Pitch sets, keys and modes

music
In one of my recent music lessons, my teacher suggested that it would be fun to improvise going between G Lydian and E Ionian (“major”). He instantly suggested these two modes, and clearly in his mind/fingers he knew…
Mar 12, 2023

 

TypeScript 4.9: NaN sanity, finally!

programming
TypeScript 4.9 is out, and it doesn’t let you use === and !== on NaN by default. Finally someone decided to do this, it’s a legitimately smart move.
Dec 16, 2022

 

Copiloting my way through Advent of Code

programming
Because of my work on quarto, Microsoft offers me free access to GitHub Copilot (this is true for contributors of sufficiently popular open source repositories on GitHub). It’s a smart move by…
Dec 4, 2022

 

The Chapman Stick

hobbies
music
I…
Nov 27, 2022

 

Same site, new look

It’s been a while! The birdsite ate blogging, and then the muskrat ate the birdsite. As insurance policy, I’m on mastodon. But I’m trying blogging again.
Nov 20, 2022

 

A JS Cadence Sensor

signal-processing
At some point during the pandemic, I became suspicious about the accuracy of my Saris H3 cadence sensor, so I wrote my own. (It turns out that the cadence sensor is fine.)
Jun 2, 2022

Bunimovich Stadium

mathematics
The Bunimovich Stadium is one example of a Dynamical Billiards table that exhibits chaotic behavior even with…
Nov 14, 2020

An Interactive Fagan Nomogram

mathematics
data-science
The Fagan nomogram (Fagan 1975) is a nomogram (Wikipedia contributors 2022) that computes the probability of the presence of some condition based on an imperfect test and varying pre-test probabilities. It is a very handy tool to understand Bayes’s…
Nov 14, 2020

Straight movement on circle

optical-illusion
Each individual circle moves along a straight line, but collectively, they look like a circle rolling inside a larger circle:
Nov 14, 2020

Error-Correcting Output Codes

explainers
data-science
Often it will be the case that we can model a process we care about as two parties communicating with one another over a noisy channel. Sometimes this is very straightforward: if you’re sending the content of a website to a cellphone, the radio in the cellphone will need to be able to figure out when the…
Jan 1, 2020

 

Multidimensional Scaling

mathematics
data-science
“Multidimensional Scaling” techniques turn measurements of similarities (or distances) into coordinates of points in a low-dimensional space, usually 2D of 3D.
Jan 1, 2020

Variations on the Hermann grid

optical-illusion
The Hermann grid is the prototypical example of the extinction illusion. Here we build a small variation of Figure 5 from Ninio and Stevens’s…
Oct 13, 2018

Purple dots

optical-illusion
If you keep your gaze focused at the black crosshairs, eventually the purple dots fade away and you start seeing an animated bright green dot instead.
Sep 27, 2018

Ring with rotating gap

optical-illusion
This is a continuous version of the purple dots illusion. Keep staring…
Sep 27, 2018

Curvature Blindness

optical-illusion
Over a gray background, some of the wiggly lines appear much more triangular in shape than they do over a white or black background.
Dec 10, 2017

Checkerboard and Crosses

optical-illusion
The checkerboard stays straight throughout the animation.
Dec 5, 2017

Seven Circles

optical-illusion
The middle circle stays the same size throughout the animation.
Nov 29, 2017

 

Trigonometry

Just like everyone else on twitter, when I saw this diagram below my reaction was: “why didn’t they show this to me 25…
Nov 6, 2017
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