Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Scott’s pi is one of many classical statistics metrics that can be used to measure how well two raters agree when they rate a set of items. Scott’s pi, like other inter-rater reliability metrics, is used for a very specific … Continue reading →

The Uno platform is a software library that allows software developers create an application that targets Android devices, iOS devices, Windows devices, and Web applications. Put another way, using Uno, a software developer can write a single application that will … Continue reading →

I was working on a problem recently and the Kendall tau coefficient came up. I hadn’t used Kendall tau in quite a long time so I took some time to refresh my memory. Kendall tau is a classical statistics technique … Continue reading →

I was recently working on a project that used a software system called Ansible. Ansible is a system that can be used to manage computer resources (machines, network, code) during application development. When I was a student learning computer science, … Continue reading →

I remember being amazed years ago when I first read about Buffon’s Needle problem. You can estimate the value of pi (~3.1416) by dropping a needle on a floor made from wooden slats, and counting how many times the needle … Continue reading →

Computing the distance between two zip codes is easy. And it’s difficult. To compute the distance between two zip codes, you can find the latitude and longitude of each zip code, then compute the distance between the two lat-lon points. … Continue reading →

I ran across a math problem that is simultaneously surprisingly easy and surprisingly difficult: “What is the average distance between two randomly selected points in the unit square?” One Sunday afternoon, instead of walking my dogs in the rain, I … Continue reading →

Computer and video games can be very sophisticated. But simple games can be fun too. Various versions of tabletop dice baseball have been around for well over 100 years. There are many variations, but in most you roll one or … Continue reading →

I was doing some machine learning coding and I wanted to programmatically create a scatter plot. My data looks like: xs = np.array([1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]) ys = np.array([3, 4, 8, 5, 6, 7, 3, 2]) … Continue reading →

Pykka is a Python language code library (or framework depending on your point of view) that helps you write programs that use the Actor paradigm. This is useful when you have many components that need to interact with each other … Continue reading →