And now it’s all this

Given that I typically take a wait-and-see attitude when Apple introduces a new product, I was surprised to find myself ordering a HomeView within a day of its announcement. I was even more surprised when lots of otherwise pro-Apple people—this guy, for example—were skeptical about its value. Why is this? Well, one reason could be that I don’t already have a HomePod in my kitchen, which makes me behind the times. I’ve been thinking I should get one (or two), but Siri’s deficiencies have kept me…

A few days ago, Allison Sheridan wrote a very persuasive article about using TextEdit, the “unsung hero of macOS,” as a simple word processor. I’ve been trying it out and… I’m going to stick with Pages. Let me explain why. First, you should know that I almost never use a word processor. The overwhelming majority of my writing over the past 30 years has been done in a text editor, and its plain text is then fed to some sort of formatting software—Markdown or LaTeX, typically—to set the styles…

I mentioned in my last post that I’m working my way through Practical Deep Learning by Ronald Kneusel. The math so far has been straightforward, and the code is written in Python, which I find easy to follow. “Easy to follow” does not mean “correct” or “to my liking.” Some of the code in the book simply doesn’t work, and I’ve had to make changes here and there to get it to run. It’s possible that some of the APIs the book relies on have changed their calling conventions, but I also found a…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] I decided to start learning about machine learning a couple of weeks ago. Partly because it sounds interesting, partly because I think I have enough math to handle it, and partly because I felt it was important to have a deeper knowledge if I want to criticize AI. I started with a library copy of Friedman and Mendhekar’s The Little Learner but decided to…

Today I tried to add a couple of recently purchased books to my library database using my lccn2library script. It failed because the Library of Congress has either moved or deleted the files lccn2library relies on. Let’s say I was trying to add Applied Elasticity by Timoshenko and Lessells.1 If you go to the LoC’s MARC record for the book and click on the Download link, you’ll see a popup that looks like this: So it looks like you can click the MODS link to get the MODS file for the book.…

Yesterday’s post included this plot: I figured it was worth a quick post to show how I made it. I had already done most of the work back in 2022 in a Mathematica notebook I made to support my original orbital curvature post. So I copied the pertinent calculations from that notebook, pasted them into a new one, and made the adjustments necessary to produce the plot. Here’s the new notebook: The bottom half of the notebook is where the plotting commands are. The key items are: The definitions of…

Rhett Allain, physics professor and blogger, published a nice article today about the Moon’s orbit. It follows largely the same line of reasoning as my post on the same topic (and the various write-ups I linked to in that post) from a few years ago. I nodded my head as I read through it, until I got to a plot at the end of the article. For much of the article, Allain complains about how the orbit of the Moon as it and the Earth make their way around the Sun is often distorted in textbooks. Like…

I’ll admit that the first thing I looked into regarding yesterday’s “Super Intelligence” meeting at the White House was whether Tim Cook was there. He wasn’t, which was probably a relief to Tim, even though it’s also an admission that Apple isn’t considered a player in AI. By anyone, not even the idiots in the Trump administration. You’ve probably seen the stupid misspelling above Trump’s signature on the “morally binding” agreement that came out of the meeting. Yes, he signed it as the…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This short video appeared in my YouTube feed last week. It’s from Hannah Fry, whom you probably know from her appearances on Numberphile and other STEM-oriented stuff. If you’re in the UK, you’ve may have seen her on the BBC, too. The short presents a classic problem in conditional probability, but the answer she comes up with is wrong. It’s a good…

The episode of The West Wing that’s always bothered me is “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” which is Episode 20 of Season 4. It takes place on the day of the equinox (in March, not September, but I remembered it because today is an equinox), and one of the continuing subplots is C.J. trying to convince the others that you can stand an egg on its end at the exact moment of the equinox and only at that moment. Oh, and it has to be the vernal equinox, not the autumnal one.1 That someone in the…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] This video Matt Parker posted a couple of days ago really pissed me off: It’s cheating to say that a result arrived at through classical mechanics—in this case, that 12mv2 is the kinetic energy of a particle—is wrong because it’s only an approximation to relativistic physics. Of course that’s the case, and I swore at my phone when the “reveal” came. By the…

Everyone’s favorite Apple archivist, Stephen Hackett, wrote a short post last week in which he linked to Apple’s page with dimensional drawings of its products. He included this drawing of the iPhone 17 Pro: You can click on it to see a 300 dpi version. The Apple page linked above will give you infinite-resolution PDFs. When I zoomed in on Stephen’s page, I was initially confused, but then I realized what seemed odd to me. You see, I’ve spent an awful lot of the past 40 years looking at…

Starting about 45 minutes into today’s Apple Event, during the segment on the new Apple Watch, Ron Huang introduced a couple of features of the Series 12 and Ultra 4 that struck me as both disturbing and possibly illegal. They certainly seem at odds with Apple’s commitment to privacy. First came Live Rewind, a feature that lets you “go back in time” to pick up on something you missed that was said in the past 15 seconds. Here’s how Apple describes it on the website: Live Rewind catches what you…

This is sacrilegious among some parts of Apple fandom, but I like using web apps. Oh, sure, I can imagine a world in which there’s a carefully crafted Mac app that has all the functions of a website I use but has all the Mac-like interface features I love and isn’t hobbled by a web UI. But I don’t live in that world and don’t expect I ever will. For example, will the Python Software Foundation ever make a Mac app that includes all the documentation I regularly use? And even if they do, is it…

I was out on a walk yesterday, listening to the ’70s Hits Radio Station on Apple Music, when “Don’t Leave Me This Way” came on. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to look at a text while the song was playing and was surprised at what the Music app told me about the song. I’m pretty sure George Benson never covered “Don’t Leave Me This Way,” but even if he did, that’s not the version I was listening to. It was the version everybody knows by Thelma Houston, with her incredible voice and that fun…

After I learned how to make a Mac widget with TerminalWidget and how to determine the locations of celestial objects with Astropy, the natural thing for me to do was combine the two into a widget that tracks the planets. I’m using the ancient definition of planet, which includes the Sun and Moon but not anything past Saturn. The numbers are the azimuth and altitude, in that order, and are given to the nearest degree. The idea is to tell me what may be visible and where it is. This particular…

Through an odd coincidence, I started writing this post when the Sun was in Cancer, but by the time I’m done and get it published, the Sun will be in Leo. Don’t worry, this isn’t an astrology post—I don’t want to anger John Gruber—but it is a further coincidence that I’ve been puttering around with observational astronomy calculations at a time when there’s been some controversy in the Apple world about astronomy vs. astrology. I’m often out walking at night, and a few months ago—when Mercury,…

A few days ago, I posted this image on Mastodon: The code I ran to get this two-month calendar on my Desktop was bash: if [ $(date +"%-d") -gt 15 ]; then cal -A 1 else cal -B 1 fi |\ terminal-widget --target cal --font Menlo --bg "#eeeeee" --text - I have since updated a couple of things and need more room to talk about it all. First, the app that put that widget on my Desktop is Brett Terpstra’s TerminalWidget, which he just released. As a one-time user of GeekTool, I’ve been waiting for…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] My fundamental rule is Don’t, but a single word wouldn’t make for much of a blog post. In what follows, I hope to explain how I’ve come to that rule and the exceptions I make to it. I’ve been thinking about how I use and don’t use spreadsheets quite a bit lately. This introspection was inspired in part by Allison Sheridan’s presentation at Macstock (which…

I noticed today that the Cubs and Yankees have the same record. I knew that the Cubs have had some extreme ups and downs this year, but I wasn’t sure if the Yankees had, so I decided to plot their progress over the course of the season so far. A plot of how far above or below .500 they were seemed like the best way to compare their seasons, so I got their records from baseball-reference.com (Cubs results, Yankees results) and cleaned up the data through a combination of Numbers and BBEdit. The…

The indispensable Michael Tsai has an interesting post up today about Apple Park and whether its design isolates the people who work there, despite its having been designed—in part, at least—to encourage collaboration. As usual, Michael has collected a group of choice quotes on the topic. I won’t link to any of them. You should just go to his blog, read the excerpts he’s assembled, and follow the links to see more. But I’ve often wondered how good Apple Park is as a working environment,…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] Yesterday I watched the most recent Numberphile video, in which Ben Sparks explains a few finite series and the equations that simplify the calculation of their sums. He derives the formulas graphically, and it’s all very cleverly done, especially the one for the sum of cubes. The idea is to get a simple polynomial expression in n for N=∑m=1nm3 As I said,…

A couple of days ago, Casey Liss took a break from arguing about temperature scales to tweak me about the recent passage of the Sunshine Protection Act by the House. The Act would make Daylight Saving Time permanent, something Casey knows I disapprove of. A similar bill passed the Senate a few years ago, and Donald Trump has said he will sign this one, so there’s a decent chance it’ll become law. Let’s see what will happen if it does. First, of course, there will be a lot of cheering from the…

[Equations in this post may not look right (or appear at all) in your RSS reader. Go to the original article to see them rendered properly.] You’ve probably seen somewhere that the density of Saturn is less than that of water. If there were a bathtub big enough to hold it, Saturn would float. I think I first read this in one of Isaac Asimov’s collections of science essays. If you do an image search, you can easily find many illustrations of Saturn floating in water. Most of these show no more…

I saw this article at Inside Higher Ed this morning, guided by a Mastodon post from Techmeme. The title of the article is “Brown Professor Suspects Majority of His Class Used AI to Cheat,” so if you’re sick to death of reading about AI—pro, con, or caveated—don’t feel obligated to follow the link. I’m interested in a plot included in the article more than the article itself. An economics professor gave his class a take-home midterm, and the grades on it were much higher than usual. He suspected…

There’s been a lot of talk lately about Mac application icons and “squircle jail.” Inspired by this post from Paul Kafasis on the Rogue Amoeba blog,1 many Mac-adjacent people have taken up his cause to “Free the Icons.” I agree, but Apple’s 50th anniversary has gotten me thinking a lot lately about the early days of the Mac, so it’s only natural that my mind shifted to the highly constrained icons Mac applications had back then. In those days, icons were 32×32 pixel images, and every pixel was…

I visited my eighth and final Louis Sullivan jewel box bank yesterday morning. The Purdue State Bank (now a Chase branch) is in West Lafayette, Indiana. As a graduate of the University of Illinois, I have thoughts about Purdue University and its substandard engineering program, but I will keep those thoughts to myself and focus on the bank. This is the north side of the bank. The thoroughly incompatible stone addition to the building was (according to Wikipedia) built in the 50s, but I must say…

Yesterday I visited the Home Building Association Bank in Newark, Ohio, a Louis Sullivan jewel box bank built in 1914. It’s currently owned by the Licking County Foundation (oh, grow up), which restored it at considerable cost over several years and reopened it to the public last fall. As you can see from the photo above, the Old Home differs from the other jewel box banks in that its exterior is clad entirely in terra cotta—it’s not mostly brick with terra cotta accents. But the accents still…

Last year, around Labor Day, I visited five of Louis Sullivan’s jewel box banks: Farmers and Merchants Union Bank in Columbus, Wisconsin National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota Henry Adams Building in Algona, Iowa Merchant’s National Bank in Grinnell, Iowa People’s Savings Bank in Cedar Rapids, Iowa These all fit in with a little driving circuit that included visiting my daughter and my younger son. This year, I headed east to pick up the last three. This morning’s bank was the People’s…

This week’s episode of Upgrade (which I listened to on a longish drive yesterday) has a preview of Jason Snell and Myke Hurley’s upcoming Designed in California podcast. No, not the “Road to the Apple II” series they’ve been squeezing into the Upgrade feed these past few weeks. This sneak preview—with special guest John Siracusa—is about the state of the classic Mac OS in the late 90s. In a word, the state was sorry. This was largely due to some expedient decisions made in the early 80s that…