Dan Scott - The Drafting Table (Page 10)

Canada-Wide Science Fair 2015

Fredericton had the honour and the privilege of hosting the Canada-Wide Science Fair / Expo-sciences pancanadienne [http://cwsf.youthscience.ca/] (CWSF/ESPC) this year. I attended last night, and have some thoughts to share in this post. It's open to visitors [http://cwsf.youthscience.ca/visitors-and-media] until noon tomorrow,

Links

Vox Maps

This post is a brief one; I'm sharing links to a site—well, a section of a site—that I find to be an interesting place to pass some time. For most of the articles on Vox.com [http://www.vox.com/], I'm pretty indifferent towards

Water

27 Rivers to Know

Throughout history, rivers have been important for transportation, agriculture, and the economy. Some of the most ancient civilizations have been associated with specific river valleys. Battles and even wars have turned on an army's ability or inability to cross a river in strength. But I find a lot

Water

Understanding ORP

For this post, I'm sharing an infographic I made a while ago as a reference for key oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) ranges in water. Oxidation-Reduction Potential [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduction_potential] (ORP) is analogous to pH, except that it concerns the aqueous activity of electrons instead of

Math

Ticket to Ride's Adjacency Matrix

As promised [https://danbscott.ghost.io/dont-be-bored-game/], here is a post analyzing strategy for a board game: Ticket To Ride [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHmf1bau9xQ]—one of my favourites. Analysis I had fun learning a bit more about graph theory and using it for the calculations in this

New Brunswick

NB Budget 2015 - By the numbers

This is not a political blog, and I have no intention of making it one. However, I believe that it's important for all citizens of this province to be aware of our fiscal situation. I hope this post can serve as a useful summary of what is in

Board Games

Don't be bored, game

This is a brief, general post about board games. In the future, I plan to write some posts about specific board games and their strategies. I've previously written about the game of Go [https://danbscott.ghost.io/degrees-of-go/] that I enjoy playing. But I also enjoy playing other

Review

Orphan Black is almost back!

This post is about what is, in my opinion, the best show currently being filmed in Canada: Orphan Black [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234222/?ref_=nv_sr_1]. Beware of minor spoilers below, but for the most part I've tried to keep this as an overview. The

Computer

Mandelbrot Set in Excel

In my previous post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/7-excel-functions-and-features-to-know/], I promised "something fun with complex numbers in Excel". This is it. The Mandelbrot Set The Mandelbrot Set [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set] is famous as a very visually-appealing fractal. It is based on iteratively applying a

Computer

7 Excel Functions and Features to Know

In this post, I thought I'd share some tools and features in Microsoft Excel that I've come across over the years. This post is not intended as a comprehensive tutorial on any of these features; rather, it can be a starting point for learning more about

Book

Nate Silver Makes My Bracket Picks

Apologies to my readers for not having a post last weekend. I was on the road for my job and had to put blogging on the back burner. My post this week is a review of the book The Signal and the Noise: Why so Many Predictions Fail—but Some

Re-Published

Economic Development Ideas for NB

For this week's post, I wanted to share some ideas about economic development in New Brunswick. Most of them are things I've discussed on Facebook before, and I doubt any of these ideas are original—I just think they're worth promoting. Four Ideas Immigration

Water

2015 Industrial and Commercial Water Reuse Conference

As mentioned in my previous post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/water-quality-profile-along-an-entire-river/], I had the privilege to attend a conference on water reuse in Austin, Texas last week. The travel to get there and home was more "adventurous" than I would have preferred (contributing to the lateness of this

Water

Water Quality Profile Along an Entire River

I previously [https://danbscott.ghost.io/up-the-creek-with-a-paddle/] blogged about an expedition [http://riogrande.texastribune.org/] to travel the entire length of the Rio Grande, by reporter Colin McDonald. That expedition has now come to an end [http://www.texastribune.org/2015/01/27/disappearing-rio-grande-expedition-recap/] , having reached its destination: the Gulf

Infographic

A Taxonomy of Cheese

Cheese is one of my favourite foods. I also like understanding how things are made. So I wanted to share the following infographic I found about different types of cheese. Also, "Cheese Lovers' Day" was this past Tuesday, so this post is kind of timely. Different types

Cities

Pedestrian-Friendly Cities

I like walking, and I like cities. As I write this post, I just got home from a nice walk in my hometown, in fact. This post is just a collection of some random ideas that I've had for ways to make cities more walkable. I can'

History

Cartier, Champlain, Laval, ...

In my previous post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/les-villes-de-lhiver/], I mentioned that I'd share some of what I learned about the history of New France on my brief trip to Québec and Montréal a couple of weeks ago (supplemented with some Wikipedia reading). That's what you&

Travel

Les Villes de l'Hiver

Last week I took a fun little trip to Québec City and Montréal. This post is a chance to share some photos, and suggest some fun things I found to do. Even in the winter, there's plenty to do. Québec City Vieux-Québec is picturesque at any time of

2014 - Year in Review

I started writing this blog early in 2014. Although I haven't always kept to a consistent schedule, I believe I've published a post almost every week. This post is written to wrap up the year, providing a look back (and handy index) to my first year

History

Psalm 107

For this post, I wrote a bit of a Christmas meditation. For next week, I'm planning a Year in Review [https://danbscott.ghost.io/2014-year-in-review/] post. Merry Christmas to all of my readers. Psalm 107 [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+107&version=NLT] may not

Math

Arabic Calligraphy

I recently got a very cool piece of art. So that's what this post is about. First things first, here it is framed and hanging on my wall: The design is Arabic calligraphy of the word al-Hurriyah (الحرية), meaning "freedom" or "liberty". The artist

Tiling

Hilbert Curve

One of my favourite topics in math is fractals. For this post, I drew the Hilbert Curve fractal in octave. The Hilbert Curve [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve] is a space-filling curve: although it is one-dimensional (a series of line segments) itself, it covers a two-dimensional area. I

Yemen

In 2012, I had the opportunity to travel to Yemen for my job (a couple of my photos from that trip are at the end of this post). Since then, that country has held a special interest for me. So one time when I was in The Midtown Scholar [http:

3D Printing

Economics of 3D Printing

This is a discussion on the economics of 3D-printing based on printing the bookend [http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:417703] from my last post [https://danbscott.ghost.io/new-bookshelf/]. As shown below, this part (including auto-generated scaffolding) was approximately 100 grams. The print time was approximately 4.5 hours (plus

3D Printing

New Bookshelf

I recently made a new bookshelf for my room and wanted to share the design. I came up with the design myself. It is built around a single vertical post (a cedar 4x4, 4 feet long) instead of the more common structure where side walls bear the load. Here is