What's New

What are fair dice?

If you like games, you’ve probably played games with dice, and you’ve probably thought about fair and unfair dice.

You might have seen “trick dice” advertised in the back of a comic book, for instance, or you might have flipped a string of heads on a coin and thought your way into the Gambler’s Fallacy or an instinctive Bayesian sense that the coin is biased towards heads.

If you have studied statistics, you’ve encountered more mathematical ways to treat these human observational instinct read more...

New overview video of the Die Roller

Thought I should post an update to the Die Roller project. It’s getting kind of useful and a lot of fun! If, you know, you’re into those sorts of things - games, statistics, computer vision, mechatronics, Fig Newtons.

http://youtu.be/FVWqVM4xyRU

3D-printed burr puzzle

Burr puzzle, assembled

I read Scientific American religiously as a child. Sometime around 1980, in Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column, he reprinted a woodcut from an 1893 book called Puzzles Old And New by one Professor Hoffman. The illustration showed the pieces and assembled form of what Hoffman called the “Nut” puzzle, and Gardner explained that there were many variations of this puzzle.

I was fascinated, and wanted to see how it worked. So I made one out of balsa wood, and solved it. read more...

Parasites

Clara and I wrote and recorded this for the Fall Creek Elementary School Talent Show, and she lip synced it with friends Ava, Clare, Grace, Nuala, and Tivona. It's a parody of "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz - see the (child-inappropriate) video on YouTube. I think it has to do with the similarities between the two most virulent parasites of childhood: pediculosis and Top 40 radio earworms.

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Die Roller is rolling

http://youtu.be/fHL1VMb2SS0

It rolls a die, controlled by USB. It’s not done yet.

Working on this project makes me hungry for some reason.