We usually think of the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, … as elements on a straight line that extends infinitely. That is, the relationship between 2 and 3 is the same as between 3 and 4 and so on: they have the same distance between them. In the case of a distance of 1 we might call them neighbours. This perspective focuses on the linearity and additivity of numbers: the linear distance from one number to...

Recently I was curious about a topic in forensic linguistics: a text analysis of different perspectives on the same events. I have not studied forensic linguistics, but I was intrigued by the possibilities that I have come across in science and the media for reconstructing past facts from preserved linguistic data. In particular, I wanted to see how much two witness accounts of a set of events overlap. To do so, I used some very simple...

Recently I decided to practise web-scraping. At the time I was looking into medical NLP. So I thought I would combine the two and collect some medical data. I chose the website for the German edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). It can be thought of as semi-structured online data.

During my time as a student I attended several courses on 3D computer graphics. One of them was on the mathematical basics and their implementation in OpenGL. It was fun to work on my visual imagination and spacial reasoning. After going over linear algebra again, we developed our intuitions about the geometry and trigonometry required for creating some of our own little worlds.

Ever since I was introduced to the sudoku puzzles I enjoyed working on them. It has always been a nice distraction and a good way to practise mental focus. Initially my attempts at solving them were quite random, but over time my solution methods became more systematic. Recently I wanted to see if I could teach a computer to do what I do when confronted with a sudoku puzzle (instead of using a brute force algorithm)....

I decided that beyond HTML, CSS and PHP there is something missing from my experience with web-related programming. I wanted to learn more about JavaScript as well. So I gave myself a challenge. I wanted to program an old puzzle that I received from my parents a long time ago, which was in a plastic form. I had already programmed it in Java which I am a lot more comfortable with.