Matthew van Eerde's web log

Raymond Chen explains some common terms for blood relatives of varying distance across cultures in his blog post "What kind of uncle am I?" He links to a diagram on genealogy.com that I felt was lacking something... so here's my version, with consanguinary colors. Red means "marriage is almost certainly legally prohibited." Yellow means "marriage may be legally prohibited - check your region's laws." Green means "marriage is amost certainly legal." Read More...

In his post "A chess problem begging for a solution", Michael Kaplan quotes Barbara Hambly's Star Trek novel Ishmael. In the quoted scene, Spock (AKA Ishmael) plays a couple of chess games against a stranger - rather unusual chess games. The problem alluded to is to determine the moves of the games given certain information. Read More...

There is a general pattern in professional people. We start out idealistic and adventurous, and as disasters inevitably accumulate we become more circumspect and pessimistic. (Pre-emptive snarky response: "you say that like it's a bad thing.") While pessimism Read More...

A full-scale sine wave has an intensity of -3 dB FS. Read More...

Sample WASAPI exclusive-mode event-driven playback app, including the HD Audio alignment dance and a version of the ac3.wav test tone with a "fact" chunk Read More...