The Monty Hall Paradox

I've been enjoying using Claude, with its new Opus 5.5 model, for writing code. We have come so far already from my early 2023 post, and we are now firmly in the era where software will be written in tandem with an LLM. I haven't used it for any large projects yet, and I'm not sure it's suited for that yet. But for now, it can greatly accelerate my output, allowing me to tackle projects I've long wanted to work on. An example of that is the "The Monty Hall Paradox".

NFL Elo Power Rankings for 2026

It's time for the annual NFL Elo update! The upcoming 2026 season will be my 3rd full season running these Elo power rankings. The new 2026 season power rankings page is now live.

Like last year, during this offseason I've completed a search for a better model, checking for accuracy going back to the 1992 season. I've got more details below.

This season, I will also be submitting the Elo model picks to a straight-up picks pool at nflpickspage.com. Assuming nflpickspage.com is operational for the 2026 season, you'll be able to join for free and compete against the model. It should be fun.

Buenos Aires Constant

Numberphile videos often "nerd snipe" me, and it's happened again. If I had tagging on my posts I'd be able to provide a link here to all my Numberphile-related posts. Maybe someday. I tried to make this Numberphile diversion a super quick one.

The Numberphile video in question here is a few years old. It's titled "2.920050977316", and it introduces the "Buenos Aires Constant," which is a decimal number that generates the sequence of primes.

The video demonstrates using the constant to generate primes, and how to calculate the constant given the primes. What they don't discuss, however, is how many primes can be generated for some number of decimal places. I wanted to find that out, and also to calculate the constant for myself, so I fired up the text editor and wrote some Python code.

Red and Black Knights

Numberphile has recently published a video on YouTube called "Red & Black Knights". The idea is to explore what happens when knights of two factions are placed on a chessboard according to a few simple rules.

I wrote some python code so I could see it in action for myself.

Ascending the Giants

I recently watched an Oregon Public Broadcasting video on YouTube called "The search for Oregon's tallest tree".

This video was originally aired on OPB in October 2017.