What I'm up to this week (April 2, 2017)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Manly_1919_Fig_135_Fordson_clutch_trans_rear.png
The next week or two might involve shifting gears a bit. In my constant biting off more than I can chew and impulsively buying new books, I've gotten the idea in my head to do my own implementation of "unums" (universal numbers) in Fortran. If I'm being honest, I'm more interested in that idea at the moment than gerrymandering, and so that topic is looking like it'll take a back seat. I'm choosing to go this route for a number of reasons beyond just finding it more interesting. First, it would give me a good chance to develop something from scratch in Fortran, instead of just analyzing examples. Second, I don't think I've seen an implementation in a lower level language before (although I have seen ones for Julia and Python) so there might be an advantage for speed that would allow more experimentation. And lastly, unums are supposed to have some interesting capabilities, so I'd like to test some of those out, and perhaps even port the Fortran code over to Julia or Python to experiment with that process.
This all makes my list for the week:
- Finish Introduction to Programming with Fortran. I finished my review for Part 2 this week, and I'm about a third of the way through the remaining material, so hopefully that won't be too much of a stretch. Ideally I'll do both a Part 3 review and an overall review, but we'll see what I have patience for.
- Finish Probably approximately correct. This has been dragging on and I just want to get it out of the way so I can not be distracted by it.
- There's also the project I mentioned that a friend of mine wants to work on, so I may put some more time into that as well and learn some SQL.
I would still like to do the Fortran post in the future, if for no other reason than that I believe the language has been a bit unfairly maligned and many of the criticisms I see for it online don't make sense if you're talking about modern Fortran. I'm also waiting to hear back on a lead about some potentially interesting software, so we'll see what comes of that.
A lot of different things going on, but I guess the best way to have a successful idea is to just have a lot of ideas generally.