Sunday, December 31, 2017

Published December 31, 2017 by with 1 comment

How Much Should You Invest To Create Your Own Pension?

The concept of a pension fascinates me since it would be great to have your investments pay your living expenses while you work wherever you want without worrying about a salary. I've created a calculator here that allows you to figure out the numbers you need to create your own pension plan.

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Friday, December 29, 2017

Published December 29, 2017 by with 1 comment

Are Annuities A Scam?

In multiple conversations with different people I've realized that they don't quite understand how annuities work and why they seem too good to be true, so I figured I'd explain a tricky one with an example.

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Friday, December 22, 2017

Published December 22, 2017 by with 3 comments

What Is The Best Time To Post To Reddit?

I was curious if time of day affects the likelihood of your post doing well or being ignored so I ran some data to see if I could spot any trends.
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Tuesday, December 19, 2017

Published December 19, 2017 by with 1 comment

How Do I Do Fast Bilinear Interpolation In Matlab When Interp2 Is Slow?

In working on CityProjections, I have to do bilinear interpolation constantly. Is there a fast way to do it in MATLAB?


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Thursday, December 7, 2017

Published December 07, 2017 by with 0 comment

How Long Does It Take To Double Your Money With An Investment If You Include Inflation?

In a previous post, I worked through why dividing 72 by your interest rate approximates your doubling time in years.
inflation adjusted yield
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Wednesday, November 22, 2017

Published November 22, 2017 by with 1 comment

How Do You Make A Plot With Custom Background Colors, Two Y Axes, Custom Opacity, Custom Gridlines, And More In MATLAB?

I had an idea for a plot recently, and it took a bit of tinkering to get it to look right in MATLAB so I figured I'd post a tutorial.


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Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Published November 14, 2017 by with 1 comment

How Do You Make Dynamic Tooltips In Tableau Public And Update Them Based On Your Data?

In some of my posts, I have tooltips that adapt to the data you are hovering over and I figured I'd type up a quick tutorial on how I do that.
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Friday, October 13, 2017

Published October 13, 2017 by with 1 comment

Why Do ODE Solvers Go To Infinity Or Zero For Simple Harmonic Oscillators?

If you work with an ODE solver (often called something like ODE45), you might notice that the solutions tend towards zero or infinity after sufficient iterations if you are solving the simple harmonic oscillator problem. Here's why...
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Monday, July 31, 2017

Published July 31, 2017 by with 0 comment

How Do I Make A Simple Climate Model From Scratch

I wanted to make a simple climate model from scratch, so I took some of the data that's available and created one. I've written up the process in detail here for anyone who wants to do something similar and have created a simple tool using this that you can play with here. Note that I am cross-posting this from another website I run called CityProjections since it fit with the theme of this blog.

Global warming temperature projection with Paris agreement

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Monday, July 17, 2017

Published July 17, 2017 by with 0 comment

Which Candidates Were Most Talked About On /r/politics in the 2016 Election Cycle?

https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/ is a politics subreddit, and I thought it might be fun to estimate the relative share of the news cycle each candidate took up there this past election season. Spoiler before I start:



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Saturday, July 15, 2017

Published July 15, 2017 by with 20 comments

What Languages Are Most Popular On /r/dataisbeautiful?

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/ is a subreddit where people make graphs of various things, and I was curious what languages/tools are most popular there so I tried a crude estimation and it worked out reasonably well. Here's the spoilers before I start:


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Sunday, July 2, 2017

Published July 02, 2017 by with 1 comment

How Do I Create A Blogger Template From Scratch?

I've done this a few times and it's actually much easier than it might seem. An example of a real site I maintain that I did this with is CityProjections. Most of the site is hosted on hostgator and I use blogger for the blog on it because I was too lazy to write my own content management system and I like blogger more than wordpress. Maybe interesting to note that I'm actually using a default template for the page you're viewing right now. I've switched to a custom template since writing this article.
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Published July 02, 2017 by with 2 comments

How Do I Change A DataGrid Cell's Background Color Based On Its Value With MVVM In C#?

Another thing I needed to do but couldn't find a great description of through googling...
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Friday, June 30, 2017

Published June 30, 2017 by with 1 comment

How Do I Make A Datagrid With Checkboxes and a 'Select All' Header Using MVVM in C#?

I needed to do this recently and didn't find any tutorials when I googled, so I figured I'd make one for the next person who googles it...
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