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.
After many years of weird text rendering issues in LibreOffice, many problems have now been solved. Let's explore the changes and look at some before / after images.
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.
The video game FEZ contains a puzzle surrounding a broken QR code. I found a way to fix the code through a deep dive into the specification. It turns out that this is not the way that the game creators expected you to solve the puzzle.
Let's take a deep dive into the way that the adoption of HD digitally shot footage ruined the lighting of a bunch of different television shows, chiefly Battlestar Galactica.
Bart Ehrman has complex views of the relationship between naturalism and history. I try to develop an understanding of what the view is, and dispute several points.
It has been falsely claimed by many commentators, including some legitimate media sources, that Bernie Sanders does more poorly with black voters than with white voters. This has been used to explain his failing to win the 2016 primary, for example. I argue that this misunderstands the relevant statistics, and that Sanders actually did better with black voters in many states, including South Carolina. The problem comes from ignoring the enormous fraction of white Republicans.