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TomRoelandts.com in 2020

2020 was a really quiet year on this blog, with a grand total of four articles posted… I’ve been working full-time (and sometimes a bit more) in my consulting business, and the time to write blog posts often eluded me. Instead of going over the…

Tom Sat, 01/02/2021 - 14:35

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Why Are Leap Years Needed?

A year is the time that it takes the Earth to complete one revolution around the Sun. You might think that a day is the time that it takes the Earth to complete one rotation of 360 degrees, but that isn’t true. A full 360 degrees rotation takes only about…

Tom Sat, 02/29/2020 - 09:54

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Langton's Ant

Langton's ant

Say that you have an ant that lives on an infinite plain with tiles that can be either black or white. The ant can move in the four main directions, and it keeps moving indefinitely, according to the following two simple rules…

Tom Mon, 04/29/2019 - 09:57
This Person Does Not Exist

Persons that don't exist.

The image below shows eight faces that were generated through a machine learning technique called a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The faces are completely artificial, and do not correspond to…

Tom Tue, 03/05/2019 - 16:50

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TomRoelandts.com in 2018

This article is a wrap-up of what happened on TomRoelandts.com in 2018.

Tom Thu, 01/03/2019 - 13:56

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TomRoelandts.com in 2017

This article is a wrap-up of what happened on TomRoelandts.com in 2017.

Tom Sun, 12/31/2017 - 15:42

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Randomness Explains Flat Tire Anecdotes Perfectly Well

Figure 2. First five simulated periods of 30 years.

Flat tires are random events. However, it seems that the human mind expects random events to be more regular than they actually are. This intuition on randomness might lead to the feeling that your own experience is somehow unexpected or strange, with anecdotes such as “my uncle seems to never have any flats, but my sister had three in the last year alone”. This is related…

Tom Sun, 01/22/2017 - 13:09

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