The illustration shows the Earth-Moon system to scale, with the same scale used for size and distance. The diameter of the Earth is 12742 km, while the diameter of the Moon is 3475 km. So, to draw the Earth-Moon system to scale on a screen, each…

I’ve had it with science and plan to convert this site to be completely about astrology. Astrology (as Wikipedia puts it: “Not to be confused with Astronomy.”) is a shortcut to the truth. After all, if the truth is in the stars (“De Trut Is Uit Daar” as we paraphrase the tagline from The X-Files in Dutch), gathering and analyzing data…

Today is 3/14 in month/day notation, and \(\pi\approx 3.14\). My daughter Noor (8) and I felt like releasing yet another image of \(\pi\) into the world, in addition to all the existing images. We made this using Hama beads. Today is a good occasion…

The animation demonstrates the looming effect that you get when something (a motorbike in this case) approaches you at a constant speed. At first nothing seems to happen, but then the bike suddenly jumps into view. A general explanation of this dangerous effect that often causes motorbikes to be missed by other drivers is…

Happy Valentine’s Day! I might not be very romantic, but I had to do something with it. Imaging the heart is an important application of tomography and other techniques in medical imaging. Since hearts are everywhere on Valentine’s Day, let’s scan one. This article builds on…

This colorful bubble chart is a simple way of freshening up your CV by adding the time dimension to your skill list. A simple list has relatively little value, since it doesn’t indicate the importance of each skill. This can be improved by including an estimate of its strength. To do this, you could simply add the number of years of experience, but I propose to go a bit further…

All the standard caching options of my Drupal 7 site are enabled. I expected those mechanisms to ensure that the access to a cached page would always be quick, both for human visitors and for web spiders like Googlebot. However, for a small site, this is not so. The Drupal caching mechanism does not work as you might expect. For me, there is a clear difference between…

We all have to look things up once in a while, and I can tell you right now that Wikipedia is the best source for practical information on mathematics. But, there are some others out there that are also worth knowing. Most of these sites are encyclopedic, and not meant for browsing top down, so I’ve used the entry for eigenvector as an example for…

I was going to call this article War on Spam. But, given how well my experiments went, I had to retitle it Skirmish with Spam. Lately, the number of spam attempts has risen so much that even Mollom lets through enough spam to get me a bit miffed. So, I decided to go “old school”… I was going to add math problems of increasing difficulty until…

The first three articles on tomography focused on analytic techniques, in which the reconstruction problem is attacked using mathematical analysis. When the step to real world scanners is made, the problem is discretized. Both the projections and the reconstruction area are divided into pixels, and a numerical approximation of the true mathematical technique is introduced. The algebraic techniques assume…