We discuss the game of higher or lower and an optimal strategy when playing.

I provide a series of Python micro-optimisations.

In light of the recent historic Artemis II launch to return to the Moon for the first time in 50 years, I describe a simple computation of the distance to the Moon from almost first principles.

A short article on Arctic Outpost Radio AM1270, a vintage ratio station broadcasting from the top of the world.

We discuss gradient descent based optimisation algorithms, starting from simple gradient descent and slowly making our way to the famous Adam optimiser, motivating each adaptation along the way.

Faced with the choice of walking or waiting for a shuttle at Auckland Airport, we explore the optimal strategy in expectation. Starting from a simple deterministic model, we introduce uncertainty in bus headways and discover the inspection paradox: under any variance in arrival times, the expected wait is always longer than the naive estimate of half the mean headway.

We visualise the many different interpretations of the North Pole.

A review of the famous German Tank Problem on estimating the number of German tanks in production conducted by the Allied forces during WW2. A discussion and derivation of the estimator used is also provided.

Discuss and document proofs to a recent article by Gappy on a number of drawdown formulas that are useful in evaluating the probability of drawdown events of portfolios.

We implement Conway’s Game of Life as an exercise in inserting JavaScript into my blog posts.