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OPEN

QUESTION

(a blog of existential crises)


Welcome to Open Question! If this is your first time here, head on over to the intro post. This is an ad-free site, and I hope to be able to keep it that way as long as possible. If you're a regular reader and enjoy our content, please consider supporting so we never have to resort to ads to keep things going.

The posts are split between theory discussion and tech tutorials. So whether you're here to read long-winded ramblings or to learn something useful, you'll find something for you. I am an ex-astrophysicist turned developer/data scientist/something, so that should give you some idea of what to look for in the posts here.

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Recent Posts

2022/01/12 - Roll your own static blog engine (Part 1)

As the first tech post here, I figured a natural choice would be a walk through on how I make and host the site itself. There's a bit much to try to cram into one post, so this will be the start of a short series on my development and publishing process.

Read the full post.

2021/10/12 - Tech Introduction

Before I start posting articles for the tech-focused side of the blog, I thought I'd make a quick post about what my plans are here.

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2021/08/25 - Hedge your bets

I can be an . . . opinionated person. My wife often likes to remind me that, before we were married, more than one of my family members warned her that I can be overly stubborn when I think I’m right. And who doesn't think they’re right most of the time? I have the luxury of often being able to spend the time to do some basic research to come up with the "best" answer when forming an opinion. (Vim is the best editor. Fight me.) But what if I’m wrong?

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2021/08/04 - Play the odds

In statistical mechanics, a foundational concept is that the most likely macrostate is the one with the overwhelming majority of consistent microstates. That is a lot to unpack in one sentence if you haven’t had a stat mech course, but the concept ends up being pretty intuitive (bear with some hand-wavy physics for just a moment). A macrostate can be thought of as a measurable quantity of a system, like the air temperature in a room, while a microstate is a specific configuration of components of a system, like the specific positions and velocities of all the molecules of the air in a room.

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2021/08/01 - Who knows?

How much do you know? Consider for a moment the vast amount of information that you've accumulated in your lifetime: the facts and trivia you learned through school and work, your day to day experiences, the memory of your internal thoughts and feelings over the years, what you've read, what you've seen with your own two eyes...

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2021/08/01 - Introduction

Reboot. I made this site a few years ago and never ended up writing anything for it past an introductory post. I've decided to start it up again and see if I actually end up posting this time, so here goes...

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