An ag(e)ing hacker - posts tagged as "science" -- Luca Saiu's blog

Happy pi Approximation Day 2014 — 2014-07-22 00:10
Updated: 2015-01-23 22:59

It’s 22/7 again. Last year on pi Approximation Day I published a simple Forth program based on an intuitive geometrical idea: see Happy pi approximation day 2013 (<https://blog.ageinghacker.net/posts/13>). I’ve been thinking about what to do in 2014 for some time, without finding anything as nice from the programming point of view. Sure, you can find series and continued fractions converging to pi, even rapidly; these methods work, but the corresponding programs are trivial to code and don’t provide any insight. So I chose another route: a practical experiment to approximate pi by cutting and weighing metal. The result turned out [...] Read more

Tags: english, experiment, gnu, guile, hacking, pi, science

How I learned procedural abstraction and the wonder of science — 2011-09-19 05:06
Updated: 2022-12-04 22:28

Inspired by a happy “discovery” I made today, I’ve written this instead of finishing the post about identity. The abandoned tape This story began on a summer evening of the late Eighties when I was 10, maybe 11. I was at some small country fair near home with my brother, five years younger than me — quite a big difference back then. My brother found an audio cassette discarded on the ground, and wanted to take it home; it looked dirty and I remember that I didn’t want to pick it up at first, but I guess I wasn’t too [...] Read more

Tags: commodore-64, english, hacking, my-masters, myself, nostalgia, science