Hi! I’m a graduate student in philosophy. Thank you for visiting my website, which hosts my personal blog. If you would like professional information or to contact me directly, please visit my about page. I also have an RSS feed you can follow to subscribe to this blog.
I lost about 80 pounds on a scientifically credible diet plan I developed myself, using a software program I wrote for the purpose and have open sourced. I discuss the scientific justification behind the program's method and algorithms, and offer other observations around weight loss.
Goodreads is infamous for its terrible book ratings. Supposedly, almost all the ratings are between 3 and 4 stars. I take a look at what the actual range is, and see what could be done to improve them (including a userscript to show the percentile of each book). I also make an argument against using a Dirichlet distribution to model star ratings.
It's rather difficult to solve traveling-salesman type problems using real world locations and data. I was recently in a position where I needed to do so, to provide sample collection routes for a group of research biologists. Here I discuss the solution I came up with, which uses entirely open source methods and software, and provide some code that could be adapted to solve similar problems.