[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’ve been working my way slowly through Reingold and Dershowitz’s Calendrical Calculations. This week I hit Chapter 11 on the Mayan and Aztec calendars and came across a...

You may have seen this article by Joe Rossignol in MacRumors yesterday. It’s about a new feature in macOS 26.4 that’s designed to keep us from pasting dangerous commands in Terminal. If a user pastes such a command, this warning pops up: Near the end of the article, Rossignol says We have yet to determine exactly...

I’ve been thinking about the new Apple Studio Display lately, mainly in the context of Jason Snell’s review of it on Six Colors and his further discussion with Myke Hurley on Upgrade. Jason’s primary complaint about the Studio Display isn’t its high price or how little it’s improved over the 2022 version. It’s 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.] I’ve been working my way through the fourth edition of Reingold and Dershowitz’s Calendrical Calculations, and I want to talk about something I learned. It’s a simple...

Scientific American has a fun little article today about the frequency of Friday the 13ths. It ends with this table, and this true but overstated conclusion: In other words, the 13th of a month will be a Friday more times than any other day of the week. Well, yes, if you live to be 400 years old, you’ll see one more...

I read Jason Snell’s review of the MacBook Neo this morning and was struck by this section on its two USB-C ports: So Apple has done the work to put two USB-C ports on the Neo—and those ports reveal a bit more of the struggles Apple had in building this computer. Both of the USB-C ports will let you charge (which is...

After writing last week’s post about the start of Ramadan and Chinese New Year, I expected to hear from people asking why I didn’t include the further coincidence of Ash Wednesday. I was surprised that the only such feedback I got was an email from TJ Luoma. It makes sense that Lent would be on TJ’s mind—it’s a big...

[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 thought some of you might be wondering about the dimensions on this drawing from yesterday’s post: Don’t be offended—I trust you all to know why the horizontal components of...

[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.] Here’s a geometry puzzle from the March issue of Scientific American. If you see the trick, it’s easy to solve.1 After doing it the easy way, I decided to solve it again the...

Yesterday was Chinese New Year and today is the first day of Ramadan. Both of these dates are based on yesterday’s new moon, so I thought it would be fun to write a little script to see how often the dates coincide. I used Emacs Lisp, mainly because I knew its calendar module had functions for converting between...

Apple’s *OS 26 icons have been getting some well-deserved criticism over the past couple of months. There was Jim Nielsen’s complaint about menu icons in macOS. Then came Nikita Prokopov’s more detailed criticism of those same icons.1 And a lot of fun has been poked at Tahoe’s app icons, reaching a peak in...

[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.] The inability of Claude and (especially) ChatGPT to extract data from the chart discussed in the last post gnawed at me. It seemed like the sort of thing an LLM should be able...