Recent content in Blogs on Joseph Szymborski has a blog.
"… all of this ended up in storage rooms, and everything became rotten and full of holes, and he himself finally turned into some kind of hole in humanity." ✪ ✪ “…все это сваливалось в кладовые, и все становилось гниль и прореха, и сам он обратился наконец в какую-то прореху на человечестве.” 
 — Google Gogol, Dead Souls Vol. 1, Chp. 6 
 In December 2009 ,…
While I was preparing to submit my most recent manuscript, I had to quickly add line numbers. It just took a couple of lines in the LaTeX source file, but I was worried that doing so would subtley mess up the document in some way that I’d only realize after it was too late. To ensure that the two documents were identical but for the line numbers, I just overlayed them using pdftk and the…
Prelude: Condorcet Voting 
 It all started when some of my friends wanted to organize a hangout. Some of us have known each other for close to 20 years, and as we’ve grown older its been harder to find time to spend with one another, so when we do, we try to make it count. 
 That’s why, when trying to decide on a fun activity, there’s a little bit of pressure to make sure…
I was avoiding getting out of bed when I came across a Mastodon post by @Foone that got me thinking. She had expressed a very reasonable thought, characteristic of her posts ✪ ✪ Ok, for the most part . You should consider buying her a coffee , her feed is great. , to include descriptions in the metadata of image so you wouldn’t have to write and rewrite alt texts every time you upload a…
I never knew whether to think I’m an incredibly fast or a remarkably slow writer. Some days I can write pages and pages of scientific prose in a single sitting, and other days getting out a sentence or two is a major accomplishment. People in my life know better to ask me when I’ll be done writing something, as the answer is typically “I have no idea”. 
 Over the years,…
This is going to be a quick post, mostly spurred-on by @boris@cosocial.ca ’s excellent suggestion. 
 This blog now has a comment section, and it’s powered by Mastodon , a federated micro-blog social network ✪ ✪ Here’s a 2 minute video introducing Mastodon if you have more questions. . 
 How does it work? 
 
 I make a post on cosocial.ca 
 People can reply to…
Motivation 
 I have needs. Very specific needs. Namely, I want: 
 
 To hash a corpus of English words, individually 
 …using a cryptographic hash 
 …quickly 
 …in Python. 
 
 Putting aside that this is a strange thing to want to do, I’ve compiled a few benchmarks to help me chose the best function for my purposes. I’ve found plenty…
Setting the Stage 
 Mr. Robot is an awesome show on the USA network with some
awesome technical consultants. The season 3 finale ends with Mr. Robot (a delusion and dissociative
personality of the protagonist, Elliot Alderson ✪ ✪ If that’s not clear, think of Mr.Robot
as Tyler Durden and Elliot as Ed Norton in Fight Club. If I spoiled that for you too, you might be
beyond…
Background 
 Motivation 
 People who poke at DNA or protein sequences as part of their job occaisionally need to find regions that are repetitive
or made up of a few nucleic/amino acids. That’s because those regions (1) can have important biological roles such as
secondary structure, function, and in the unique case of DNA, expression, and (2) can confuse algorithms such as…
Motivation 
 Last Friday was Donald Trump’s inauguration and, in case you’ve been living under a rock,
a lot of people are talking about the size of the crowds. The salient points are that a
New York Times story 
concluded that the crowds sizes of Trump’s inauguration were “about one third” that of
Obama’s 2009 inauguration (citing reputed crowd specialist Keith Still );
a…