Jan 5, 2016
Reappointed to the Howard County Board of Appeals
I am honored to say the Howard County Council reappointed me to the County's Board of Appeals last night. I thank the Council for this remarkable experience and the trust and faith…
Blog
Archive page 43 of 73
Dec 31, 2015
Flood Mitigation Mistakes in Tucson
The Arizona Daily Star has a post about recent flood mitigation measures taken in Tucson, and opens with this: "This is a great Christmas present for 600 property owners," said Tucson City…
Dec 29, 2015
Review on Government-Run Disaster Risk Pools
There's a great review article in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction on the Australian approach to government-run disaster risk pools. The key takeaways are: Get your pricing right, Pricing reflective…
Dec 27, 2015
Phonics is Now on CRAN
You can now download phonics on CRAN. Or just do this: r install.packages("phonics") You will have to compile it. Image by Bruce1ee / Wikimedia.
Dec 25, 2015
A Tyvek Christmas Miracle
A couple of years ago, I bought a roll of Tyvek sheeting for a special project. It was completely the wrong answer for that project, but that's a subject of a different…
Dec 24, 2015
Soundex in Phonics
It's Christmas Eve, I have about eleventy things I need to get done, so I checked out how the yak was doing. I just pushed a new v0.5.1 of Phonics in R…
Dec 23, 2015
Drone Hobbyists Need to Calm Down About Registration
There's been some outrage over the terms of the new Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) drone registry. The key thing is that the registry will make owner's addresses and names available to the…
Dec 22, 2015
Teaching Calculus
I got my contract this evening to teach Calculus I at UMUC. I've taught almost the entire mathematics sequence over the last 5 years. But calculus is new to me. For a…
Dec 17, 2015
Playing fair with Geometry
I was thinking about spherical geometry the other day and discussing other alternative geometric systems via email. We all remember through high school geometry that there are some thing we can prove…
Dec 15, 2015
Volokh Conspiracy on the Maryland State Guard
David Kopel of the Volokh Conspiracy has a nice blog post on the Maryland State Guard. The Maryland State Guard was initially created to provide homeland defense during World War II. From…
Dec 12, 2015
How we externalize other life risks
In my estimate of the costs of gun violence, someone suggests that amortizing the costs across ammunition is not an appropriate solution, giving this example: I doubt just take $9.1 million X…