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Mihai Pătraşcu 1982–2012
A pathbreaking researcher taken too soon from us (src) Mihai Pătraşcu passed away on Tuesday of brain cancer, having not yet reached age 30. We, Dick and Ken, did not know about his year-…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 103 posts.
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Can a person be identified by just the way they type?
Do a detailed analysis of your own typing style, just using Mathematica. Can a person be identified just by the way they type? See group data analysis.
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Why Multi-armed Bandit algorithms are superior to A/B testing (with Math)
In a recent post, a company selling A/B testing services made the claim that A/B testing is superior to bandit algorithms. They do make a compelling case that A/B testing is superior to one particular not very good bandit algorithm, because that particular algorithm does not take …
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Map Simplification with Visvalingam's Algorithm
An interesting challenge in cartography is getting data of the appropriate resolution. As Lewis Fry Richardson observed , the more precisely you measure the length of a coastline, the longer it appears; geographic shapes have infinite complexity. Digital displays, in contrast, are limited by pixels. Choosing too high…
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Why multi-armed bandit algorithm is not "better" than A/B testing
Learn about the basics of multi armed bandit testing & algorithms, the difference b/w multi-armed bandit testing and A/B testing, its application in the real world.
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I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets
When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get ...
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My Prime Factorization Sweater
I wore my Prime Factorization Sweater to KidlitCon09 , and it shows up in all my pictures, so I think it’s time for me to explain it.
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New Particle Discovered at CERN
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Kolmogorov Complexity - A Primer
The Complexity of Things Previously on this blog (quite a while ago), we’ve investigated some simple ideas of using randomness in artistic design (psychedelic art, and earlier randomized css …
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Ice
Water is complicated and fascinating stuff! There are at least sixteen known crystal phases of ice, many shown in this diagram based on the work of Martin Chaplin: (Click for a larger version.) For…
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Physicist Uses Math to Beat Traffic Ticket
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
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What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...?
I’m eager to summarize the (largely excellent) discussion of last week’s nightmares and to talk about what it all means. I’ll surely get to that in the next few days. But meanwhil…
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How Not To Sort By Average Rating
Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?
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Math For Programmers
Probability theory might be the most useful area for programmers, but it is also a blurry field, difficult to learn right. You might check this book for details, and there is also an free, online draft version available. The Logic of Science
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A Better Strategy for Hangman
Learn the optimal strategy for playing Hangman.
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Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem explained
This theorem is one of the most important proven in the twentieth century. Here are a few brief selections that will help you start to understand it. Gödel’s original paper “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” is available in a modernized translation . It’s also in print from Dover in a nice, inexpensive edition …
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Who Expected That? Extreme close-ups create a Klein Bottle.
Suppose you go around taking extremely close-up black-and-white pictures of randomly chosen natural and unnatural objects (rocks, trees, streams, buildings, etc.). What do they look like? Well, eac…