Category: Maths
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EV snow’d tripping
Adventures with EVs often involve big mountain climbs, which consume additional energy, impacting range. I recently had the opportunity to drive climbs from Bright to Omeo and back via Mt Hotham, in Gunaikurnai and Taungurung country, and get a sense for how EVs handle hills. I collected efficiency data for each leg of a road…
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EV adventuring with resilience
Road trips are the most demanding EV scenario currently in Australia, especially to remote destinations. However, a little planning shows that they are still quite doable. Did the plans survive contact with reality? Mostly. In short, it was a pleasure to drive an EV long distances and the only inconvenience was faulty public charging infrastructure.…
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EV adventuring
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are great for weekend adventures and more. In Australia in 2024, it still requires a little extra planning, but many adventures are achievable with that little extra, and as infrastructure continues to improve, there will be ever less transport planning for ever more adventuring! For the time being, I’ll run you through…
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Privacy puzzles
I contributed a database reconstruction attack demonstration to the book Practical Data Privacy by my colleague Katharine Jarmul. While we might think anonymous summary data is safe to share, this attack demonstrates it’s possible to dramatically reduce the search space for re-identification, in this case from half a trillion quadrillion possibilities to just one! My…
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Maths Whimsy with Python
At PyCon AU 2023 in Adelaide I delivered a talk titled Maths Whimsy with Python. It was a great chance to review a range of projects small and large I’ve already shared here. Check out the slides and video. In three years of the maths whimsy repo, I’ve covered a lot of ground, and got…
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Electrifying the world with AI Augmented decision-making
I wrote an article about optimising the design of EV charging networks. It’s a story of work done by a team at Thoughtworks, demonstrating the potential of AI augmented decision-making (including some cool optimisation techniques), in this rapidly evolving but durably important space. We were able to thread together these many [business problem, AI techniques,…
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A coding saga with Bard
Though but a footnote in the epic of coding with AI, I though it worth musing on my recent experience with Bard. Bard currently uses the LaMDA model, which is capable of generating code, but not optimised for it. The story might be different with Codey as protagonist (or is that antagonist?) I didn’t produce…
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Smarter Semantle Solvers
A little smarter, anyway. I didn’t expect to pick this up again, but when I occasionally run the first generation solvers online, I’m often equal parts amused and frustrated by rare words thrown up that delay the solution – from amethystine to zigging. The solvers used the first idea that worked; can we make some…
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I did it my way – hand-rolled navigation with open spatial data
Sure commercial maps app directions are great, but have you ever found the customisation options limited? What if you want to use bike paths and back streets when cycling, or avoid winding roads that might make backseat passengers car-sick on a road trip? The paved route OpenStreetMap and OpenRouteService do provide this type of functionality,…
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End-to-end simulation hello world!
I’ve talked to many people about how to maximise the utility of a simulator for business decision-making, rather than focussing on the fidelity of reproducing real phenomena. This generally means delivering a custom simulator project lean, in thin, vertical, end-to-end slices. This approach maximises putting learning into action and minimises risk carried forward. For practitioners,…