Index: Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward
A complete index of posts from Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward.
Introduction
The posts here on Maximum Effort, Minimum Reward fall roughly into these four categories:
Math & Physics, my formal training, and area of expertise
Code & Programming, which I enjoy but am continually confused by
Language, with a particular love of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs
History, my favorite subject I was never any good at
Math & Physics
Physics
The Tyranny of the Wagon Equation — Pre-Gunpowder Military Logistics and the Minimum Donkey Rate: A mathematical extension to ACOUP's recent blog post on military logistics
Dungeons & Dragons, Peasant Accelerators, and Inertial Confinement Fusion: Mixing Real-World and D&D Physics for Fun, Profit, and Nuclear Power Sources
How to Fail at Amazon Interviews with Calculus of Variations: Doing a lot of complicated math to avoid a trick question, and an inadvertent tutorial on variational calculus
An Addendum to "How to Fail at Amazon Interviews with Calculus of Variations": Extension of the Euler-Lagrange equations to higher derivatives
Six-Star Textbooks on a One to Five Scale — A List: Most textbooks aren't great. These are the select few I consider triumphs of pedagogy.
The Young Pedant's Guide to the Greek Alphabet and Acceptable Variable Nomenclature: Never use upsilon, and other inviolable rules.
How to Season A Wok & Thin-Film Interference: Why do heated woks turn blue? I asked ChatGPT, but it's still not great at physics.
A Lukewarm Defense of Imperial Units: In which I defend the use of Fahrenheit over Celsius, sort of defend inches and feet, and make a halfhearted attempt at explaining why I like cups as a unit of volume.
Guinea Pigs are Fermions -- Part 1: Part 1 of a series exploring the quantum mechanics of guinea pigs, with a short digression into creation and annihilation operators and their uses in guinea pig quantum mechanics. Part 1 of a series exploring the quantum mechanics of guinea pigs, with a short digression into creation and annihilation operators and their uses in guinea pig quantum mechanics.
The Devil and the Cerulean Sweater: The Devil Wears Prada, Anne Hathaway's cerulean sweater, Rayleigh scattering, and and extraterrestrial solar spectra. Who is right, Dylan or Meryl Streep?
Statistics
A Statistical Analysis of Sniffing in the Wheel of Time: Why do all of Robert Jordan's female characters "sniff" so much?
A Terrible Statistical Analysis of Pass the Pigs: Optimal Play of “Pass the Pigs,” in which I roll a plastic pig die 574 times.
Data Through the Looking Glass — Part 1: An introduction, and the Three Commandments of Good Data Analysis
Scaling Problems in Social Control: In which I discuss Reddit engagement statistics, angry moderators, Dunbar's number, and dive headfirst into pseudoscience.
Code & Programming
Voltorb Flip
Part 1: The Rules of the Voltorb Flip and the Limits of Determinism.
Part 2: Prior Art, some Python code, and a Heuristic Algorithm that beats the previous literature!
Part 2.5: Significance testing.
Part 3: In which I learn that Tesseract is difficult to use, and build the least robust OCR engine ever.
Part 4: Building a Better Board, Decision Trees, Optimality, and a Retrospective
Part 5: Reinforcement Learning and Optimality Testing by a Guest Author, blaine141!
Machine Learning & ChatGPT
I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language: In which ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people
Is A Hot Dog A Sandwich? Defining the Sandwich with Unsupervised Learning: A Classification of Dough-Wrapped Meats, and a Rigorous Answer to the Hot Dog Problem
Elizabeth Bennet and Sennacherib, Destroyer of Babylon: A fanfiction written by GPTchat, with some guidance from me.
Language
Ancient Egyptian
Ancient Egyptian and Emoji Chain Letters: the near exact mapping between an ancient language and the dirty chain letters my friend sends me.
Ancient Alien Linguistics, The Pyramids, and Radio Antennas: In which I discuss the incredible effort put into making Stargate's Egyptian/Alien thesis historically accurate, and William Shatner exposes the true nature of the Great Pyramid as an RF antenna
An Offering for the Dead: A Short Tutorial on Reading Ancient Egyptian
Famous Opening Lines in Literature: Translated into Middle Egyptian, for practice, then back to English, for humor
Spoken Egyptian in Age of Mythology: In which I attempt to translate the Ancient Egyptian spoken by the units in a real-time strategy game.
Indo-European
A Brief History of Dik: Indo-European Linguistics and Counting Rhymes, or, Dik + Pimp = Bumfit
The Pig-Pork Transformation — Class Divisions in Medieval and Modern English: In which I attempt to explain this twice, once with only Germanic words, and once with only Latinate words.
History
The Great Kings of Assyria Reply to Spam Texts: Royal titulary, badass introductions, and how to irritate spambots
The Great Kings of Assyria Reply to More Spam Texts: Ashurnasirpal II meets his soulmate!
The Great Kings of Assyria Reply to Yet More Spam Texts: A continuation of my ongoing efforts to frustrate and annoy spam texters with the help of the greatest Assyrian monarchs.
The Sibylline Oracles and the Last King of Rome: Never haggle with a prophetess. The story of Tarquinius Superbus and the Cumaean Sibyl, and the real history behind it.
Minutiae from the Ancient World: Ancient customer reviews, raunchy graffiti, grisly records of torture, and actually valid pregnancy tests. The Ancient World has it all!
Inspirational Quotes from My Personal Heroes: No, really! Sort of!
The Evolution of the Alphabet: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs through the Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic alphabets. And my own secret alphabet, just for fun.
Top 16 History-Adjacent Podcasts of 2023: Are list-based articles even allowed anymore or did Buzzfeed already beat that horse to death?
Bookmarks Bin
Bookmarks Bin, Sept 2023.