Category Archives: Fun

Interesting projects.

Musical Scale Modes Table

01 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

Mathematician and educator John Baez has an excellent series of blog posts about music theory. The seventh concerns generating scales by using notes separated by fifths. Shifting the start point generates the seven major scale modes. Shifting the root key generates those seven modes in the twelve keys (a total of 7×12=84 scales).

John asked if any of his readers would be interested in creating that table of all 84 rows. It sounded like — and turned out to be — a fun exercise. This post explores in detail the Python solution I came up with.

Continue reading →

Calculating the Number e (in Python)

10 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

It has been almost a year since my last post here. I haven’t been idle code-wise, but I have been too distracted by Real Life to do any blogging here. My publication rate is way down on my main blog, too.

To get me posting here more, I think I need more of a focus on casually documenting my own little projects rather than Code Wise articles. Those take more work than I seem willing to put in these days. With that in mind, I have some trivial Python fun to share…

Continue reading →

Building a Turing Machine

10 Friday Dec 2021

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

I’m not sure how I got to thinking about Turing Machines (TMs). I was going through some files recently and spent some time looking at busy-beaver.c (from 2017 according to the file date). It contains an implementation of a TM. But something else got me speculating about my own implementation; I just don’t recall what.

I decided to actually write it when it occurred to me that I could use a Python generator to implement the Turing Machine tape. Sadly, I didn’t think of it in time for the trilogy I just published about Python generators (part 1, part 2, part 3).

Continue reading →

A Simple DL Parser

10 Wednesday Nov 2021

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Last time I introduced a general Definition Language (DL) I created for defining structured information. The end goal was an extension of DL, called Data Definition Language (DDL), intended for defining memory and file formats. It was intended for tools that examine that data, allowing them more knowledgeable output than a raw hex dump.

I mentioned that DL has been on my mind lately, and as it turns out I spent the day yesterday writing a DL parser in Python.

Continue reading →

Playing with Polynomials

01 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, ,

I haven’t put nearly the energy into this blog as I have my main blog, Logos Con Carne. My intentions are good, but I never seem to get around to posting here. (It’s certainly not due to lack of interest.)

In an attempt to get more in the habit, I thought I’d write about some simple fun I had recently with a class for calculating polynomials. It was inspired by a lesson from a set of really fun Python tutorial YouTube videos.

Continue reading →

Multiplication Visualized

01 Tuesday Sep 2020

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

On my regular blog I just posted about a Japanese visual multiplication method. It’s a cute trick that ties into the notion of grid multiplication techniques. (In general, multiplication techniques are of some interest due to the Mandelbrot set, which requires multiplying large numbers lots of times.)

It turns out code to generate the patterns was a lot easier than I thought it would be. The hardest part was generating the diagonal summing lines.

Continue reading →

Life With Class

07 Thursday May 2020

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Last time I showed you the functions necessary for Life — for John Conway’s game of Life, that is. We ended up with a set of functions you can use to generate frames of a Life session.

This time I’ll show you an object-oriented version (a Life class) along with some other tweaks to make things look nicer.

Continue reading →