I mentioned in my last post that I’m working my way through Practical Deep Learning by Ronald Kneusel. The math so far has been straightforward, and the code is written in Python, which I find easy to follow. “Easy to follow” does not mean “correct” or “to my liking.” Some of the code in the book simply doesn’t...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] I decided to start learning about machine learning a couple of weeks ago. Partly because it sounds interesting, partly because I think I have enough math to handle it, and...

Today I tried to add a couple of recently purchased books to my library database using my lccn2library script. It failed because the Library of Congress has either moved or deleted the files lccn2library relies on. Let’s say I was trying to add Applied Elasticity by Timoshenko and Lessells.1 If you go to the LoC’s...

Yesterday’s post included this plot: I figured it was worth a quick post to show how I made it. I had already done most of the work back in 2022 in a Mathematica notebook I made to support my original orbital curvature post. So I copied the pertinent calculations from that notebook, pasted them into a new one, and...

Rhett Allain, physics professor and blogger, published a nice article today about the Moon’s orbit. It follows largely the same line of reasoning as my post on the same topic (and the various write-ups I linked to in that post) from a few years ago. I nodded my head as I read through it, until I got to a plot at the...

I’ll admit that the first thing I looked into regarding yesterday’s “Super Intelligence” meeting at the White House was whether Tim Cook was there. He wasn’t, which was probably a relief to Tim, even though it’s also an admission that Apple isn’t considered a player in AI. By anyone, not even the idiots in the Trump...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This short video appeared in my YouTube feed last week. It’s from Hannah Fry, whom you probably know from her appearances on Numberphile and other STEM-oriented stuff. If...

The episode of The West Wing that’s always bothered me is “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which is Episode 20 of Season 4. It takes place on the day of the equinox (in March, not September, but I remembered it because today is an equinox), and one of the continuing subplots is C.J. trying to convince the others that...

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This video Matt Parker posted a couple of days ago really pissed me off: It’s cheating to say that a result arrived at through classical mechanics—in this case, that 12mv2 is...

Everyone’s favorite Apple archivist, Stephen Hackett, wrote a short post last week in which he linked to Apple’s page with dimensional drawings of its products. He included this drawing of the iPhone 17 Pro: You can click on it to see a 300 dpi version. The Apple page linked above will give you infinite-resolution...

Starting about 45 minutes into today’s Apple Event, during the segment on the new Apple Watch, Ron Huang introduced a couple of features of the Series 12 and Ultra 4 that struck me as both disturbing and possibly illegal. They certainly seem at odds with Apple’s commitment to privacy. First came Live Rewind, a...

This is sacrilegious among some parts of Apple fandom, but I like using web apps. Oh, sure, I can imagine a world in which there’s a carefully crafted Mac app that has all the functions of a website I use but has all the Mac-like interface features I love and isn’t hobbled by a web UI. But I don’t live in that world...