brainwagon

The 10 hex digits of Ï€ starting at the 10 millionth place after the decimal point (is it really a decimal point if you are writing numbers base 16?) are 7AF58 63EFF. How do I know? Why, courtesy of my own implementation of the Bailey-Borwein-Plouffe formula for computing hex digits of pi. This remarkable discovery […]

I had need for a reminder of a bit twiddling hack that I had forgotten, and found this useful page that included many I don’t think I had seen before. These are mostly “too clever”, and should be used sparingly in your code. You’ve been warned. Bit Twiddling Hacks [tags]Programming,Hackery[/tags]

Need something to listen to on a really long trip? Librivox has just completed a huge audiobook version of the sixth edition of Charles Darwin’s classic On the origin of species. It’s a fascinating book, and well worth reading if you have any desire to understand the history of biological science. LibriVox » The Origin […]

While playing around with the

Okay, most of the ones of these I’ve written have been at least a little obscure or obfuscated. This one is entirely straightforward, and is further unremarkable because you need to have the gnu bignum library to make it work. Shrug. It’s still kind of fun, and it demonstrates just how straightforward the library is […]

This is the kind of paper I read when I have a lunch hour by myself at the local sushi bar. [math/0110143] The Kruskal Count The Kruskal Count is a card trick invented by Martin J. Kruskal in which a magician “guesses” a card selected by a subject according to a certain counting procedure. With […]

Through some convergence of factors (namely, my experience trying to read the accelerometers in the Wii remote, last night’s earthquake, and this mornings blear eyed checking of the Make Blog feed) I found the application below, which turns your Macbook or Macbook Pro into a seismograph by reading the accelerometer inside. I tried it on […]

sieve completed… 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**3 – 1 is prime 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**5 – 1 is prime 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**7 – 1 is prime 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**13 – 1 is prime 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**17 – 1 is prime 0.000000 user, 0.000000 system 2**19 – 1 is […]

A pretty good jolt this time, really close (epicenter only a couple of miles away) with some pretty good rolling. Recent Earthquakes – Info for event nc40194055

It seems that our neighbors to the north have sobered up on the whole anti-terrorism laws issue. Their Supreme Court recently revoked a law that allowed indefinite detention of foreign terrorism suspects violated their Charter of Rights and Freedoms. BBC NEWS | Americas | Canada rejects anti-terror laws

Take the numbers from 82 stepping down to one, and write them all out together. You get a very big number. 828180797877767574737271706968676665646362616059585756555453525150494847464544\\ 43424140393837363534333231302928272625242322212019181716151413121110987654321 It’s prime. What’s slightly odd is that there are no other numbers constructed the same way for n < 500 which are also prime. [tags]Mathematics,Prime Numbers[/tags] Addendum: I got the number from […]

Perhaps this could be adapted to help me get exercise…. YouTube – Cat wheel II by Richard Norton

My daily sail upon the seas of the Internet blew me ashore on An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation, a book on implementing Scheme by Paul Wilson. Scheme has a bit of nostalgia for me, having taken a class in Scheme from Will Clinger back in my graduate days at the University of Oregon. […]

A great collection of links to Classic Texts in Computer Science.

C’mon folks. It’s 2007 for pete’s sake. Why are there still programs which can’t be built on 64 bit machines? Yes, it can be a pain. When we ported the RenderMan with all its mumble mumble lines of code to the DEC Alpha, it was tiring, gritty, annoying, but absolutely necessary. And in the grand […]