Chris’ Corner: HTML
HTML is fun to think about. The old classic battle of “HTML is a programming language” has surfaced in the pages of none other than WIRED magazine. I love this argument, not even for it’s merit, but for the absolutely certainty that you will get people coming out of the
Read moreArea of a quadrilateral from the lengths of its sides
Last week Heron’s formula came up in the post An Unexpected Triangle. Given the lengths of the sides of a triangle, there is a simple expression for the area of the triangle. where the sides are a, b, and c and s is the semiperimeter, half the perimeter. Is there
Read moreEntering Russian characters in Vim with digraphs
The purpose of this post is to expand on the following sentence [1]: Russian letters are created by entering [Ctrl-k followed by] a corresponding Latin letter followed by an equals sign -, or, in a few places, a percent sign %. The Russian alphabet has 33 letters, so there couldn’t
Read moreChebyshev and Russian transliteration
It’s not simple to transliterate Russian names to English. Sometimes there is a unique mapping, or at least a standard mapping, of a particular name, but often there is not. An example that comes up frequently in mathematics is Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev (1821–1894). This Russian mathematician’s name Пафну́тий Льво́вич Чебышёв
Read moreAn unexpected triangle
Let J(x) be the function plotted below. This is the Bessel function J1, but we drop the subscript because it’s the only Bessel function we’re interested in for this post. You can think of J as a sort of damped sine. We can create versions of J with different frequencies
Read moreThe developer skill you might be neglecting
Ben and Ryan talk with Geoffrey (Jef) Huck, a software developer turned public speaking coach, about the importance of soft skills in the tech industry—in particular, speaking and communication skills. Their conversation touches on how Huck’s experiences with anxiety shaped his efforts to become a better communicator, practical techniques for
Read moreCan AI Models Reason: Is Data All You Need?
Many are voicing concern that the world is running out of data and that this will be a blocker to progress toward smarter AI models. One paper in fact projects timelines for when we will run out. AI researchers are looking for ways to adapt. Nvidia has trained a specific
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