Mark Tomczak @mtomczak@social.cleverlibre.org

In which I convince a bunch of players to accomplish goals for me by roleplaying a college dean.

http://personal-blog.fixermark.com/posts/2022/the-story-of-ctu-1/

This represents a not-insignificant part of my career.

A lot of the stuff we see on Mars could easily be transplanted into an Earth desert.

But from time to time, she reminds us she's an alien planet with one third of Earth's standard gravity.

https://www.sciencealert.com/check-out-the-twisting-towers-of-rock-curiosity-found-on-mars/amp

I've been trying to get back to at least as much control theory as I understood in my college days, and this is a pretty neat explainer of the notion of stable vs. unstable control systems (what they intuitively mean, without diving headlong into the math of how we get the systems model to tell us if we're looking at a stable / unstable one).

https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/you-need-to-know-what-right-half

First explainer I've ever seen of Taylor series that really clicked for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d6DsjIBzJ4

In general, I wish more of calculus had been taught to me not as a fundmental math that is abstractly internally-consistent, but from its historical origins: "Physics and engineering are hard, here's some brilliant hacks people came up with to make the estimates and calculations tractable." Then you can go from those to why they work to get to the theoretical context-free calculus.

Here is the fundamental difference.
In application-level programming, there is such a thing as a function that is guaranteed to succeed and return.

In systems-level programming, no such creature exists.

Ye young people who seek understanding of the computing world: this is not the whole of the law, but it is the law.

The image that appears in my brain whenever someone says anything like "C is a fine language if you just use it right."

Part one of thinking about simulating drivetrains. #frc

https://fixermark.blogspot.com/2022/05/simulating-differential-drivetrain-part.html

Hello world. :)