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Digit symbols in the Parshvanatha magic square
In last month's article about the magic square at the Parshvanatha temple, shown at right, I said:It has come to my attention that the digit symbols in the magic square are not too different from the...
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Strangest Asian knockoff yet
Below, One Liberty Place, the second-tallest building in my home city of Philadelphia. (Completed 1987, height 288 meters.)Below, Zhongtian International Mansion at Fortune Plaza, the tallest building...
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How many 24 puzzles are there?
[ Note: The tables in this article are important, and look unusually crappy if you read this blog through an aggregator. The properly-formatted version on my blog may be easier to follow. ]A few months...
View ArticleHow I got three errors into one line of code
At work we had this script that was trying to report how long it had taken to run, and it was using DateTime::Duration: my $duration = $end_time->subtract_datetime($start_time); my ( $hours,...
View ArticleMore thoughts on a line of code with three errors
Yesterday I wrote, in great irritation, about a line of code I had written that contained three errors.I said:What can I learn from this? Most obviously, that I should have tested my code before I...
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Automatically checking for syntax errors with Git's pre-commit hook
Previous related articleEarlier related articleOver the past couple of days I've written about how I committed a syntax error on a cron script, and a co-worker had to fix it on Saturday morning. I...
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I found the best anagram in English
I planned to publish this last week sometime but then I wrote a line of code with three errors and that took over the blog.A few years ago I mentioned in passing that in the 1990s I had constructed a...
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Moore's law beats a better algorithm
Yesterday I wrote about the project I did in the early 1990s to find the best anagrams. The idea is to give pair of anagram words a score, which is the number of chunks into which you have to divide...
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Miscellaneous notes on anagram scoring
My article on finding the best anagram in English was well-received, and I got a number of interesting comments about it.A couple of people pointed out that this does nothing to address the issue of...
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Solving twenty-four puzzles
Back in July, I wrote:Lately my kids have been interested in puzzles of this type: You are given a sequence of four digits, say 1,2,3,4, and your job is to combine them with ordinary arithmetic...
View Article/dev/null Follies
A Unix system administrator of my acquaintance once got curious about what people were putting into /dev/null. I think he also may have had some notion that it would contain secrets or other...
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An anagrammatic cautionary tale
I previously claimed that “cinematographer” / “megachiropteran” was the best anagram in English. Scoring all the anagrams in the list of 13 million Wikipedia article titles did not refute this, but it...
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Zomg lots more anagram stuff
I'm almost done with anagrams. For now, anyway. I think. This article is to mop up the last few leftover anagram-related matters so that I can put the subject to rest.(Earlier articles: [1] [2] [3] [•]...
View ArticleAnnual self-evaluation time, woo-hoo!
It's annual performance evaluation time at my employer, ZipRecruiter, and as part of that I have to write a self-evaluation. I know many people dread these, and I used to dread them, but these days I...
View ArticleBase-4 fractions in Telugu
Rik Signes brought to my attention that since version 5.1 Unicode has contained the following excitingly-named characters: 0C78 ౸ TELUGU FRACTION DIGIT ZERO FOR ODD POWERS OF FOUR 0C79 ౹ TELUGU...
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Git remote branches and Git's missing terminology
Beginning and even intermediate Git users have several common problem areas, and one of these is the relationship between remote and local branches. I think the basic confusion is that it seems like...
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Git's rejected push error
On Saturday I posted an article explaining how remote branches and remote-tracking branches work in Git. That article is a prerequisite for this one. But here's the quick summary: When dealing with a...
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Seveneves
BuySevenevesfrom Bookshop.org(with kickback)(without kickback)Neal Stephenson's Seveneves is very fat, so I bought it to read on a long trip this summer. I have mixed feelings about Stephenson, but...
View ArticleSabotaged by Polish orthography
This weekend my family was doing a bookstore event related to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. One of the movie's characters, Jacob Kowalski, dreams of becoming a baker, and arrives to a bank...
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Another example of a machine perception failure
IEEE Spectrum has yet another article about fooling computer vision algorithms with subtle changes that humans don't even notice. For more details and references to the literature, see this excellent...
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