In the past couple weeks, I’ve shown you how to use machine learning to improve the efficiency of road trips all over the world, including the U.S., Europe, and South America. In this post, I’d like to show you how we can use the exact same algorithm to optimize walking tours in large cities. If …
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been computing optimal road trips across the U.S. and Europe. This time, as a shout-out to my current home state, I made a road trip around Michigan. With the snow melting and a warm summer right around the corner, it’s about time we start planning our summer fun. If …
[This is another crosspost from the Digital Scholarship Collaborative Sandbox blog from the MSU Libraries. The original blog post can be read there.] In my earlier post “Digital Collections and Accessibility”, I touched upon the considerations we would need to address when building or creating digital collections (or other things that rely heavily on utilizing …
As a follow-up to my post about computing optimal road trips across the U.S., I thought it’d be fun to make a road trip map for Europe as well. If you’d like to get into the nitty-gritty of how these road trips are created, check out the first post. Europe is a massive continent with …
Last week, Tracy Staedter from Discovery News proposed an interesting idea to me: Why not use the same algorithm from my Where’s Waldo article to compute the optimal road trip across every state in the U.S.? Visiting every U.S. state has long been on my bucket list, so I jumped on the opportunity and opened …
A couple years ago, I wrote an article using massive data set of reddit posts to tackle one of the more popular questions about reddit: How do I get a highly-upvoted post on reddit? In light of the recent findings that half of all reddit posts go ignored, this question is more important than ever. …
As a long-time fan of Saturday Night Live, I have fond memories of the Pat sketch where Pat’s friends were always trying to figure out his/her gender through a series of hilarious indirect tests. Despite their every effort — from asking Pat which bathroom he/she uses to asking about love interests — Pat’s friends could never figure …
Earlier this week, Google announced that Psy’s insanely viral YouTube music video, Gangnam Style, officially broke the 2,147,483,647 view barrier. What’s significant about that number, you ask? That’s the largest number that can be encoded by a 32-bit integer number. The folks at Google never suspected a video would exceed 2 billion views until Gangnam …
Ah, the Roman Empire. One of the greatest empires to conquer the known world of ancient Europe. At its height, every man desired to sit on the throne, making the Roman Emperor one of the more precarious roles in ancient history. We always hear about the greatest and worst Emperors — Caesar Augustus and Caligula, …
Florida State and Alabama have been dethroned. Several crowd favorites are struggling to stay in the top 25 (bye bye, Tigers!). And now the upstart Mississippi State Bulldogs — who weren’t ranked at the start of the season and have never won a national championship — are ranked #1 in the national polls. It’s no …