How To Train Your Robot

2024-02-052024-02-05

One less Historical Online Library… Google Removes Cached Page Search Engine Feature

This month you may have noticed Google removed the cached page within its search results. The Ars Technica comments note that this could be a disaster for internet historians as well as users looking up previous pages to compare recent legal agreement changes and website changes across the web.

2024-01-032024-01-03

Jackson County in High Flu Season – a Statistical Analysis

Last week it was announced that high flu cases are having effects on the health system in Jackson County, Oregon. A top recommendation on the OPB article says to get vaccinated for Flu – does this recommendation play out in the statistical data though?

2023-12-312023-12-31

Thanksgiving/Christmas/End-of-year travel – Charge ahead?

With the recent massive increase in electric vehicle sales, combined with free fast charging included with particular new car models this year, you may be wondering if the current charging systems can handle it?? This thanksgiving weekend had quite a line on specific stations like the one out of Arizona, as you may have seen in the news and forums! but what about major holidays in general such as Christmas? Let’s look at some of the recent busy days and see if it’s as bad as some have presumed…

2023-12-052023-12-05

Learning from previous mistakes – pulling historical vulnerability information from various plugins

If you keep a watch on software security newsletters or blogs like the Wordfence blog, you’ll know there are a good number of new detected defects and vulnerabilities on a regular basis, even on well known plugins and software. It’s worth looking into the details of how this happens especially if you work on PHP software from time to time. Thankfully there are public records which let you compare to look at how these are fixed:

2023-12-042023-12-04

Interesting news about Amazon Q AI

There’s some interesting news about Amazon Q AI this week: The AI that is supposed to give useful help for your Amazon Web Services apparently was giving more than expected…

2023-10-262023-10-26

The Einstein hat does repeat periodically… on a cylinder!?

Months ago you may have seen the new shape that does not periodically tile (repeat) like most other shapes, in the plane. However, that is assuming an infinite (x,y) plane… What if instead of that geometry, we try building out a periodic cylindrical tiling?

2023-10-252023-10-25

Maker Faire Vallejo, CA 2023

This year the Bay Area Maker Faire was back after years of postponement! This was an enormous fair compared to others I had attended and included some very interesting exhibits:

2023-09-222023-09-30

Central Oregon Maker Fair Review

Earlier this month there were some interesting makers – music makers, robots, woodworking, taking things apart and putting things together – check out the video !

2023-09-032023-09-07

Ideas for the Einstein Mad Hat contest

As you may have seen from Matt Parker’s latest video, there is a new contest for the recently discovered Hat and Spectre tiles! For more details about this recent discovery please see the MoMath article about this “ein stein” (a pun for “one stone” in German).

2023-08-142023-09-01

Where are the big roofs for Solar? A mathematical look at pulling data from OpenStreetMap

In recent years there has been a lot of talk about solar and more renewable energy. In USA the recent IRA has provisions for extending solar and renewable energy, and the Florida governor last year supported Solar benefits which turn out to be helpful in many natural disasters, making an energy grid more easily self-sustainable after hurricanes that are common to that state. What if we could go over a map and see what buildings are the best candidates for solar generation? OpenStreetMap has not just street maps, but many other features, including building coordinates, which can give us polygons that can calculate areas for potential solar!