeting, doodling numbers, and it was later popularized by Martin Gardner’s writings. It is a great way to have some fun learning how to use Matplotlib to draw up some interesting charts, too:
Continue reading “Possible ABC Proof Conjecture brings Primes into Prime time news again!”The eBook Shuffle
Remember when there were mini mp3 players with one button and a shuffle feature? If like many geeks you have a bunch of interesting ebooks from Humble Bundle, Oreilly or Github or wherever you get technical books, you probably have folders and folders of lots of interesting books. What if you want to “shuffle” or randomly pick one off your virtual bookshelf and read a bit while staying home? Today I’ll show how to virtually “grab a book off the shelf” of your collection with a simple Python script:
Continue reading “The eBook Shuffle”Re-flash-light project
Have you ever had a flashlight “ruined” by some ancient batteries becoming a permanent part of the flashlight? In my latest instructable I have an example home-re-built flashlight I made recently. If you have some good flashlights ruined by bad batteries please see this tutorial as an example of how you might turn it into something new and working again!
Continue reading “Re-flash-light project”Brain games
During lockdown in many cities it may be a good time to stay in and do some reading or video games. But what are some good games that can improve your mind during these challenging times? Here are a few suggestions:
Continue reading “Brain games”Online learning conferences
While many of us may not be going to favorite programming conferences, there are some interesting upcoming conferences to watch or watch the videos:
Digital Ocean TIDE – Going on now, a bit like the AWS free conference – a bit of an infomercial.
Knime – still a few upcoming live dates coming up on this one and the previous sessions are up, explaining this powerful machine learning tool.
May you go fourth and program!
Update –
200 OK conference – tomorrow, May 15th
Enthusiastcon – 10min talks June 6th
FastOrSlow – the new site checker from WordFence
Today the Wordfence developers announced the new fastorslow.com tool, a handy tool for seeing how fast your site is in various parts of the world. The Wordfence folks build a quite useful plugin used by many sites – and this one – to keep reduce risk of attack.
This new tool however can be used to see the performance of any type of public site and recommendations on speeding it up. It also would be a much easier way to time requests to a server like in the World Network Requests Measurement post.
Continue reading “FastOrSlow – the new site checker from WordFence”New England Repeaters added to Hearham.live Repeater Listing and Repeater-START
The Repeater-START app now includes repeaters imported from the New England Repeater Directory. This makes the app and repeater listing much more useful to those in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine! This expands the repeater-START app and any other applications needing an offline, fairly complete listing of amateur radio repeaters worldwide.
Continue reading “New England Repeaters added to Hearham.live Repeater Listing and Repeater-START”Things to do while distancing or quarantined at home
With the recent increased cases of covid-19, many are staying home or quarantined. Here are a few ideas to productively spend some time…
Continue reading “Things to do while distancing or quarantined at home”Mathematics with Pi – and earth measurement with network requests
In Ian Stewart’s book, Professor Stewart’s Casbook of Mathematical Mysteries, he writes about an easy way one might prove that the earth is not flat. His “easy” proof can be done by booking some flights and timing them… or, simply looking up actual flights from certain cities to other cities. If it is much much shorter for a certain flight from A to D while A to B to C to D in a nearly straight line is much longer, it’s effectively a proof you can go around the world without falling off…
Continue reading “Mathematics with Pi – and earth measurement with network requests”