If you write code, one of the things you discover quickly is that there is a significant amount of personal style that goes into your code. Most of the time it’s pedantic, a matter of a few spaces or parentheses; but more often than you might expect, it can play a significant role in code… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Nerd Stuff
A Visit to the Archives
Deep within The Labyrinth – or The Lab, for short – near the dark woods of CASC and the Enchanted Lake of Hausmann (beneath which live two great dragons, one blue and one white, each cautiously and perpetually circling around the other, generating enough energy to power the Labyrinth), in close proximity to the perimeter… Read more »
Python Image-Averaging and Color-Averaging
Download the file created in this post here: pil_example.py The Origin Have you ever marveled at the sheer number of pixels and colors that modern cameras can capture? Particularly phone cameras – they capture so much detail. I’m always surprised reviewing pictures from my phone’s camera on my computer, because they always appear so much… Read more »
D3 and the Parallel Plot: Extending the Parallel Plot to Multiple Files (Part 2 of 2)
Files used in this post: multi_parallel.html myrandedata.csv myrandudata.csv myrandndata.csv In this post, I’m going to show you how I created the following D3 script, which loads 3 files filled with random 4-element vectors (each file samples random numbers from a different random number distribution – normal, exponential, or uniform) and plots them on a parallel… Read more »
D3 and the Parallel Plot: Understanding the Parallel Plot Example (Part 1 of 2)
I’m just a beginner at using D3, and I’m learning how to use it in order to find some interesting/novel applications of D3 for scientific data. I come from a traditional engineering programming background – lots of procedural Excel programming, lots and lots of Matlab, and lots and lots and lots of C++. I’ve used… Read more »
D3 and WordPress
I am currently learning how to use a Javascript library called D3, and I had to do a bit of wrestling with WordPress to get the two to play nicely together (with the intent of creating nice WordPress posts explaining internals of D3). I ended up using an iframe to wrap D3 scripts, and I’ll explain… Read more »
U.S. Energy Portfolio: Where are we going, where have we been? (Part 2 of 4: World War 2)
Phase 2: World War 2 It’s Deja Vu All Over Again… Except Different When World War 2 began, it, like World War 1, created massive horror, but also massive opportunity. The second world war led to a complete sea change in technologies. Oil had become, by this time, a strategic resource, one worth invading and… Read more »
Euclid as the First Programmer
Prelude: Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Standford and of programming fame for his book series The Art of Computer Programming, begins this series by stating: The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can… Read more »
Smelly Wine, Refrigerated Wine, and Whining Winos
My friend Jenny asked me the other day why refrigerated wine tastes so mellow, compared with the flavor explosion you get with room-temperature wine. It’s a great question, and the principle behind it is so important – you see it every day of your life, whether you know it or not. It’s the concept… Read more »
MediaWiki, Blockquotes, and CSS
The Problem I recently ran into some trouble getting some <blockquote> sections of my wiki to show up and be rendered properly. I defined a CSS style called “quote,” which I wanted to apply to some excerpts from books that I was quoting in an article on my wiki. First, I defined the CSS “quote”… Read more »