#Drupal geek and cat lover. Currently employed by WebFirst.
Other interests:
- Music engraving using #Lilypond
- Choral music arrangements and conducting
- Trying to become a less-lame #bassist
- Typography
- Gardening, then forgetting about the garden when the weeds come
- Hiking
- #Cocktails and mixology
Fun fact: I designed four of the fonts available on Google WebFonts. One of them was used almost exclusively for a couple of years by Facebook meme-makers who can't spell.
| GitHub | https://github.com/ossobuffo |
| Drupal.org | https://www.drupal.org/u/daniel_j |
EDIT: Disregard this, invalid test. Iterating 1M times instead of 1k irons out the wrinkles.
Ever wondered whether it's faster to directly cast a variable versus invoke a casting function in PHP?
I wondered, so I wrote a script that calls (bool) $int 1000 times, then invokes boolval($int) 1000 times. It turns out that boolval() is between 15% and 250% faster than an explicit cast.
I'll bet the same is true for intval(), floatval(), and strval().
My employer is hiring for the position of Sr. #Drupal Developer. We operate in the Federal space, so this is a USA-only position. For more details, see here: https://www.webfirst.com/careers/sr-full-stack-drupal-developer
If you like numbers don't just study math - study tuning systems in music! Music theory has cool names for individual numbers, like the 'schisma', which is 32805/32768.
Lots of people say they don't like math because they don't like numbers. In reaction, many mathematicians say that math is not really about numbers. Indeed, I don't spend most of my days messing with numbers: I spend a lot of time thinking about shapes, abstract structures, ideas from physics, and so on.
But some mathematicians *do* love numbers and spend a lot of time on them. I love them as a kind of hobby. The properties of the number 24, for example, are utterly mind-blowing, connecting higher-dimensional spheres to lattices and string theory.
The study of tuning systems offers humbler fun with numbers. If you go up a fifth you multiply the frequency of your sound by 3/2. Do this twelve times and you *almost* go up 7 octaves. But you're off by a factor of
531441/524288 ≈ 1.01346
This is called the 'Pythagorean comma' - a glitch in the Pythagorean tuning system.
There's also a tuning system called 'just intonation', based on simple fractions as shown below. In this setup if you play the sequence C G D A E C you don't get back where you started: you wind up higher by a factor of
81/80 ≈ 1.0125
This is called the 'syntonic comma' - a glitch in just intonation.
In the 6th century, Boethius noticed that these two commas are close but not quite the same - a kind of meta-glitch between glitches! He called their ratio the 'schisma'. It's
(531441/524288)/(81/80) = 32805/32768 ≈ 1.00113
It's also the ratio between 8 justly tuned perfect fifths plus a justly tuned major third and 5 octaves.
I find this fun!
I haven't really talked about my work stuff on here (ok let's be real, I'm more of a lurker than a poster) but today's launch day for us, so might as well spill the beans to all 115 of you...
I co-founded a data privacy startup, and we just released our first product. If you're in tech, or have friends in tech, I'd love your help boosting and even better would love to get your feedback on what we're building (especially if you think it's dumb)!
More at https://phaselab.co/
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John Carlos Baez
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