This week Wayne wrote about how to organize technical research.
I wrote a post about normalized cryptograms, a way of describing the pattern of letters in a word. It turns out that even short words may have a unique letter pattern, words like eerie, amass, and llama.
Calculating exactly how much a cable will sag requires numerically solving a nonlinear equation, but there’s a simple approximation with an error of less than 1%. The “approximate” result might be at least as accurate as the “exact” result since the “exact” calculation rests on an assumption that does not hold exactly.
Finally, a Pi Day post. Eighteen centuries after Archimedes came up with his method of calculating π, James Gregory came up with an iterative algorithm for speeding up the calculation.