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Degrees of Separation
When talking about God, I’m not so certain that we have a great understanding of what we can and cannot say properly, or what we can and cannot understand properly.
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Time in Ruby and ActiveRecord
How does the Ruby
Continue reading …Timeclass relate to the ActiveRecordtimecolumn type? -
Typecasting in Ruby and Rails
I recently had the need to typecast string values passed as query parameters to a controller action to their appropriate type. In solving this problem, I've learned a lot about Rails' typecasting layer, Ruby's typecasting methods, as well as a handful of edge cases. The result was a typecasting function that I think has a lot to offer.
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Encoding the Logic of Sets: More on Sets as Procedures
How can procedures be used to encode the logic of both infinite and finite sets?
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Initial Thoughts on Infinite Sets and Procedures
Is modern mathematics built on a logical fallacy? How ought we to understand infinite sets? What's a procedure? I'm starting to explore these topics as I think through the mathematics and logic of infinity.
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Introducing: Togglicons
Togglicons offers a single SCSS mixin for bringing customizable toggling icons into your web application.
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A Simple Tree Building Algorithm
It is, unfortunately, not that often that I get the opportunity to devise an algorithm to solve a problem at work. Most work simply doesn’t require that kind of thinking. But I thoroughly enjoy that kind of thinking, and thus thoroughly enjoyed the most recent opportunity I had to employ it. The problem was simple (though I have simplified and abstracted it for this post as well): we have a database table of
Continue reading …things, and thesethingshave a parent-child hierarchy, and we need to display a tree of thesethingsin our UI. So, let’s dig in. -
Communication is Hard
Communication is hard. I have found myself contemplating this truth a lot lately. At work it has become a kind of mantra on my team. Have you ever taken the proverbial step back to consider what all is involved in communicating with another human being? We have these thoughts, often messy, squishy, and loosely formed, which we attempt to shuttle from our mind into someone else’s mind (let alone a group of other minds). In order to get these nearly amorphous ideas out of our heads and into another, we package them up in words. We quiver these small muscles in our throats or we engage our wrists and fingers to hammer out some collection of runes or we sometimes even drag our hands across tree pulp scrawling out an even cruder form of these same symbols. There is no inherent connection between the etherial thoughts in our minds and these vibrations in the air or scribbles on a surface; there is nothing that guarantees this representation, whatever physical form it takes, properly encodes our thoughts. In fact, it is impossible for me to imagine that words could ever fully encode thought. But that is only half of it.
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1 = 0.9999...
In mathematics it is proven that
Continue reading …1 = 0.9999.... How is this so? But more importantly, in understanding how and why this is true, what can we glean about the nature of paradoxes? Let's explore. -
An Example of an ERB Component
An example of building an "ERB component", that is, an ERB partial that has ansome flexibility around their HTML output articulated via an interface in the
Continue reading …rendercall.