4+ hour, 42+ min ago  (439+ words) Lilypond is a TeX-like typesetting language for sheet music. I've had good results asking AI to generate Lilypond code, which is surprising given the obscurity of the language. There can't be that much publicly available Lilypond code to train on....

1+ mon, 2+ week ago  (394+ words) I saw a post on X recently that said Bill Gates is closer to you in wealth than he is to Elon Musk. Mind blown. For round numbers, let's say Elon Musk's net worth is 800 billion and Bill Gates' net…...

2+ mon, 3+ week ago  (469+ words) A few weeks ago I mentioned that I was reading Stephen Ambrose's account of the Lewis & Clark expedition and wrote a post about their astronomical measurements. James Campbell left a comment recommending Edwin Danson's book [1] on the history of the…...

3+ mon, 3+ week ago  (160+ words) I was reading about Shackleton's incredible expedition to Antarctica, and the Weddell Sea features prominently. That name sounded familiar, and I was trying to remember where I'd heard of Weddell in math. I figured out that it wasn't Weddell exactly…...

5+ mon, 4+ day ago  (260+ words) This morning I took an old blog post and turned it into an X thread. I think the thread is easier to read. More expository and less rigorous. The post and thread look at generalizations of the fact that every…...

5+ mon, 1+ week ago  (229+ words) In an inflationary economy, the purchasing power of your currency continually deteriorates. If you have an investment that grows slower than your purchasing power shrinks, you're actually losing value over time. The true rate of growth is the rate of…...

5+ mon, 3+ week ago  (155+ words) If AI can do part of your job, you're likely to either be fired or promoted. AI will always have some error rate, and if it can do your job at an acceptable error rate, you'll need to find another…...

6+ mon, 2+ week ago  (158+ words) The biggest math symbol that I can think of is the Riemann P-symbol The symbol is also known as the Papperitz symbol because Erwin Papperitz invented the symbol for expressing solutions to Bernard Riemann's differential equation. The way the Greek…...

7+ mon, 4+ day ago  (211+ words) This came out a few weeks ago, but I just learned about it today and I think it's hilarious. I quit. I am clearly not capable of solving this problem. The code is cursed, the test is cursed, and I…...

7+ mon, 6+ day ago  (360+ words) In 1944, Douglass Adair conjectured the authorship of each essay, and twenty years later Frederick Mosteller and David Wallace confirmed Adair's conclusions by Bayesian analysis. Mosteller and Wallace used a computer to carry out their statistical calculations, but they did not…...