Category Archives: Miscellaneous

I’m pretty sure I tracked down the previously unknown song that inspired the 1966 song “Friday on My Mind” by Australian rock band the Easybeats. The song is “Badinerie”, the final movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2 … Continue reading →

I worked at Microsoft from June 1997 to June 2025. For most of those years, I was proud to say that I worked at Microsoft. Many of my friends still work at Microsoft, but they are not happy with what … Continue reading →

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 two dice which determine the result of a play, for example, “single”, or “ground out”, … Continue reading →

I played an interesting horse race dice game for the first time recently. The mathematics of the game intrigued me and so one evening while on a dreadfully long flight, I wrote a short simulation (using the Python language) to … Continue reading →

I played an interesting horse race dice game for the first time recently. The mathematics of the game intrigued me and so one evening while on a dreadfully long flight from Seattle to Boston, I wrote a short simulation (using … Continue reading →

I try to learn something new every day. On a recent morning before work, for no reason I can remember now, I figured I’d implement a function from scratch to compute the coefficients of the characteristic polynomial of a matrix. … Continue reading →

I came across an interesting antique gambling machine called a 10-dice popper. There are 10 ordinary six-sided dice in 10 glass tubes. When a lever is pressed, all 10 dice are popped up and rolled. I could find no information … Continue reading →

A common technique to analyze the effect of machine learning predictor variables, but a technique that I don’t like, is to estimate Shapley values using the SHAP tool. Let me explain. Suppose you want to predict a person’s income (y) … Continue reading →

I’ve been looking at simulated quantum computing using the three main quantum languages/libraries: Q# from Microsoft, Cinq from Google, and Qiskit from IBM. I learn best by taking existing examples, and refactoring them. One morning before work, I refactored an … Continue reading →

The Q# programming language is designed for quantum computing. Learning any completely new programming language is difficult, but Q# is especially difficult because of all the underlying quantum concepts. I was looking at some of the Q# online documentation examples … Continue reading →