I have ve always loved maps. I guess it goes well with liking drawing and maths, there’s a deep connection (the pun is intended) between the subjects. As a map lover, when we decided to relocate to a somewhat more countryside town, I wanted better-looking maps to wander around the area. I checked government-issued maps, but they were either too large (scale 1:25000) or didn’t show the area I was interested (for the 1:10000 maps.
A few weeks ago I started trying a pre-beta release of Dyalog APL (now available as “full beta”) for Mac. Fellow Mac users, looks like we are in for a treat after so much time of only having GNU APL and the pretty expensive APLX. Now Mac APL lovers, users and aficionados will have a competitive, commercial option. At last!
I started with the usual 1+1, ⍳ 10 , ⍴ ⍳ 10 to check it worked as expected.
The links to Amazon and The Book Depository are affiliate links. If you purchase like 50 copies I may afford a coffee :D
From Flickr
It all started after reading If you can’t choose, pick at random at Aeon.co. It delves into how choosing at random can be best in some cases. Give it a read, it is interesting. Among the HackerNews comments about this submission there were some mentions about choosing at random in real life, and to the novel The Dice Man (Amazon | Book Depository).
Is this line noise?
⍉' *'[⍎'1+0<|z',(∊150⍴⊂'←c+m×m'),'←c←(¯2.1J¯1.3+(((2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b))∘.+(0J1×(2.6÷b-1)×(¯1+⍳b←51))))'] Nope. This is not line noise, but a complete APL program to display the Mandelbrot set in glorious ASCII, with asterisks and spaces just like Brooks and Matelski did a long time ago while studying Kleinian groups (it’s a short paper, read it someday). I’ll explain in (a lot, I hope) detail this line in a few moments. So, what’s APL first?
A few months ago (woah, so long already) I had an impulse buy: I purchased a circular slide rule from Etsy. It was cheap, and I had always wanted one, so… I just bought it (a neat addition to my Addiator.)
I guess if you are geeky enough to read mostlymaths.net, you know how a slide rule works. Although I knew how to use it, getting to grips with it took a little while.
A few days ago I found myself with a problem. I wanted a reddit button in one of our websites, and our technical guy wanted it to be asynchronous. After a little poking around and deciding that reddit doesn’t offer asynchronous buttons, I rolled my poor man’s version: wrap it in a $(document).ready() It’s not asynchronous, but at least it won’t block page loading.
Both happy, we deployed and I tested.