Xamuel.com

Announcing the newest project: The Romaji Dictionary
Long term readers will recognize this project as one I started almost a year ago. Back then, I had no idea what I was doing. I wrote a giant C program from bare principles to parse the EDict’s XML file– a major case of Reinventing The [...]

In seventh grade algebra, I learned how to derive the equation for a line. In this context, a “line” implicitly means a two-way-infinite line, shooting off to infinity in either direction. What isn’t taught in school is the much more difficult and subtle question of how to derive the equation of a finite [...]

A normal graphing calculator, you enter an equation and get a curve. An inverse graphing calculator goes the other way: from curve to equation. The current version accepts curves in the form of English letters. So it can generate equations whose graphs appear to spell things out, like “Hello World”.
The calculator [...]

Mathematically speaking, we’re probably living in a computer simulation, under certain reasonable assumptions. The idea behind the proof is simple. Assuming humans live long enough and continue to advance in technology, eventually we’ll be able to create such fine simulations of the world that the people in those simulations will be conscious. [...]

I’ve been thinking a lot about mathematical notation lately and, more precisely, how to subvert it. After all, you don’t really understand something until you can subvert the həll out of it One question I was led to is: why do we use the symbol “+” for addition and “-” [...]

Just when I was really getting used to my own mortality, a new concept had to come along and change everything: Quantum Immortality. You’ve heard of the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment: seal a cat in a box and arrange so the cat will get gassed if a quantum waveform collapses in a certain way. [...]

So I programmed a page to randomly generate names of Japanese restaurants. It’s pretty cool, check it out here: Japanese Restaurant Name Generator. Not only does it come up with randomized names, but you can even vote on them
So far it’s been a fun quick little project to give me [...]

Think of me as the Frank Gilbreth of university mathematics: always looking for ways to make it more efficient. There’s a perpetual struggle in mathematics education about how many facts and formulas should be presented vs. how much power they grant. It’s nice to know two ways to solve a task, but in [...]

There are two types of knowing: emotional knowledge and intellectual knowledge. The two can overlap, but the overlap is surprisingly small. We know something intellectually when we’ve read it or heard it or been taught it from a reputable source. Knowing something intellectually, you can answer questions about it on a [...]

Here are a few very minor little ideas for how to improve various technologies. I’ll update it as I think of more!
Clocks
Gadgets which display the time, should almost always display it, unless there’s a very good reason not to. For example, Windows and OSX are good about displaying a clock at most times, [...]