FOB

I keep wanting to blog about my latest tiny piece of software, but I keep having one more bug or feature.

So instead, I've cooked up this little word game. Tell me what you think of it…

I was playing in a D&D game with my boy last Sunday, and someone brought up the question of how likely a character was to have an 18 stat. Of course the rest of the session was a loss for me, as I sat there trying to do the math with pencil, paper, and a four-function calculator.

D&D has six stats, each a number between 3 and 18. The character roll-up rules we are playing specify that each stat will be obtained by rolling four dice and taking the top three.

About 9% of D&D characters will have an 18 stat. The answer is explained here.

So I thought about it tonight and figured out that in Haskell I can generate the Fibonacci sequence using the definition

let l = [1,1] ++ zipWith (+) l (tail l)

If you type this at ghci you can say "take 20 l" and get

[1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144,233,377,610,987,1597,2584,4181,6765]

Laziness weirds programming.

I posted an audio compressor / limiter written in Haskell to HackageDB and BartForge this weekend. I also posted its ancillary pure-Haskell WAVE file IO library, and my Haskell argument parsing library.

It all still needs a lot of work to be good, but it's usable now. Enjoy.

From this interesting blog post:

Where in C++ we might say:
  for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++) f(x)
in Haskell we would say:
  map f (take (10 [0..]))

Which is sadly all too often true. I'm definitely one of the ones who will tend not to find the much happier

map f [0..9]

In a previous blog post I talked about some serious problems I had with questions on a standardized math test my son took recently. Apparently Reddit linked it, and both my blog and Reddit got a number of comments.

The interesting thing to me is the documentation the whole incident brought to the existence of two dramatically distinct views of what mathematics is—something I'd go as far as to call a mathematics "class divide"…

It seems like I've been posting a lot of negative stuff lately. I'm a naturally cranky, opinionated person, but there's lots of things I enjoy. I should report on them too.

I recently reviewed the worst juvie novel I've ever read—the "banned book" The Transall Saga. Today I have the happier task of reviewing a well-written and intriguing novel intended for a slightly younger age group. Gordon Korman's Swindle came to my attention today when my son brought it home from the school Book Fair, where apparently every kid in school bought a copy. I'm always suspicious of these sudden hits, but I read a couple of chapters of Swindle this morning.

I'm hooked…

My boy just got the practice version of the Oregon Standardized Math Test. This Sample Test is intended for Grade 3.

The test is a putrid example of how bad these standardized tests are. As near as I can tell, it's a combination of testers being proud of how well they can trick third graders, and utter ignorance of basic mathematical principles. Without further ado, I present the most obnoxious questions…

Lately, I've had the opportunity to intervene in a number of attempts to "boil the ocean"…

A week or two ago my wife was emptying the dryer and found the sticker shown here on the inside of the bin. (Penny shown for scale.) Neither of us has the slightest idea how that sticker got there. Or where else it might show up.

I'm afraid. Very afraid.