Major Change of Ideas

Edit: April Fool's. The article completely fails to answer for the benefits of math and science (including medicine and natural disaster prediction). It grossly exaggerates the negative aspects of math and science. Incidentally, math and science have made a large positive difference in my life.

Good morning, everybody! I decided to write a blog post to say that I will be completely changing the way I view knowledge and the purpose of life.

Photo credit: my sister

Basically, "higher" knowledge (including logic, science, mathematics, etc.) is completely useless. There is no point in learning these subjects, which is why I have dropped all my college classes and will not be going to school today.

Instead, we should go to the fields, with a shovel and a rake, and grow crops. I will therefore end my blog and begin life as a worker at a ranch in Wyoming.

5 Methods for Approximating Pi

Happy super-π day! π-day falls on March 14 every year, because the month-day combination results in 3-14, which are the first 3 digits of π. But this π-day is particularly special: include the year, and you get 3-14-15, the first 5 digits of π. We won't get another π-day like this for another 100 years, so you better enjoy this one!

A particularly special time will be at 9:26:53 PM tonight, when we'll get 3-14-15 9:26:53, or the first 10 digits of π.

In honor of the occasion, I'm going to post 5 simple methods for approximating the value of π.

Snowflake Photos

In this post, I'm including some of the photos of snowflakes I've taken over the past few days. As usual, these close-ups were taken using my macro setup. I did not edit the photos in any way.

Nature Wallpaper

I collected 12 of the highest-resolution, best-quality photographs of nature I've taken over the past few years, cropped them to highlight the important parts, and then applied JPEG compression. Now I'm releasing them for my blog readers to enjoy as a desktop background.
To download as a .zip file, click here. Note that the photos shown in this post are low-resolution previews. If you have any questions about the wallpaper, please comment!

Perlin Noise

Today I finished a JavaScript program that will generate random numbers, and then use those numbers to generate Perlin noise.

Perlin noise is like a sort of organic randomness. First I'll explain randomness with regards to computing.