Profile avatar
dougmerritt.mathstodon.xyz.ap.brid.gy
I'm a philomath (many interests; call it polymath-wanna-be) professional computer programmer in Silicon Valley. #mathematics #computer_science #unicode […] [bridged from https://mathstodon.xyz/@dougmerritt on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
222 posts 5 followers 0 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 23 Comments 27

1980s: I still remember when windows started appearing on personal computers. You didn't even have to think about it. You intuitively knew what it implied and you just needed someone to show you which precise actions you needed to do things like close a window. 2020s: Trying to find a […]

submitted 1 hour ago • 2 comments

You know I love a good Venn Diagram. Been seeing this one around lately. Seems to sum up the times.

submitted 4 days ago • 6 comments

"Sparse Voxels Rasterization: Real-time High-fidelity Radiance Field Rendering" Cheng Sun, Jaesung Choe, Charles Loop, Wei-Chiu Ma, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang 2024 Dec 5 "We propose an efficient radiance field rendering algorithm that incorporates a rasterization process on adaptive sparse voxels […]

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

There's often good news if you look for it (Guardian article about the likely collapse of the Murdoch Media empire): https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/feb/22/were-clearly-heading-towards-collapse-why-the-murdoch-empire-is-about-to-go-bang

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

HARDCORE MATH POST I knew a guy named John McKay who had a crazy good ability to perceive patterns in math. He came up with amazing results, but also some even more amazing conjectures which turned out to be true. One was recently proved by Britta Späth and Marc Cabanes. They proved it after […]

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

@screwtape https://mathstodon.xyz/@[email protected]/114030222575171589

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Sometimes people think #curl is simple little HTTP tool, while in reality there's a whole internet transfer machine in there supporting 28 protocols.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

I really enjoyed this explainer on why making a calculator app do the right thing is way harder than you might expect. Recommended for both the software engineers and mathematicians. https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app The paper is "Towards an API for the Real Numbers" by […]

submitted 9 days ago • 1 comment

Banach-Tarski Paradox, but with my cat and his excess fur it is seriously a thing, I can show you

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

DL4819 has crashed on runway 23 at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Airport is closed to all arrivals and departures. Flight was a CRJ-900 from Minneapolis. Crashed on landing at 2:14pm local time. #Aviation #Toronto #DL4819

submitted 11 days ago • 1 comment

OTD 1961: Burroughs announces the B5000. First(?) computer designed for high level languages (esp ALGOL). http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/burroughs/LargeSystems/B5000_5500_5700/5000-20002-P_The_Descriptor_-_A_Definition_of_the_B_5000_Information_Processing_System_196102.pdf

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Correct. If the birthdate field contains corrupt or mismatched data, it defaults to 1875-05-20, which serves as a flag. May 20, 1875, is the day the international standards and metrics treaty was signed. Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.

submitted 13 days ago • 274 comments

Be mine. This is a threat.

submitted 13 days ago • 0 comments

US now confirmed as the most idiotic nation on Earth https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c5y25z4e4e1t

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

New post: Posthumous Chebyshev Polynomials https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2025/02/12/chebyshev-third-fourth/

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

#PhysicsJournalClub "Three-dimensional holographic imaging of incoherent objects through scattering media" by Y. Baek, H. de Aguiar and @sylvaingigan arXiv:2502.01475v1 #optics #physics #imaging As you daily experience anytime you look at anything, light scattering severely impairs your […]

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment

Today I released a new version of bdflib, my Python library for working with bitmap fonts in the BDF format (commonly used on Unix systems). New in this version is the `bdflib.effects.expand()` function and the `bdflib-expand` command-line tool, which can be used to aspect-correct a BDF font […]

submitted 16 days ago • 0 comments

Eight research groups disbanded (and 46 people fired) at the University of Twente (NL). This include the Complex Photonic Systems group, where I did 3 years of postdoc. It is the end of an era 😢 https://www.utoday.nl/news/75196/dismissal-for-46-st-employees-complete-research-groups-disbanded

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

A primer on Long Covid which includes information about ME/CFS: "What is Long COVID?" https://www.thegauntlet.news/p/what-is-long-covid "Although a more severe infection increases your risk of Long COVID, most Long COVID cases – over 90% – began with a mild infection, due to the much larger […]

submitted 18 days ago • 0 comments

@screwtape This is somewhat short, and they seem to be starting to forget Unix system calls, but may be of interest to you: "How Copyover MUD Servers Worked" http://jackkelly.name/blog/archives/2025/02/06/how_copyover_mud_servers_worked/ You're implementing a Lisp-dialect language and a […]

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

I'm glad this is happening now so we will see how far they will go. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-finds-trump-administration-violated-court-order-halting-funding-rcna191528

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

@AmenZwa A KIM-1 adventure game in 1.1 KB. Hard to top. https://mathstodon.xyz/@[email protected]/113981654125478870

submitted 17 days ago • 0 comments

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment