Miscellaneous

Image editor

Image editing software is complicated, and I don’t use it often enough to remember how to do much. I like Paint.NET on Windows because it is in a sort of sweet spot for me, more powerful than Paint and much less complicated than Photoshop.

I found out there’s a program Pinta for Linux that was inspired by Paint.NET. (Pinta runs on Windows, Mac, and BDS as well.)

Exponential sum of the day

I have a page that draws a different image every day, based on putting the month, day, and the laws two digits of the year into an exponential sum. This year’s images have been more intricate than last year’s because 19 is prime.

I liked today’s image.

The page has a link to details explaining the equation behind the image, and an animate link to let you see the sequence in which the points are traversed.

Podcast interview

Rebecca Herold posted a new episode of her podcast yesterday in which she asks me questions about privacy and artificial intelligence.

Entropy update

I updated my blog post on solving for probability from entropy because Sjoerd Visscher pointed out that a crude approximation I used could be made much more accurate with a minor tweak.

As a bonus, the new error plot looks cool.

Newsletter

My monthly newsletter comes out tomorrow. This newsletter highlights the most popular blog posts of the month.

I used to say something each month about what I’m up to. Then I stopped because it got to be repetitive. Tomorrow I include a few words about projects I have coming up.

The letter S

I was helping my daughter with physics homework last night and she said “Why do they use s for arc length?!” I said that I don’t know, but that it is conventional.

Yes, it appears ‘Spatium’
Euler referenced this

— Cole Shackelford (@_cole_s) February 27, 2019

By the way, this section heading is a reference to Donald Knuth’s essay The Letter S where he writes in delightful Knuthian detail about the design of the letter S in TeX. You can find the essay in his book Literate Programming.