A 3D terrain model of Condor Peak in the Angeles National Forest
A 3D model of Eaton Canyon in the Angeles National Forest
Lately, I've been relaxing by printing and hand-painting models of my local mountains made with TouchTerrain touchterrain.geol.iastate.edu these are very satisfying to make and extremely cool looking in person - and chonky 8"x8"x2" and weigh nearly a pound each.
I play ukulele, does that count as a small overlap?
Because of this mornings lunar eclipse, today belongs to RA, god of the sun?
Many puzzle cubes lined up on labeled stands
Needed to complete my younger son's "cube station"
A 1x1 cube stand holding a joke 1x1x1 puzzle cube, and a 0x0 cube stand holding nothing
Thanks to 3D printing, my sons and I can now instantiate all the stupid jokes that pop into our heads
Half the time I secretly suspect that the "App" is just a web browser stripped down to just render one webpage.
Reading "Blueprints" by Marcus du Sautoy, and while I am not a fan so far this did jump out at me:
"Mathematics is far from being just a list of all the true statements we can discover about numbers. Mathematicians are storytellers [...] Not every story that it’s possible to tell is worth telling."
picture of an ent in front of a whiteboard with equations of arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic means on it, with text "ent justifying the means" under it
Stupid idea that has been plaguing me all weekend
I think my jar of starter is probably the most resilient thing in the house
A round loaf of whole wheat sourdough bread
A loaf of whole wheat (about 50% fresh milled hard red wheat) sourdough bread
It's been a while, but it turns out I am still okay at making bread
I recently subscribed to the labels at bsky.app/profile/did:... and it's especially interesting to see what gets posted by normal people vs. what gets posted by people who spend maybe a little too much time on this site (i.e. labeled "this person posted 100+ times in the last 24 hours")
It horrible! The store shelves are full of horrific abominations like this:
Happy New Year to all of Meta's and Reddit's algorithmic feeds that are still showing me crap from just after Christmas. But you would never do that to me, would you BlueSky?
I made the post but neglected the photo, geez
You can buy a print of Lumat here brandonbird.myshopify.com/products/lum... or any of Brandon's excellent ewoks
It took me way too long to get this @brandonbird.bsky.social original painting of Lumat framed and displayed on the wall.
Goshdarnit, @fartsandwich.bsky.social is a genius: foodisstupid.substack.com/p/nog-eggs?f...
I am just saying, if scouting offered a badge in Creepy Effigy Avoidance, we could prevent a lot of these problems.
John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats singing and playing guitar
It was great to get out and see @themountaingoats.bsky.social on the last day of the current US tour. NGL there were tears in my eyes when they played "This Year" because, my friends, it has been a year. But we will make it through.
This is a pretty easy 20 for me. It feels like it was made by someone well under the age of 40. I would add "Slide rule", "Punch Cards", "Party line Telephone", "8 track tape", "8mm home videos" to stretch this another decade, but it still needs more Jurassic tech to distinguish folks 70+ or 80+
Gentlemen and Cogentlemen or Gentlecomen?
Banana Fox and the Secret Sour Society Banana Fox and the Book-Eating Robot Banana Fox and the Gummy Monster Mess Green Eggs and Ham Take a Hike
Four of my biggest hits that any kid would LOVE for Christmas #kidlit
For the curious, here is my coded up solution to the SAT problem with explanation of the (clever if I do say so myself) formulation of the problem as constraint equations in binary variables
Yesterday I finished the 24th and final Parker book. Highly recommended for reading and looking great on a shelf
If you're curious, my "real solution" used the MILP solver cbc via the PuLP interface and took about 5 minutes for each problem (highly variable) for a total of 75 compute hours. It was 10-100 times faster than using Z3 on the same equations.
I've completed "Christmas Tree Farm" - Day 12 - Advent of Code 2025 #AdventOfCode adventofcode.com/2025/day/12 I finished this morning, and I was a little annoyed at the "fast solution", but not as mad as I would be if there was a super clever incremental/recursive/DP solution that I'd missed.
When all my friends has Apple 2e's and Commodore 64s, my first computer was a kit-built Z80 machine running CP/M that my uncle had built for a client who didn't end up needing it. It was as big as an oven, but we typed many BASIC program from books and magazines into it over the years.
SciPy had a linprog method if you formatted your part 1 with a matrix, which will be easier than my z3 solution that writes out the equations. docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/re...
Would it make you feel better if I told you this is definitely applied math?
This is an Integer Linear Programming problem, I as far as I can tell, it's going to involve a very cleverly pruned DFS that still runs for a long time, or The Math: the Simplex method and Branch and Bound
