So an MAA contest problem just led to three sequences, only two of which were published in the OEIS.  Well I submitted them and this morning they were accepted.  They involve graphical representations of permutations.  Links here and here.

I've now done everything I need to do with the OEIS to proceed with the (big, scary) paper I'm writing up ( ( Read more... )

So I attended a class down at Rutgers yesterday.  It's an experimental mathematics course taught in Maple.  Since I'm a python-only kind of guy, it was extremely interesting for me.  I don't have a Net-Id, so I can't access anything off the Rutgers machines.  I popped out my laptop which had both Python and Mathematica on it (but no maple) and ( Read more... )

So I put off writing up the result I desperately need to write up  in order to do a little relaxing maintenance on Hilga.  I figured trying to publish this was stressful enough that I could take a break and do something more fun but work related.  I spent most of the day chasing down a pure typo where a h2t and a t2h got mixed up.  (Even though my ( Read more... )

Spent the day trying to make some small modifications to Hilga.  Turns out that she didn't like them.  "Stop trying to change me!" she cried, but I didn't listen.  Then I tried to give in and just get back to a working relationship between the two of us, but she wouldn't have that either ( Read more... )

   Spent all day optimizing a Slitherlink program I wrote.  It's running much faster now, and just designing better techniques for each of the steps has been tremendous fun and made me think a great deal.  Maybe part of escaping all the rumination is just keeping too busy to think about things ( Read more... )

So I've been using whatever strategies I can to get myself to be more productive.  I know achievements are silly, but as psychologists have shown (and video game companies know) they work really well.  Instead of displaying them in a video game profile I can write about them on LJ (and people can ignore these posts if they want, since they're ( Read more... )