An entirely skippable preface (Seriously, we don’t start building it until the third section.) While going through some of my dustier folders on a flight to Hawaii I came across . It’s a lovely book with plenty of inspiration for simple demos; perfect plane material. After working through a few chapters, I moved my particle system and canvas logic into their own util.js file. Until then i’d been creating a new HTML file for each demo, manually adding the title, script includes, and next/previous links. This meant that I had to edit each file to include util.js. It was a frustrating amount of overhead considering each demo only took a few minutes to write. didn’t someone…

Today we hiked the Kalalau Trail and swam beneath the cold spray of a waterfall. Today we discussed the finer points of the axolotl protocol used by TextSecure. Today we delighted in “shave ice”, a local delicacy that is definitely not a snow cone. Today we wrote copy, polished features, closed bugs, and merged pull-requests. Measured by lines of code, today was short. Measured by steps taken, it was tall. Measured by ideas discussed, things learned, and sights seen, it was towering. For the past week and a half I’ve been trapped on an island among a team of brilliant hackers. A curious duality exists on the island. At sunrise, stand…

There’s something magical about a procedure that just works. Even if you don’t understand why it works, having a set of steps that will always get you to the same destination feels nice. In life there are few patterns that consistently produce the same outcome. But in math? Hoo boy… This post takes us through two very simple procedures that converge to a numerical endpoint. We’re going to graph the amount of time it takes to reach this endpoint, which actually ends up being quite pretty. Careful; such routines can be somewhat of a rabbit hole. As xkcd’s Randall Munroe puts it, The Collatz Conjecture states that if you pick a number, and if it’s even divide it by two and if it’s odd…