South Park makes me really happy sometimes

December 2, 2010

I’ve embedded a YouTube playlist that will play two videos back to back. I promise it’s worth it to fully watch both videos. Enjoy. (Total running time: under 4 minutes).

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Birthrate by Month

December 1, 2010

I was in a discussion about horoscopes and how they’re wrong, when a possibly crazy claim came up: most people are born in one half of the year instead of another. Because it’s trivially true if all you need is 50% + 1 to make it “most” — I pressed the guy making the claim [...]

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Monty Hall Bet Monte Carlo — Play at home!

November 26, 2010

If you caught my last post about the back and forth I’ve had with YouTube user “adolthitler”, you know the situation. If not, there’s a person who is wrong on the Monty Hall problem, and refuses to be corrected — so I tried to make a bet with the guy with terms that would make [...]

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Making Money with Monty Hall

November 24, 2010

There’s a fun and notorious probability problem known as the Monty Hall problem. It’s notorious for tons of reasons. The setup is simple. You’re on a game show and are presented with three closed doors; a prize behind 1 of the doors; non-prizes behind 2 of the doors. Usually it’s something like, a car behind [...]

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Show Hidden Files on a Mac

November 16, 2010

How to show hidden files on a Mac: Terminal: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE killall Finder The killall command kills and refreshes all open Finder windows. If you would like to turn it back off: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE killall Finder

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Using OpenID with Gmail and Google Accounts

November 4, 2010

The URL that is needed is: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id — and it’s the same for everyone who has a Google account. So when they ask for your OpenID, just copy and paste that URL. (It may send you to Google to verify that you want that site to be able to log you in).

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Including eps figures into LaTeX

October 5, 2010

I have a folder for my images that I include in my LaTeX documents called “img”. My graphics package is set by (it used to be slightly different — see bug report below): \usepackage{graphicx} \graphicspath{{img/}} Pro-tip: If you turn an image 90 degrees, it’s height and width are defined by how it started. So, if [...]

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Getting Optimal Weight from a Spectrum

October 3, 2010

To derive the equation for the information one can get from a spectrum. Doppler shift: Assuming that the Doppler shift is small compared to absorption line width, the observable intensity change at a given pixel: Doppler shift restated: Add over available spectrum. Each pixel contributes according to the optimal weight: citation: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007PhRvL..99w9001M

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A few more LaTeX tricks

September 24, 2010

Just happened to be a week where I figured out a lot of LaTeX things at once — and I wanted to get them down before they are lost forever. I have wanted to know how to do an automatically variable height “evaluated at” symbol in LaTeX for a long time. Yesterday, I stopped waiting. [...]

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A few LaTeX tricks

September 20, 2010

I learned several neat LaTeX tricks in the past few days. The first is how to write LaTeX in my wordpress blog entry: or syntax. To write it, you enclose the mathtype you want like: [tag] e^{\i \pi} + 1 = 0 [/tag] (but replace tag with the word: latex). or syntax. Using the plugin: [...]

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