Determining the worst winter ever in Chicago:
Chicago can be a cold, miserable place in winter. Have you successfully blocked last winter from your memory? Want to know how it compared with previous winters? And just how bad was the legendary winter of 1978-79?
Here is an evaluation of past winters in Chicago that I made in Python using data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.
And here's a bonus chart I made for my hometown of Minneapolis.
Math resources:
Visualizing pi
Visualizing the derivative of a function
Non-math resources:
UIC Graduate Employee Organization
Bicycle repair and technical info
Some amusing webcomics:
XKCD Comics
Dinosaur Comics
SMBC Comics
Two enlightening (and two not-so-enlightening) videos:
Clifford Stoll on TED
Vi Hart - Doodling in Math Class: Snakes + Graphs
Look Around You - Maths
What you know about math?
My photography:
Open source software:
I am a strong advocate of open source software. There are scores of wonderful free programs made available for download (and for sharing) by devoted and talented programmers. You don't need to buy that newest Adobe software, nor do you need to steal it. Here are some of my favorite free open source software packages:
Firefox - The best web browser on the market. Think: Internet Explorer. (I also recommend Chromium, an open source project started by the Google Chrome team.)
Ubuntu - A surprisingly user-friendly operating system. Think: Windows.
GIMP - A feature-rich raster-based image processor. Think: Photoshop.
LibreOffice - A suite of productivity software for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc. Think: Microsoft Office.
Octave - A high-level programming language and interpreter for numerical computations. Think: Matlab.
Python - A high-level programming language with a large variety of toolkits. I would recommend starting with Anaconda as a package manager.
Bonus: Open source hardware!
