How to make a maths nerd wince in pain

One day in 1990 when I was home from school, I promised my mother that I would do something productive, and not waste the day. I promised her that I would translate a book that she was given when she was a child. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidi is the well-loved story of a…

My first job out of high school was as a pipe organ builder; I was one of the only apprentices to start that year. I’ve lost touch with Peter Jewkes who was my boss and who taught me. …

Landfill is an interesting product. The price fluctuates far enough that it can fluctuate from positive to negative and back again. If someone is building a tunnel, you can probably get paid to take landfill. If someone is building an island, you can probably get paid for supplying landfill. …

This has been bothering me for a while, but now that so many of our previously-face-to-face conversations have gone online, it’s really bothering me. When you meet face-to-face, you can start with “good morning” or “good afternoon”. This can be achieved with a subtle check of your watch, or some…

I’ve been teaching classes remotely for over a decade now — mostly to adult learners — and so I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. Generally I’m teaching using Zoom, but you can use most videoconferencing tools. …

I hear that my friends and colleagues in the USA are having a cold winter. Could we swap? We’ve got enough heat to spare this summer. I’ve started pining for the cold season — April to September in Sydney. I remember the “cold season” from my childhood having sport cancelled…

Astronomy, sales prediction, subscription signups… what do they have in common? There are all sorts of situations where we want to get a simple summary of interesting events in data. It’s really useful to say “we had three bursts of sales activity, one just before Mothers’ Day and the other…

TL;DR — it’s getting hotter. No matter which city I look at, if someone has been taking temperature measurements for a few decades, I keep seeing the same trend. One degree of warming every 40–60 years, and a trend towards fewer cool days, and more hot days. In 2017 I…

This is a write-up of the fireside chat that Chris Saad gave with the first Sydney Microsoft React cohort. …