Category Archives: Randomness

A tale of woe that is the annual tax return

Posted on 2010-01-27 by Daniel Tiggemann

Oh, make the hurting stop! Just one simple example; a tiny, innocent looking fragment out of the tax form EÜR (Einnahmenüberschussrechnung nach § 4 Abs. 3 EStG für das Kalenderjahr 2009): Line 5 asks if I closed my business or sold it in 2009. … Continue reading →

Posted in Randomness | 287 Comments

A set of three non-transitive d4 dice (i. e., tetrahedra)

Posted on 2008-08-19 by Daniel Tiggemann

Randomness contains its surprises (take my probably favorite Dilbert cartoon of all times, the accounting department’s random number generator: Are you sure that’s random? That’s the problem with randomness: You can never be sure). One of such surprises is non-transitivity … Continue reading →

Posted in Randomness | 322 Comments

Building a random bettor

Posted on 2008-07-14 by Daniel Tiggemann

For the next season of Fußball-Bundesliga, we’ll use kicktipp for betting on the results, as we have in the previous seasons. This time, we want to introduce additional dummies, ‘Heimsieg’ (home victory) and ‘Zufall’ (randomness), as yardsticks of predictive performance … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Randomness, Soccer | 338 Comments

Automatic type coercion sucks!

Posted on 2008-05-25 by Daniel Tiggemann

By trying to make your life simpler, JavaScript makes your life really hard. This snippet meant one hour of debugging: var w = canvas.getAttribute(‘width’); var neighb = [ -1, 1, w, -w ]; Looks innocent enough, n’est-ce pas? Unfortunately, canvas.getAttribute() … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Randomness | 246 Comments