John 
I recently ran into the following comic strip online: The comic is unsettling because it points out that a palindrome is a symmetric sequence of characters, which is not the same as a visually symmetric sequence. What words are symmetric … Read more
I figured out something that I wasn’t able to find by searching, so I’m posting it here in case other people have the same question and the same difficulty finding an answer. I’m sure other people have written about this, … Read more
Ramanujan came up with an approximation for factorial that resembles Stirling’s famous approximation but is much more accurate. As with Stirling’s approximation, the relative error in Ramanujan’s approximation decreases as n gets larger. Typically these approximations are not useful for … Read more
I got an evaluation copy of The Best Writing on Mathematics 2021 yesterday. One article jumped out as I was skimming the table of contents: A Zeroth Power Is Often a Logarithm Yearning to Be Free by Sanjoy Mahajan. Great … Read more
The length of antenna you need to receive a radio signal is proportional to the signal’s wavelength, typically 1/2 or 1/4 of the wavelength. Cell phones operate at gigahertz frequencies, and so the antennas are small enough to hide inside … Read more
Now that most people are carrying around a powerful computer in their pocket, what use is it to be able to do math in your head? Here’s something I’ve noticed lately: being able to do quick approximations in mid-conversation is … Read more
There are two techniques in software development that have an almost gnostic mystique about them: monads and macros. The photo is a pun [1]. Pride and pragmatism As with everything people do, monads and macros are used with mixed motives, … Read more
The symbols ≪ and ≫ may be confusing the first time you see them, but they’re very handy. The symbol ≪ means “much less than, and its counterpart ≫ means “much greater than”. Here’s a little table showing how to … Read more
A palindrome is a word or sentence that remains the same when its characters are reversed. For example, the word “radar” is a palindrome, as is the sentence “Madam, I’m Adam.” I was thinking today about Morse code palindromes, sequences … Read more
Balaji Srinivasan asks in a Twitter thread why we’re not far more productive given the technology available. Here I collect the five possible explanations he mentions. The Great Distraction.All the productivity we gained has been frittered away on equal-and-opposite distractions … Read more