Xamuel.com

Lately I’ve been studying a multi-parent analog of trees. A mathematical tree can be thought of as the family tree for an asexual species where each node (except the root) has exactly one parent. In the “trees” I’m looking at, instead of a root, there’s a finite set of “xatriarchs” (e.g. matriarchs and patriarchs but [...]

The C specifications are interesting because they leave many behaviors undefined. For example, if you try to use an uninitialized variable, the results are technically undefined. In some languages, the specifications might stipulate that if that ever happened, the program should gracefully halt with an error message or something. Or that all variables be initialized [...]

Three friends went to a pool party together. The pool was full of people splashing around and having fun, but of course the hardest part was making the initial jump. The first friend jumped in right away. The shock of the cold water quickly went away and he had fun with everybody in the pool. [...]

What makes a person royal? The “real” monarchies are backed by force and intrigue, making them arbitrary: if history had gone differently, Queen Elizabeth II might not be “royal”, even if the basic structure of her family were identical. In my earlier article, I defined the mathematic royalty by saying a given person is royal [...]

“The typical scientist devotes himself tirelessly to science.” Anything wrong with this sentence? No, there is not. It’s an example of an interesting device in the English language, where we use a single member of a class to represent the entire class. (In fact, I just did it again, this time picking out a single [...]

In a recent article, I showed how ordinal numbers can be used to prove some astonishing results, namely, that the Goodstein Sequences shrink to 0. I spent some time thinking what else the idea could be applied to, but I couldn’t think of anything. Then, as if my life were one big collection of cliches, [...]

When I was in junior high, somehow I ended up reading the works of Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and theologian. Yeah, I was a bit of a weird kid back then. I was really impressed with the depth and life of the work. When we read about science in textbooks, it’s [...]

If you randomly start tracing down the family tree of mankind, you’ll probably reach a dead-end. But if you’re lucky you might avoid dead-ends forever and trace out an infinite chain of descendants. The likelihood of this depends on how prone humans are to spawn offspring: if everyone always has children, then you’ll get an [...]

I finally coded an RSS feed for my webcomic! The feed is here: Xamuel.com Webcomic. You can use that to subscribe in Google Reader or whatever reader you prefer In case you’ve missed them, here are the comics so far: Define The Universe (NEW! Just published it minutes before publishing this post!) Casino Naturale (Thursday, [...]

During the past week, I switched hosts from Bluehost to Linode. I liked Bluehost, but I outgrew them. My Inverse Graphing Calculator was “too popular” for them. They froze it, and I had to adjust it to text-only mode before they’d unfreeze it. I can understand that– a cheap, shared host plan isn’t really intended [...]