The beauty of math; the humor of stupidity.
In my last post, I promised that I d explain how we can build interesting mathematical operations using logic gates. In this post, I m going to try do that by walking through the design of a circuit that adds to multi-bit integers together. As I said last time, most of the time, when we re trying to [ ]
At this point, we ve gotten through a very basic introduction to how the electronic components of a computer work. The next step is understanding how a computer can compute anything. There are a bunch of parts to this. In this post, we ll start looking at the first of those: how are individual operations implemented using [ ]
From my previous post, we understand what a diode is, and how it works. In this post, we re going to move on to the transistor. Once we ve covered that, then we ll start to move up a layer, and stop looking at the behavior of individual subcomponents, and focus on the more complicated (and interesting) components [ ]
Since I used to work at twitter, a few folks have asked what I think of what s going on with Twitter now that Elon Musk bought it. The answer is a little bit complicated. I worked for Twitter back in 2013, so it s quite a while ago, and an awful lot has changed in that [ ]
It s been a long time since I updated this blog. I keep saying I want to get back to it, but every time I post anything, it leads to a stream of abuse from trolls and crackpots, and the frustration drives me away. But I shouldn t let a pack of bullying assholes do that! So [ ]
I don t mean to turn by blog into political nonsense central, but I just can t pass on some of these insane arguments. This morning, the state of Texas sued four other states to overturn the results of our presidential election. As part of their suit, they included an "expert analysis" that claims that the odds of the election results in the state of Georgia being legitimate are worse that 1 in…
With COVID running rampant throughout the US, I ve seen a bunch of discussions about herd immunity, and questions about what it means. There s a simple mathematical concept behind it, so I decided to spend a bit of time explaining. The basic concept is pretty simple. Let s put together a simple model of an infectious disease. This will be an extremely simple model we won t consider things like…
My old ScienceBlogs friend Mike Dunford has been tweeting his way through the latest lawsuit that s attempting to overturn the results of our presidential election. The lawsuit is an amazingly shoddy piece of work. But one bit of it stuck out to me, because it falls into my area. Part of their argument tries to make the case that, based on "mathematical analysis", the reported vote counts couldn t…
To me, the strangest crackpots I ve encountered through this blog are the π denialists. When people have trouble with Cantor and differently sized infinities, I get it. It defies our intuitions. It doesn t seem to make sense. When you look at Gödel incompleteness theorem it s really hard to wrap your head around. It doesn t [ ]
A bunch of people have been sending me links to a particularly sloppy article that (mis)uses linear regression to draw an incorrect conclusion from some data. So I guess I ve got to got back to good-old linear regression, and talk about it a bit. Let s start with the basics. What is linear regression? If you [ ]