olsgaard

Thank you for releasing this book. I've just started working with simulations to solve some toy problems I've been pondering, and couldn't solve analytical, so the timing of this post is impeccable!

I've read the first chapter and it is very well written and easy to follow, and the exercises look really good.

I have 2 questions:

1) Are you open reports on minor spelling/grammar mistakes? (There's a missing full-stop on page 6, and on page 4 you write "in the road" instead of "on the road". Really minor things.)

2) Do you consider the current chapters "done"?

About identifying "The Big Question", I have a story from my days as a graduate student, where I failed to do so.

I was asked to help on a project that needed to identify humans in an audio stream. During my literature review, I came across the field of "Voice Activity Detection" or VAD, which concerns itself with identifying where in an audiosignal a human voice / speech is present (as opposed to what the speech is).

I implemented several algorithms from the literature and tested it on the primary tests sets referenced in papers and spend a few months on this until I finally asked myself "What would happen if I gave my algorithm an audiostream of a dog barking?"

The barking was identified as "voice".

As it turns out, the "Big Question" in Voice Activity Detection is not to find human voices (or any voices), but to figure out when to pass on high-fidelity signals from phone calls. So the algorithms tend to only care about audio segments that are background noise and segments that are not background noise.

> There's not that many appealing residential places next to loud, busy roads.

Yes, yes there are. There are countless elevated highways through the middle Shanghai, I believe the highest is an intersection where the roads stacks five levels high - in the middle of the city.

Yeah, that was a brainfart on my end.

What about the multiplied version? That is how I would intuitively understand 2S_2, and I still don't accept that shifting is the same.

In the numberfile video he doesn't explain the way he calculates 2・S_2. He says he shift it, but doesn't explain why that is valid.

    Shifted version:
         1-2+3-4+5-6 ...
           1-2+3-4+5 ...
    sum: 1-1+1-1+1-1 ...
    
    Multiplied version:
         2-4+6-8+10-12 ...

The multiplied version shifts between +(2n) and -(2n). Following the logic that S_1 = 0.5, because that is the average between 0 and 1, I would argue that the multiplied version of S2 should equal 0, as that is the average between a postitive constant and its negative (but the variance is going to be infinite. Doesn't that have a say?).

What if we triple shift?

    Triple shifted version:
         1-2+3-4+5-6+7-8+9 ...
               1-2+3-4+5-6 ...
    sum:     2-3+3-3+3-3+3 ...

Look! now 2・S2 is equal to 2!

No, I didn't know they worked together. I'll have a look!

Honestly, I would say the main advantage is you don't have to learn Emacs.

Emacs is a very polarising environment and there are many programmers for whom it is simply not the right code editor.

What are the major benefits of Rodeo compared to Spyder?

What Jupyter Notebook is missing is a good text/code editor and what good text/code editors are missing is Jupyter Notebook like write and execute.

This is the first example I've seen of the power that using Electron in Atom can give, and it makes me super exited!