Entering 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

Chebyshev 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

An 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

The 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

Why Ubuntu is STILL Best Linux Distro for Developers

Can 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

These 5 Linux Commands are Completely Pointless

What Happens When You Run a Linux Command?

Dimensional analysis for gamma function values

Sometimes it’s useful to apply dimensional analysis where it doesn’t belong, to imagine things having physical dimension when they don’t. This post will look at artificially injecting dimensions into equations involving factorials and related functions. Factorials The factorial of n is defined as the product of n terms. If each

Falling power analog of binomial theorem

Yesterday I wrote about how the right notation could make Newton’s interpolation theorem much easier to remember, revealing it as an analog of Taylor series. This post will do something similar for the binomial theorem. Let’s start with the following identity. It’s not clear that this is true, or how