Hein's Thoughts

(TLDR:  I read a cool article about turning your life around.  I feel like my life has been turning around over the last 21 months.)    I just read a short article  (paywalled) called, "13 Ways I Completely Changed My Life in a Year and So Can You."  I feel like I have been changing over the last 21 months and today I feel pretty positive about those changes.  The article reminded me about my own struggles.    Somewhere around 2006, I found that I had become a clock-watcher at work.  Before 2006, I would be mostly excited about work and I would have to set an alarm so that I did not accidentally stay for 9 or 10 hours at work.  After 2006, I started watching the clock at around 2 or 3 pm waiting for my work day to end.  Often I was very tired in the afternoon.  I think I had developed a health problem, but I don't know what that the health problem is.  (I have found that I do have blood sugar problems (type II di...

Reddit Post  https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fyh9qr/eli5_how_does_the_poor_mans_log₁₀_calculator/ So… This is an interesting one. During my high-school days, most of us here in India couldn’t afford a decent calculator. We all had one of those cheap ones that can do basic BODMAS and additionally, square roots. Log books were also rare and used to go out of stock pretty fast. There is this brilliant trick that used to work perfectly to find the log₁₀ of any number upto 3 digits on this regular calculator: 1. Type the number. 2. Recursively take its square root 19 times. 3. Subtract one. 4. Multiply the result by 227697. And miraculously, it gave the log₁₀(x) accurate upto 4/5 decimal places. Sometimes even more. How does this work? My response: Suppose x>0. The limit of (x^a -1)/a a->0 from the positive side can be computed using l’Hospital’s rule. lim (x^a -1)/a = lim ( exp( a ln(x)) -1)/a = lim ln(x) exp( a ln(x) )/1 = ln(x). So...

On Saturday, Cat, Chuck, and I discussed, "What could you show a caveman?" Here are some of the things we came up with: You might be able to make bow, sling, spear, spear thrower, boomerang, candles, sail boats (keel, rudder), canoes, pulleys, levers, windmills, watermills, the plow, a screw pump, possibly an aqueduct, chairs, tables, carpentry, writing, clocks, catapults, possibly penicillin, vaccines, soap, hygiene, hygienic surgery, copper tools?, (i would try for bronze, iron and steal also) a lathe, pottery, domesticating animals,  Robert's Rules of Order, the scientific method, statistics, compass, mud huts, toilets?, plumbing, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, how to trade, clothing, yarn, twine, rope, sewing, how to make fire, cooking, baking, alcohol, bathing, and how to clean clothing.  I would try to invent concrete, electricity, light bulbs, and vacuum tubes.  If there were villages of a couple hundred people, you could introduce sewage...

I’ve been reading “ Category Theory for Programmers ” which was suggested to me by Mark Ettinger.  This book presents many examples in C++ and Haskell.  It teaches you some Haskell as you read the book.  It uses almost zero upper level mathematics and it skips almost all of the mathematical formalities.  If you decide that you want to read it, then you might want to read the first six chapters of “ Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! ” and write a few small Haskell programs first.  (I also would suggest trying to solve the first three problems in Project Euler  https://projecteuler.net/archives   using Haskell.)   I find the book to be easy to read and informative. When the author makes a statement like   A*(B+C) = A*B + A*C where * means categorical product, + means coproduct, and = means isomorphic, I find myself trying to figure out the categories where the statement is true and the categories for which it is false.  (It is true fo...