A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the nefarious phrase “could care less” (The popularity of “could care less” cannot be underestimated) saying it was not worth getting uptight about its use. I must have some very lenient readers because no one took umbrage at this thesis, which kind of made my exhortation at the end a little superfluous. […]
READ MOREA week or so ago, I bought a cheapo remote electronic timer for my Canon Rebel XTi from eBay as a device to play around with creating animations. It was about $15, shipping included, so if it didn’t work or failed miserably, it wasn’t much of a loss. It is, essentially, a knock-off of Canon’s Timer Remote Controller TC-80N3 which, even at B&H, is $136, about ten times more. (Love you and your gear, Canon, but come on.) […]
READ MOREThere’s a concept in functional programming called currying which gives you the ability to create one function from another, and have the created function call the original but with some arguments prefilled in. To be ultra-rigorous, we assume the original function has n arguments, and currying produces a chain of n functions each taking one argument to produce the same results as the original. We, however, will skip that rigorous definition since it’s too constricting for our discussion here. Instead we’ll talk about partial function application, but call it currying anyway. In essence: we want to call function A that takes lots of parameters, but since some/most of them are preset to some default values, we’d prefer having another function B that calls A filling in those presets to save time/effort. […]
READ MOREOne of the kinds of art I really enjoy is art that shows off the draughtsmanship of cartographers, especially from the early 1900s or earlier. We have a small collection of framed old maps from places we most closely associate ourselves with: London, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Normandy, Colorado. Road maps, railway maps, topographic maps. I find them utterly fascinating, tracing in my mind’s eye how the countryside has changed or the urban expanses filled out, squinting to read the names. […]
READ MOREIn 1897 a new bill was submitted to the Indiana General Assembly. It was written by an amateur mathematician called Edwin J. Goodwin whose ability to understand basic mathematics was so poor that he firmly believed that he’d squared the circle. (The proof that it can’t be done was published in 1882 by Lindemann.) The bill was presented as a contribution to education in Indiana and was titled “A bill for an act introducing a new mathematical truth”. The interesting passage is this one: […]
READ MOREHere we go, another grammar article full of the most awful bollocks. 20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Gets Wrong by Jon Gingerich. Go read it, I’ll wait. […]
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