Been a busy couple of weeks here in Nutshell Central. Principally there was Workshop Hell, which I’ve come out the other side of pretty much unscathed, and with a better working knowledge of Fourier transforms and weavelets than at any prior point in my existence. (Thanks here are due to Wendy, who has long been my principal source for explanations of analysis, and came through for me on the whole wavelets thing. Wendy, remind me to buy you dinner next time I’m in the region.)
Aside from that, the rather short term is coming to an end. We’re doing what I consider the fun part of the course — combinatorics, or “counting” if you prefer — which lets me bring in all sorts of problems from different games. I’d been talking to Blue earlier this week, and he mentioned that on one of his Ultimate teams how many different men and women there were, and how many were required for a line on the field. A-ha, I thought to myself a little while later, there’s a combinations question here.
The best new tool for the web I’ve seen in a while is YubNub: it’s billed as a command-line for the web, but infinitely extensible, so really it’s a little like a Forth interpreter for the web. The reason I like this is that I don’t always remember to switch search engines in my FireFox search box, with disappointing results. Typing a prefix command will be easier for me to remember, because it means I don’t have to mix mousing into my keyboarding.