Other Stuff
Around Ottawa:
Check out my other blog - it’s older than me!
Other blogs in our general vicinity: The Brown Knowser, an almost anonymous blog, David Scrimshaw, City councillor Glen Gower, Michael Geist, fagstein, freezenet.ca.
Pothole problems? ottawa.ca
Around the web:
xkcd (here’s a good one, and another one.)
Read some news: wsj.com, bbcnews.com, NPR, Toronto Star, wired.com, splinter.com, Hacker News,
More blogs: r-bloggers.com, Schneier on Security, Nelson’s Weblog, Sacha Chua, Ed Zitron, Daring Fireball, Kottke, Research Buzz, Of Particular Significance, And Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Filed under “interesting”: The encyclopedia of mathematics, gnuplotting.org, Kevin Fang, ask the physicist.
Filed under “useful”: The Old Reader, a handy web-based RSS feed reader; the world-famous integral calculator, doom emacs, org-mode, detexify, a tool to help identify the right LaTeX command to use.
Computer algebra is cool: Maxima demos, Maxima by Example, The MaximaList, Sage math cell, wolframalpha.com.
Donald Trump has a problem with chewing gum.
Learn what you can do at zombocom.
Or learn some lisp.
Or COBOL!
You can learn a lot of different languages and their techniques from Hyperpolyglot.
Music and Radio
Some of my favourite radio stations are WCRB Classical, Jazz FM 91, KCEA (big band/swing), Radio Dismuke, and Radio Swiss Jazz.
Reading recs
Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick… an interesting account of how the mathematical fields of dynamical systems and chaos theory came to be.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes… I think this book really inspired Christopher Nolan to make Oppenheimer.
Einstein’s Fridge by Paul Sen. One of the few pop physics books that is not a waste of time.
Eugene Wigner’s 1960 paper, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” (opens a pdf) is worth a read.
“How to Become a GOOD Theoretical Physicist” by Gerard ’t Hooft.
The origins of Nipper the Dog… (he was a very good boy!)
Cool Math and Physics
The entire topic of complex analysis, especially Cauchy’s integral formula, domain colouring and the Gamma function. (here’s a good book for learning complex)
Here’s an interesting video on continued fractions.
Gabriel’s Horn: You can fill it with a finite quantity of paint, but require an infinite amount of paint to cover it.
Chicago Pile-1: the world’s first man-made nuclear reactor (don’t try this at home).