Clik here to view.
Conway's Topograph Part 3
This is the third (continued from Part 2) in a series of three blog posts. In the following we'll investigate a few properties of an object called Conway’s topograph. John Conway conjured up a way to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Finding (Fibonacci) Golden Nuggets Part 1
As I mentioned in my last set of posts, the content would go somewhere and this post will be the first to deliver on that. In fact this is the all math, no code first half of a two part post that will...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Finding (Fibonacci) Golden Nuggets Part 2
This is the mostly code second half of a two part post that delivers on a promise of meaningful uses of some theory I overviewed in my last set of posts. If you see words like topograph, river, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Protecting Sensitive Information in Public Git Repositories
a.anchor-twitter, a:visited.anchor-twitter { font-weight: bolder; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; outline: none; } iframe { width: 300px; height: 20px; } .bump-left { margin-left: 1em; }...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Quick and Dirty: Santa's Coming
I have been wanting to write a post for awhile, but was travelling for a work event and while on the road I decided to be lazy.Since I just so happen to use a few GData APIs occasionally in my day to...
View ArticleHandling errors in Google App Engine...and failing
After spending a nontrivial amount of my nights and weekends working on an AppEngine app, I wanted a good way to monitor the logs without checking in on them every day. After a particularly frustrating...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Python Metaclass for "extra bad" errors in Google App Engine
So now here we are, having tried to handle errors in Google App Engine...and failed all because silly DeadlineExceededErrorjumps over Exception in the inheritance chain and goes right for...
View ArticleWhere have I been?
Well, it's been a bit crazy and I haven't written a blog post in ages. I have several brewing, but had just been too busy at work (and a ton of travel for personal fun) to really have the excess time...
View ArticleSilly Pranks on your Friends
Disclaimer: These are silly little pranks, but I don't encourage messing with someone's computing environment without letting them know you have done so.First Prank:I have a friend who really likes to...
View ArticleReverse Calculating An Interest Rate
I was recently playing around with some loan data and only happened to have the term (or length, or duration) of the loan, the amount of the recurring payment (in this case monthly) and the remaining...
View ArticleLife of π: Continued Fractions and Infinite Series
This is from a talk I gave to the UC Santa Cruz Math Club back in February. I have had the slides cluttering my desk since I gave the talk as a reminder of putting them up on the web, and today I...
View ArticleA Decorator for App Engine Deferred Tasks
I happen to be a big fan of the deferred library for both Python runtimes in Google App Engine. If an application needs to queue up work, breaking the work into easy to understand units by writing...
View ArticleLast to Cross the Finish Line: Part One
Recently, my colleague +Fred Sauer and I gave a tech talk called "Last Across the Finish Line: Asynchronous Tasks with App Engine". This is part one in a three part series where I will share our...
View ArticleLast to Cross the Finish Line: Part Two
Recently, my colleague +Fred Sauer and I gave a tech talk called "Last Across the Finish Line: Asynchronous Tasks with App Engine". This is part two in a three part series where I will share our...
View ArticleLast to Cross the Finish Line: Part Three
Recently, my colleague +Fred Sauer and I gave a tech talk called "Last Across the Finish Line: Asynchronous Tasks with App Engine". This is part three in a three part series where I will share our...
View ArticleBridging OAuth 2.0 objects between GData and Discovery
My colleague +Takashi Matsuo and I recently gave a talk about using OAuth2Decorator (from the google-api-python-clientlibrary) with request handlers in Google App Engine. Shortly after, a Stack...
View ArticleSome Fibonacci Fun with Primes
I haven't written in way too long and just wanted to post this fun little proof.Assertion: Let \(F_n\) be the \(n\)th Fibonacci number defined by \(F_n = F_{n-1} + F_{n-2}\), \(F_0 = 0, F_1 = 1\). Show...
View ArticleCalculating a Greatest Common Divisor with Dirichlet's Help
Having just left Google and started my PhD in Applied Mathematics at Berkeley, I thought it might be appropriate to write some (more) math-related blog posts. Many of these posts, I jotted down on...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Trigonometry and Nested Radicals
Early last month, I was chatting with one of my officemates about a curious problem I had studied in high school. I hadn't written any of the results down, so much of the discussion involved me...
View ArticleBayes' Law Primer
I'm currently writing a blog post that uses Bayes' Law but don't want to muddy the post with a review in layman's terms. So I have something to link, here is a short description and a chance to flex my...
View ArticleConditional Probabilities in "Thinking Fast and Slow"
I'm currently reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. (Thanks to Elianna for letting me borrow it.) I'm not finished yet, but 60% of the way through I definitely recommend it.While reading...
View ArticleMath for Humans, A Second Attempt
The morning after posting my latest blog post, I woke up still thinking about how to explain the concept.More importantly, I realized that my goal of writing math for humans failed miserably. So here...
View ArticleQuantitative Brain Teaser: Brain Only
I've recently been working some atrophied mental muscles and came across a brain teaser that was pretty nifty: Find a 10-digit number, where each digit represents the number of that ordinal number in...
View ArticleQuantitative Interview Brain Teaser: Computer Assistance
In a previous post I discussed a recent brain teaser I had come across: Find a 10-digit number, where each digit represents the number of that ordinal number in the whole number. So, the first digit...
View Article
