I read about aesthetic uses of Latin Squares on John Cook’s site a few months ago. Since I maintain a resource to use colour tables in Igor Pro, I thought it would be fun to use Latin Squares to display colour tables for easy visualisation. Briefly, I wrote some code to generate a 9 x […]
Category: adventures in code
Seles II: Tennis coding challenge solution
In a previous post, I described a coding challenge sent to me by my colleague. Here is the challenge again: There is a tennis match between two players denoted 1, and 2. You are given a sequence of 1s and 2s whereby each number denotes a point won by player 1 or player 2 (e.g. […]
Seles: Tennis coding challenge
A colleague sent me a coding challenge. This is a short post to describe how I tackled it. Edit: a follow-up post is here. This is the challenge: There is a tennis match between two players denoted 1, and 2. You are given a sequence of 1s and 2s whereby each number denotes a point […]
Under The Same Name: Journal titles and band names
Some journals sound like they should be bands. Whereas some journal titles ARE in fact the same as band names. I wondered… how many journal titles are also band names. Let’s find out! The journals cited in PubMed could be downloaded as a text file from here. This list includes every MEDLINE journal – even […]
Tips from the Blog XV: locating the php.ini file for WordPress on Raspberry Pi
If I struggle to find the answer to something, it must be worth a post to help out others. So, here’s where to find the php.ini file on a standard WordPress install on Raspberry Pi. I installed a LAMP stack and WordPress on a Raspberry Pi following these excellent instructions. The aim was to import […]
Os Mutantes: an implausible naming system for SARS-CoV-2 mutants
The scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been astounding. Aside from efforts to generate vaccines, the genomic surveillance of the virus has been truly remarkable. For example, the nextstrain project has sequence many SARS-CoV-2 genomes. In fact, the rapid identification of multiple new strains and mutations by diverse groups of scientists has resulted in […]
Crackerblocks: computing solutions for IQ Block game
The IQ Block game is a puzzle where the player must fit eight shapes into a square space. The challenge is to find as many ways as possible to do it. The box says there are more than 40 solutions! So how many are there? I wrote a solver to crack the IQ Block game. […]
I’ve Gotta Get A Message To You: automated emails from Raspberry Pi zero
I have a long-running project to make timelapse movies using a Raspberry Pi Zero with camera module. I’m capturing a countryside view and have images for two years. The uptime on the Pi is seriously impressive, but nonetheless I wanted to upgrade the Pi so that it would send me updates of how it’s going, […]
Tips From The Blog XIV: embedded file locations in an Adobe Illustrator file
I was working on a figure in Adobe Illustrator today. The ai file had 32 embedded TIFF files (we tend to embed images rather than linking them for portability reasons). I wanted to change all of the images, but to do this I needed to know where the originals were. Clicking on the file shows […]
Represent: geographical breakdown of a virtual seminar series
During the pandemic, many virtual seminar programmes have popped up. One series, “Motors in Quarantine“, has been very successful. It’s organised by my colleagues Anne Straube, Alex Zwetsloot and Huong Vu. Anne wanted to know if attendees of the seminar series were a fair representation of the field. We know the geographical location of the […]