I ran into an example of especially bad design on a web page yesterday. Not “how it looks” design; “how it works” design. Here’s an excerpt from an online payment page: Looks straightforward, right? Just click in the field, type in the amount to pay, and off you go. But unlike almost every other example you’ll see...

[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.] Speaking of the equation of time, which I was in yesterday’s post, I wanted to extend some of the work I did in that post to draw my own EoT plot and to be able to adjust it to...

Here’s a fun post by Andrew Plotkin. He’s a late riser, so the shortest day of the year, which is on the solstice, means nothing to him. He’s interested in the date of the earliest sunset, because that means his sunlight hours will be increasing after that date. He calls it the Nighthawk’s Solstice and figures 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’m in the middle of a three-lecture series on the Wolfram Language and thought the puzzle presented in this recent MindYourDecisions video would be a good problem to practice...

Back in early 2023, I wrote about combining some of my simple command-line date commands into a single Keyboard Maestro macro. This became my go-to system for quickly getting the number of days between two dates. Around that same time, I wrote a shortcut so I could make the same quick calculation on my iPhone (or...

I checked out Practical Approximate Analysis of Beams and Frames from the University of Illinois library a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t dug into it deeply yet, but I smiled in recognition of some of the early material. Here, for example, are some poorly reproduced photos of beams being bent by end loads and...

Thanksgiving is not the last Thursday of November. I mean, it is this year, and it usually is, but that’s not how it’s determined. Since 1942, Thanksgiving—the US one, not the Canadian one—has been set by federal law to be the fourth Thursday in November. The law was passed in December of 1941, when you would have...

While I was putting together my recent post on Maya calendar calculations, I tried to get some information on the Moon from a NASA website. Specifically, a page with the prosaic name Moon Fact Sheet at the URL https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/moonfact.html The gsfc part of the domain refers to the...

I don’t care much about monitoring the traffic here, but analyzing web logs seemed like a good way to practice using Pandas. I used some old data analysis friends, like groupby, and made some new ones, like the vectorized str functions. I also reacquainted myself with rsync, which I used to run quite often in my...

Longtime readers of this blog know I’m a sucker for calendrical calculations. So I couldn’t stop myself from doing some after reading this article by Jennifer Ouellette at Ars Technica. The article covers a recent paper on the Dresden Codex, one of the few surviving documents from the Maya civilization. The...

I expect Fox News to make bad charts as part of its predisposition to promote right wing views. But today I saw an incredibly bad chart that, as far as I can tell, doesn’t promote its usual awful agenda. It’s terrible for politically neutral reasons. I saw it first in today’s post from Paul Krugman. He got it from...

Except for a short period when its original developers were unable to keep up and the app suffered badly, Castro has been my podcast player for many years. Its triage system of managing podcast episodes fits well with how I listen. Unfortunately, Castro has been giving me trouble in recent weeks. It often fails to...