Al Sweigart's blog.
Just a general logo design idea I had, but I really do love the tech scene in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’m not sure if this design is original.
By the way, now that I have your attention, I wrote a free book that teaches complete beginners computer programming by making games: Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python.
UPDATE: Got the shirt in the mail:
“MooseGesture” is a Python module that implements a basic mouse gesture recognition system. It can identify gestures made up of strokes in the eight cardinal and diagonal directions.
A mouse gesture is holding down the mouse button and moving the mouse cursor in a specific pattern to issue a command.
Mouse gestures are a way of dragging with the mouse in order to draw out a certain pattern. The most mainstream uses of mouse gestures in computer software are for web browsers. (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer)
You can download the module (and a simple Pygame test script that uses it) here:
MooseGestures & Test App (zipped)
(The screenshot above shows the test app after entering a mouse gesture. It correctly identifies the gesture as Down Right Up.)
(The above screenshot shows a more complicated gesture: Down, Up, Down, Right, Left, Right.)
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A Good Introduction and a Light Read
“Innumeracy” is at heart a book on the use, misuse, and abuse of statistics and probability that are made by a (unfortunately) large number of people (this reader included). Paulos has managed to make a quick read that is packed with facts and examples of numerical illiteracy.
It would be easy to call this book a sort of Malcolm Gladwell-lite (though it was written well before Gladwell’s entering into the spotlight). It doesn’t even come near 200 pages (even with the book’s large font) and the insights it describes are not original. However, Paulos does a great job bringing several concepts together in a format that is well suited for the general (and usually math-phobic) audience.
On the downside, if you are already familiar with the Gambler’s Fallacy, Bayesian Theory, and how to calculate the combinations of dice rolls or card hands, you might find the book a little too elementary. I’d recommend giving it a quick read anyway: the book is short enough and bound to have a couple things you didn’t know (Von Neumann’s coin flip trick was a favorite one for me).
The book desperately needs to have drawings and diagrams to illustrate the points it makes. Paulos doesn’t waste much ink with needless fluff. But the constant presentation of text-only descriptions of number and probability that make for a dry, even sometimes tedious, read. (His next book, “Beyond Innumeracy”, is reportedly better although I haven’t personally read it yet.) And it’s hard to remember in what chapter or on what page you read a particular factoid or anecdote. An index or a detailed table of contents with sections listed would have been helpful.
All in all, I would recommend John Allen Paulos’s “Innumeracy” as a fun and informative read to anyone, whether they count mathematics as one of their interests or not. Four out of five stars.
Here’s a cipher disk that you can print and cutout to help you manually implement the Caesar Cipher. A program to implement this cipher (and break the cipher) is available in Chapter 14 of the free programming book “Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python” at http://inventwithpython.com/chapter14.html
Simply download and printout the PDF and cut out the two circles and place them on top of each other. The key number is whichever one is opposite the outer “A” letter.
If you would like to change around the font or the logo, you can also download the original Photoshop file.
High resolution PNG files of the inner and outer circles are also available for download.
Click to view the full image:
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