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Sideband #47: POV-Ray 101
By all indicators (page reads, Likes, comments), most of my readers don’t find POV-Ray quite as interesting as I do. That’s too bad, because I’ve finally decided on a theme for this blog. It’s going to...
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Sideband #48: L27 Details
Over the last two days I’ve written about a way of viewing words, sentences, even entire books, as single (very large) numbers. We do that by treating the characters in the string as “digits” in a...
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Sideband #49: A Mazing Python
I don’t know if it’s having been in the saddle so long, having all this retirement time, or the magic of Python (perhaps all three), but I’ve made major advances in personal projects that have been on...
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Sideband #50: Pawn to King-4
Last time I mentioned wanting to write a chess move parser since my earliest days of programming. Hard-core coders often see things in terms of the software behind them. For instance, I sometimes...
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Sideband #51: POV-Ray Cameras
I’ve been mentioning, and even writing about, POV-Ray for a while now. It and I go back quite a few years, and — as with may of my long-time hobbies — it’s something I’ll pick up and get really into...
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Sideband #52: POV-Ray Animation
I mentioned last time that a big draw for me with POV-Ray is the ability to create three-dimensional scenes and move around them. Having lots of camera positions is part of that; I want to see my scene...
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Sideband #53: Making Movies
Today I want to tie up last time’s post about animation before moving on to other things. I’m sure I’ll return to the topic of making movies with POV-Ray and FFmpeg; it’s just too much fun, and I have...
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Sideband #54: Cantor’s Diagonal
Be warned: these next Sideband posts are about Mathematics! Worse, they’re about the Theory of Mathematics!! But consider sticking around, at least for this one. It fulfills a promise I made in the...
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Sideband #55: Numbers & Sets
In this post I’ll show how Set Theory allows us to define the natural numbers using sets. It’s admittedly a very abstract topic, but it’s about something very common in our experience: counting things....
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Sideband #56: Spelling Numbers
We’re still motoring through numeric waters, but hang in there; the shore is just ahead. This is the last math theory post… for now. I do have one more up my sleeve, but that one is more of an overly...
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Sideband #57: Weird Math
In the recent post Inevitable Math I explored the idea that mathematics was both universal and inevitable. The argument is that the foundations of mathematics are so woven into the fabric of reality...
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Sideband #58: Halt! (or not)
evaluate(2B || !2B) Hamlet’s famous question, “To be or not to be?” is just one example of a question with a yes/no answer. It’s different from a question such as, “What’s your favorite color?” or,...
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Sideband #59: Running Hot
As a diversion for the weekend: Have you ever wondered why computers run so hot? No? Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s actually kind of a hoot. (We’ll get back to the more serious topic of algorithms and AI,...
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Sideband #60: Tick
A different, more personal, anniversary… Looking back at the five years of this blog (or, for that matter, the many more years of this blogger), I can’t help but reflect on how man- and mice-plans go...
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Sideband #61: Tock
You’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, right? The tick to finally tock? (My clock is — as usual — running a bit behind; this should be #62, but that’s another story.) Today’s tale involves...
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Sideband #62: Quaternions
Folded into the mixed baklava of my 2018, was a special mathematical bit of honey. With the help of some excellent YouTube videos, the light bulb finally went on for me, and I could see quaternions....
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Sideband #63: Matrix Rotation
For me, the star attraction of March Mathness is matrix rotation. It’s a new toy (um, tool) for me that’s exciting on two levels: Firstly, it answers key questions I’ve had about rotation, especially...
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Sideband #64: Matrix Magic
In the last installment I introduced the idea of a transformation matrix — a square matrix that we view as a set of (vertically written) vectors describing a new basis for a transformed space. Points...
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Sideband #65: 4D Rotation
This is a Sideband to the previous post, The 4th Dimension. It’s for those who want to know more about the rotation discussed in that post, specifically with regard to axes involved with rotation...
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Sideband #66: Abacus Multiplication
Today’s earlier post got into only the beginnings of abacus operation — mainly how to add numbers. To demonstrate how they have more utility than just adding and subtracting, this Sideband tackles a...
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