And now it’s all this

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…

I’ve been thinking about 1984 lately—the year, not the novel. What got me thinking about it was the reduction in gas prices over the past few weeks, and this article in the New York Times about Donald Trump’s declining poll numbers among white working-class voters and how that might affect November’s elections.1 Forgive me for not being especially optimistic, but one of my distinct memories from 1984 makes me think the polls are lagging. A news story on one of the networks back in 1984 included…

[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.] At the end of yesterday’s post about the combinatorics of the World Cup group stage, I said “this is good enough for me.” Turns out that was a lie. Today I rewrote some of the code to come up with a slightly more detailed result. The last bit of work in that post was to generate the 40 unique point totals that can come from a group. These are the possible…

[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.] We’re in the middle of the first set of games in the group stage of the 2026 World Cup, and I’ve been thinking about how many ways the points can be distributed among the teams in a given group. I used Python to help with the enumeration. Here’s a quick summary of how the group stage works: The teams are split into groups of four. Within each group, all…

I took a bike ride this morning on a portion of the I&M Canal Trail from Romeoville to Joliet and back. It’s a fairly short ride, eight miles each way, and that distance got me thinking about using Mathematica to do some calculations after I got back home. The trail has mile markers with little snippets of information about the canal and the surrounding area. Here are the markers I passed this morning: The mileage figures on the markers increase as you go south and west, which is downstream.…

[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.] After my last post—the one about using Fourier series—I started thinking about how to use Mathematica to develop Fourier series.1 I could, of course, use the Integrate function to determine the Fourier coefficients, but Mathematica has other functions that can do the job directly once you understand how they work. Mathematica has several Fourier functions,…

[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.] We’re finally here, at the end of all things. In this post, we’ll use a Fourier series to get the formula for the center deflection of a simply supported beam with a uniformly distributed load. We’ll see some of the same math that we saw in the previous Fourier series solution, but the fundamental approach will be different. Let’s start with 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 would have been the last post in the series if I hadn’t realized recently that another method deserved a post. So this is the penultimate. It was described in this 1943 paper by Nathan Newmark and is known—or was known—as Newmark’s method. I say was because this method is dead. How dead? Forty-five years ago, when I was an undergraduate taking…

[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.] We’re in the home stretch of this series, so ANIAT will soon go back to complaining about Apple’s UI choices.1 Next week’s WWDC keynote should provide some inspiration. But today’s post covers our eleventh method for deriving the center deflection of a uniformly loaded simply supported beam: the dummy unit load method. When I was an undergraduate, this was…

[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.] The biggest problem I face when writing posts in this series is deciding how much background explanation to put in. If I included only the stuff I do to get the answer, the posts would be very terse: one sketch and a dozen or fewer lines of math. A full explanation, though, could easily turn into several semesters’ worth of structural analysis theory. I’m…

[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.] Continuing our series on the many ways to get the center deflection of a uniformly loaded beam, we come to another energy-based technique: Castigliano’s method. Castigliano’s second theorem provides a relationship between displacements, forces, and the strain energy in a linearly elastic system. The strain energy, U, is the potential energy of the system…

[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.] Today we’ll use the Rayleigh-Ritz method again, but this time we’ll avoid dealing with an infinite sum. In case you’ve forgotten, this is our problem: We’ll express the shape as a polynomial. The form of the governing differential equation, EIyiv=w tells us that our solution won’t have any terms of higher power than x4. That gets rid of the infinity…

[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 just learned that people are listening to music pitched slightly down because it makes them feel better. Instead of the A above middle C being set at 440 Hz, they have it tuned down to 432 Hz. This strikes me as odd, but how you feel is how you feel. Do whatever you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. I was interested, though, in the math behind…

[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.] Continuing our trip through various methods to derive the equation for the center deflection of a uniformly loaded simply supported beam, today we’re going to do the first of two solutions using the Rayleigh-Ritz method. Of all the possible shapes a beam can deform into, the shape it will deform into is the one that minimizes the potential energy of the…