A decade of WiFi

It was just over 10 years ago when I wrote my original blog post on WiFi. Looking back on it, it’s incredibly nerdy – did I really include a sparsity plot for a matrix? Nevertheless, it blew my mind how viral it went, along with the Android app that came shortly afterwards (written in a mad microwave-curry-and-energy-drink-dash). I therefore have it to thank for the inspiration to continue to write, safe in the knowledge that the internet was full of maths and physics geeks like me. It probably also led pretty directly to my current career writing software professionally.

As a tribute then, let’s dust off the ol’ solver and buff it up to a 2024-like shine. Hopefully the internet is just as full of geeks as it was a decade ago!

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Last orders

I’ll be the first to admit, this is a post I wrote mainly to scratch an itch of mine and so may have an audience of approximately 1. Fortunately in my previous life as a physicist I found that approximations can actually encompass many orders of magnitude, so perhaps we’re on to a winner here? Let’s find out.

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A deluge of data

Forgive me for writing yet again about the weather, but

It’s part of my national heritage, and
This summer has had genuinely terrible weather.

Of course it remains to be seen exactly how terrible, and in great and unrelenting detail. How better to honour the time-worn traditions of my people?

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Flipping out

Matt Parker, employing the enviably pithy prose typical of a content creator forged on the unforgiving fires of social media, asked the simple question back in 2018:

How thick is a three-sided coin?

Translated into mathematician-ese, this means

What aspect ratio of a flipped coin leads to the chance of landing on either edge being the same as landing on a particular face?

Such is Matt’s reach that this question has been answered thoroughly many – times – before, but that’s never discouraged us. Let’s take a look.

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Losing it

Here’s a fun question – let’s consider, purely in the abstract, the notion of quickly putting on a lot of weight. If, hypothetically, one were to weigh themselves every day and, conceptually, throw away all of the results which showed an increase in weight, what, in a strictly Platonic sense, are the odds that actually they’re just a fat shit not actually losing any weight?

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Newton fractals with WebGL

It’s always exciting when a new 3Blue1Brown video emerges – Grant has an incredible sense for the intuitive visualisation of complex concepts (pun intended). His most recent on Newton fractals however really pushes the bar, and I couldn’t help but have a go at emulating it.

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MaTSlab

Matlab is an archaic piece of software, is stupidly expensive, has a ridiculous syntax, horrible UI, and a whole host of bizarre quirks that you just put up with because that one grad student 10 years ago wrote a controller in it for a camera from a company which no longer exists and your supervisor refuses to buy a new one because apparently that’s a ridiculous price for only 14 bits of dynamic range.

Deep breath.

And despite all that, when I was in the zone I’m not sure I’ve ever been as effective in another piece of software. Let’s see about bringing it up to scratch.

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Swing and a miss

After my last post, where I noted that 45 degrees was the optimum angle to shoot a projectile the farthest, a commenter asked if the same was true for jumping from a swing. “Of course!” I initially thought. As we shall see, it isn’t actually that simple.

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A light sprinkling of maths

I’ve got a house now which, amongst other things, means that all of my future posts will be depressingly domestic. In particular, as I sat watching a sprinkler water my new well-shaded lawn, I noticed that some parts of grass were being watered more than others. It wouldn’t be right to fix these kinds of problems without first wringing all possible interest from them however, so let’s first understand what’s going on from the safe, dry comfort of a computer screen.

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Shady business

Since the start of lockdown, I’ve found ever more reasons to be grateful for the surprisingly sunny postage-stamp of a garden I enjoy here in London. I am however moving to a new house soon, and have been curious to know how the new garden will fare in comparison. Hopefully so are you, as we’re about to enjoy it in painful detail.

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