Geeking out over arbitrary boundaries
https://blog.plover.com/geo/boundary-conditions.html [blog.plover.com]
2020-06-25 04:57
tags:
maps
urban
Reddit today had this delightful map, I think drawn by PeterVexillographer, of “the largest city in each 10-by-10 degree area of latitude-longitude in the world”:
Some commentary on the near misses.
Wonders of the Internet
https://blog.plover.com/misc/wonders-2.html [blog.plover.com]
2019-11-05 04:18
tags:
life
tech
web
There wasn’t any indication of what it had been part of, or what it was for, but it did have the marking PART 2198768 on the back, so I handed that to The Goog.
And the result was instantaneous and unequivocal: it belongs to my refrigerator. Specifically, it goes in the back of the freezer compartment to keep food from falling down into the back and blocking the drainage path.
Incenters of chocolate-iced cakes
https://blog.plover.com/math/cake.html [blog.plover.com]
2019-10-11 03:12
tags:
food
math
visualization
Grandma made a cake whose base was a square of size 30 by 30 cm and the height was 10 cm. She put chocolate icing on top of the cake and on the sides, but not on the bottom. She wanted to divide the cake fairly among her 9 grandchildren so that each child would get an equal amount of the cake and the icing. How should she cut the cake?
The pain of tracking down changes in U.S. law
https://blog.plover.com/law/citations.html [blog.plover.com]
2019-10-03 17:06
tags:
history
investigation
policy
But this didn’t tell me when the coffee exception was introduced or in what legislation. Most of Title 23 dates from 1958, but the coffee sign exception was added later. When Congress amends a law, they do it by specifying a patch to the existing code. My use of the programmer jargon term “patch” here is not an analogy. The portion of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1978 that enacted the “free coffee” exception reads as follows:
To track this down, I had no choice but to grovel over each of the links to the Statutes at Large, download each scan, and search over each one looking for the coffee provision. I kept written notes so that I wouldn’t mix up the congressional term numbers with the Statutes volume numbers.
The New York City passport office
https://blog.plover.com/misc/passport-office.html [blog.plover.com]
2019-07-11 22:44
tags:
essay
hoipolloi
nyc
policy
travel
The New York passport office. Wow. Where to begin?
Philadelphia Slaughterhouse Hotel
https://blog.plover.com/history/slaughterhouse-hotel.html [blog.plover.com]
2019-07-02 20:02
tags:
history
maps
philly
urban
Yesterday on my other blog I posted about the most hilariously mislocated hotel I’ve ever heard of. It’s the hotel that in 1910 was located in the Philadelphia stockyards, just the other side of the railroad tracks from the hog pens, between the slaughter house and the abbatoir:
Alphabetical order in Korean
https://blog.plover.com/lang/mooneo.html [blog.plover.com]
2019-05-20 20:50
tags:
language
Alphabetical order in Korean has an interesting twist I haven’t seen in any other language.
In Korean, alphabetization is also done at the syllable level.
Hangman's Wages
https://blog.plover.com/history/halifax-gibbett.html [blog.plover.com]
2018-10-25 01:40
tags:
finance
history
language
And I’m glad to be introduced to the bizarre world of pre-union Scottish currency, which, in addition to the loonslate, includes the bawbee, the unicorn, the hardhead, the bodle, and the plack.
Testing for divisibility by 7
https://blog.plover.com/math/divisibility-by-7.html [blog.plover.com]
2018-08-01 16:18
tags:
math
There are well-known tests if a number (represented as a base-10 numeral) is divisible by 2, 3, 5, 9, or 11. What about 7?
Don't do this either
https://blog.plover.com/prog/perl/do-not-2.html [blog.plover.com]
2018-07-13 17:13
tags:
perl
programming
type-system
Allowing an argument to be passed in seven different ways may be convenient for the programmer writing the call, who can save a few seconds looking up the correct spelling of emailclass_name, but debugging what happens when elaborate and inconsistent arguments are misinterpreted will be eat up the gains many times over. Code is written once, and read many times, so we should be willing to spend more time writing it if it will save trouble reading it again later.
perl, but really all duck languages.
What's in those mysterious cabinets?
https://blog.plover.com/tech/highway-stuff.html [blog.plover.com]
2018-06-04 18:00
tags:
hardware
photos
transport
urban
Thanks to the Wonders of the Internet, it didn’t take long to figure out what it is for. It is a controller for the traffic lights at the intersection.
Philadelphians, move to the back of the bus!
https://blog.plover.com/misc/aisle-blocking.html [blog.plover.com]
2017-12-24 04:49
tags:
essay
hoipolloi
philly
transport
urban
I started to find many more things about Philadelphia that are better than in New York.
Usually. One thing about Philadelphia is seriously broken. Philadelphians do not know how to get on a bus.
No, it is not a compiler error. It is never a compiler error.
https://blog.plover.com/prog/compiler-error.html [blog.plover.com]
2017-11-13 21:41
tags:
bugfix
javascript
programming
sorting
But could it be...
A bug in the sort() function. O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!
Counting increasing sequences with Burnside's lemma
https://blog.plover.com/math/increasing-sequences-2.html [blog.plover.com]
2017-10-17 00:12
tags:
compsci
math
The Burnside lemma is a kind of big hammer to use here, but I like big hammers. And the results of this application of the big hammer are pretty good, and justify it in the end.
Another example of a machine perception failure
http://blog.plover.com/tech/machine-perception.html [blog.plover.com]
2017-08-05 21:32
tags:
ai
music
I found the best anagram in English
http://blog.plover.com/lang/anagram-scoring.html [blog.plover.com]
2017-02-22 16:47
tags:
compsci
language
programming
More thoughts on a line of code with three errors
http://blog.plover.com/prog/three-errors.html [blog.plover.com]
2017-02-17 17:43
tags:
development
Previously: More thoughts on a line of code with three errors
Another Git catastrophe cleaned up
http://blog.plover.com/prog/git-tastrophe.html [blog.plover.com]
2016-12-13 04:24
tags:
development
swtools
In a pickle and back again.
Ysolo has been canceled
http://blog.plover.com/wikipedia/ysolo-2.html [blog.plover.com]
2016-12-09 23:02
tags:
factcheck
physics
social
space
An earlier article discussed how I discovered that a hoax item in a Wikipedia list had become the official name of a mountain, Ysolo Mons, on the planet Ceres.