Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips Somewhere, somehow we forgot what a good approximation was. We used to tell this “joke” a long time ago in a place far, far away. Consider the situation with an amorous young gentlemen on one side of a room and an amorous young lady on the other side of the room. Every […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Present and past weave together. New tools or old techniques? I am a bit slow on the uptake of “new” things from time to time. This past week or so I stumbled across this thing called Jupyter. It is a type of “notebook.” Some call it yet another implementation of the “notebook” […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Someone who had a big influence on my life has passed away. “The Mote in God’s Eye.” Star Wars was in theaters, and everyone was enthralled. The science fiction community tried to fit in with Luke, Han, and the rest, often in vain. Every science fiction commentator had their own list of, […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The day we fixed a supercomputer with a cardboard box. I suppose this post has to do with good old American ingenuity or some myth we like to create about ourselves. Regardless of myths and selective memory, this is actually a true story. On the job we had serial number one of […]

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by Dwayne Phillips I realize that my plea won’t do any good, but could we please use the right terms in describing “artificial intelligence?” Everybody is doing artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Really? Consider… Artificial intelligence Deep Learning Machine Learning Neural Networks Pattern Recognition The vast majority of what people call AI today is really […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A look at the Lenovo Yoga Book. This look concentrates on writing with a pen. Lenovo may have reinvented the portable computer with their new Yoga Book. A previous post tested the Halo Keyboard for typing. This post examines how the Yoga Book captures handwriting. The flat plastic panel on the Yoga […]

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by Dwayne Phillips A look at the Lenovo Yoga Book. This look concentrates on typing on the Halo Keyboard. Next up, let’s try writing with a pen. Lenovo may have reinvented the portable computer. We’ve come a long way since the days of the KayPro CPM lug-able computer. Lenovo’s Yoga book is thin. See the […]

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by Dwayne Phillips While I sip my morning coffee, I’m using a computer that is somewhere else, run by someone else, and paid for my someone else. I am taking a data science course online. As part of the course, I have some weeks of limited, free time on a machine leaning platform that is […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We give new titles to an old profession. Back in the last decade of the prior century, I met several people at work who had one skill: They could read a product catalog. They would read the catalogs from DEC, Sun, IBM, and even Dell. They would proclaim, “Look what is out […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Regardless of what Excel tells us, significant digits (remember that?) tells us otherwise. Recall something called significant digits from high school math? Consider calculating something with two numbers. One number has two digits while the other number has three digits. The answer can only have two digits. For example, 23 x 123 […]

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