brainwagon

I was reading Kraitchik’s Mathematical Recreations book (a very nice little Dover volume) and ran across this interesting puzzle on pg. 140: 21, A man stakes 1/m of his fortune on each play of a game whose probability is 1/2. He tries again and again, each time staking 1/m of what he possesses. After 2n […]

Matt pointed to an interesting article by Tom Duff on writing code. It actually clearly elucidates some of the principles that I use in writing my own code. As a caveat, I suspect that I am the original authors of at least one of the code fragments that Tom critiques. 🙂 Reading code from top […]

As part of my slow, arduous march toward doing a high altitude balloon launch, I acquired some super cheap wireless modules from sparkfun.com. Sadly, I haven’t had time to play with them much, but here’s someone who has. I am more interested in using these tiny transmitters as back up beacons, but the information is […]

Thanks to Kevin Bjorke for pointing out this paper. It combines a couple of interesting features to create a point-based renderer that efficiently uses the GPU to render scenes with global illumination. I’ll have to read it more carefully when I have time. Micro-Rendering for Scalable, Parallel Final Gathering. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9u8EdFbmiI

I hand you a deck of cards, which you shuffle, and deal me a random 5 card poker hand. I announce that I have an ace in my hand. What are the odds that I have a second ace in my hand? Now, play the game, and deal me another hand. I announce that I […]

Microsoft researcher Richard Szeliski has a text on computer vision available for download. Szeliski has written countless papers on computer graphics, including lots of papers on creating panoramas from images. Good stuff, bookmarked for later consumption.

This is just a test. If you are running Firefox 3.5, you should get a video window that allows you to watch a Superman cartoon encoded in Ogg Theora. If you aren’t running it, but have a Java enabled browser, you should get an applet which plays the same video. If you have neither, you […]

Well, I thought I had the rotation thing figured out, but I still seem to be missing something. But I did muck around a little bit, thresholding the image in a couple of different ways, making the pair shown below. The one on the left contains mostly the bones, with all the flesh transparent. The […]

I still check my WSPR station logs each morning when I wake up. This morning I spotted the callsign E51EME, coming from grid square BG08. I’ve come to realize that many of these spots which include only a four element grid designator are spurious bad decodes, and I didn’t recognize the prefix (I’m not much […]

The Computer History Museum is a fascinating place, and here is a link to their collection of still imagery, some of which I have seen before, but some of which I had never seen before. archive.computerhistory.org – /resources/still-image/

Well, I’m suffering from a feeling of deja-vu: recent doctor visits indicate that my weight has crept back up (no surprise) and that my BP and cholesterol aren’t doing much better either. I could make excuses about the surgery I had earlier in the year or whatever, but the reality is, that I’m back to […]

I’ve been doing a bit more reading about growing plants hydroponically. In doing so, I found reference to something called “Hoagland solutions”, which are nutrient solutions used for growing plants hydroponically. Since hydroponically grown plants don’t get nutrients from trace elements in the organic matter in soil, you need to be especially careful to ensure […]

Lately everyone I talk to seems to think ham radio is dying. I wonder why they think that. Anybody have any guesses?

Okay, not really, but on this day in 2002, I did start this blog. Since then, I’ve made 3,106 posts, and there have been 5,461 comments. I’ve gone through two different hosting services, as well as hosting this on my own web server. And I’ve had a great time. I’ve gone through several different phases, […]

Here’s a very nice article about the game phenomena that was Lunar Lander: Forty Years of Lunar Lander | Technologizer Addendum: Here’s a screen grab of the arcade version of the game. I used to love this game.