An Ode to Lee Sedol & Groucho Marx
I previously looked at the amount of instantaneous power it would take to go 100 mph in the worlds best faired-recumbent bicycle (velomobile). It takes approximately 1,000 watts, an achievable power output for a fit cyclist. So why hasn’t anyone gone 100 mph yet? The answer appears to be acceleration. Power Again Previously I noted…
The fastest anyone has ever gone on their own power on land is 89 miles per hour and change, in a vehicle called the Aerovelo Eta. The first thing I noticed is the lack of apparent windscreen. If you’re also curious about that, the vehicle pilot sees with a display connected to a camera sticking…
An interesting method in simulation and modeling is the Monte Carlo simulation. Wikipedia describes them best: Monte Carlo methods can be used to solve any problem having a probabilistic interpretation. Methods vary, but tend to follow a particular pattern: 1. Define a domain of possible inputs2. Generate inputs randomly from a probability distribution over the domain3….
The New York Times “Spelling Bee” is a difficult puzzle in which you try to come up with words using only the letters that appear in a honeycomb grid. Every word must contain the center letter and letters can be reused. Below is an example spelling bee: The first words that come to mind for…
There is an opportunity for reducing tax burden in taxable investment accounts when you are ready to start selling shares. The goal of this post is to share a method for minimizing the tax burden associated with selling shares in a taxable account. In this exploration, I am going to focus on long term holdings…
I have fantasized that someday I would fly a little bush plane out of a little private grass strip I maintained. While this may never happen, in the event that it does, I should be prepared to know whether a location is suitable and how to ideally place the runway. My (limited) perspective in this domain…
An interesting problem that I perceive exists in selecting a fixed income instrument is whether or not it makes sense to wait for a better instrument some time in the future. For instance, if interest rates are likely to go up, and some new certificates of deposit with better rates are likely to become available…
There are many orthogonal curvilinear coordinate systems. One of those is parabolic coordinates. In this post I will look at how parabolic coordinates are related to Cartesian coordinates in 3 dimensional space. I will determine unit vectors in parabolic coordinates in terms of Cartesian coordinate unit vectors. I will determine the arc length of a moving…
This post is the first in a series of example evaluations of interesting (to me) vector problems. There is plenty of literature available on the how and why of vector analysis. So while this series will not be a deep exploration, hopefully some of the problems and solutions are of interest for the reader. Problem…
On a previous post I suggested it is important to be able to detect interaction in regression analysis in order to create a better model of a dependent variable. I showed that by creating a new feature (column) in my dataset that represented the known relationship between two other features, a much better multiple linear regression…