The Brachistochrone curve (from Greek brachistos, “shortest,” and chronos, “time”) is the path between two points that allows an object to descend under gravity in the shortest possible time. First posed as a challenge by Johann Bernoulli in 1696, this problem spurred breakthroughs in mathematics and physics. The solution—unexpectedly a cycloid rather than a straight […]
Tag: education
Tickling/testing AI emotions
People familiar with Machine Learning and AI in general understand the underlying mechanics of how AI chat works. But to many non-techies, it can seem fantastic, magical, even eerie with their converstational abilities and responses blurring the lines between humans and machines. In this quick and simple converstation log, folks who are mystified with AI, […]
The classic “Two Trains” problem with interactive solution
You may have heard of the classic puzzle: Two trains start from two towns, heading towards each other. One train leaves Town A heading towards Town B at some speed while at the same time, the other train leaves Town B heading towards Town A at another speed. If the distance between the two towns […]
Creating a Fishbone Diagram Like a Pro in Excel
In this post I walk you through all the steps needed to create an amazing Fishbone diagram in Excel, without having to manually draw or paint anything. The steps presented here can be used to create any Fishbone diagram suited for your specific situation. What is a Fishbone Diagram? A fishbone diagram is a commonly […]
Understanding Step Charts (and creating them in Excel, Python)
Step charts are suitable for showing fluctuating or irregular values over time. There’s no built-in Step chart type in Excel, so most people use a Line chart instead, which is not really ideal or sometimes accurate (I’ll explain that below). With proper data shaping, it’s possible to create Step charts in Excel. In this post, […]
Building an at-a-glance holidays timeline
Today, I share the steps required to build an overall holiday calendar timeline in Excel. This allows you to see the entire year’s holidays with different categories (e.g. company holidays, federal, personal vacation, etc.) at a glance without requiring you to navigate month by month to see the events. All the year’s key events can […]
Prisoners of the world
In this post, I touch on a complex and touchy issue of the human society. We look at the prisoners’ population around the world for selected countries, while casting a wide net of diversity. With the data and visualizations presented, we should be able to answer: Which countries have the highest number of prisoners? Which […]
Calculating Playoff Chances
With the NFL regular season winding down after week 15, we have a pretty good idea of which teams are definitely out of the playoff hunt, which teams have clinched a playoff berth, but the rest are still up in the air. In this blog post, I calculate the chances of making the playoff for […]
Plotting ranges of values – Cat metrics
In this purr-fectly delightful blog post, I’ll guide you through steps to meaningfully depict ranges of values in Excel, all the while crafting irresistibly cute charts—no graphic skills needed! You’ll discover a few charts showcasing upper and lower values, Means, and custom markers. Using data such as the lifespans, weights, and prices of different cat […]
Unicode transformation fun
In this post, I share some exercises of encoding a usual string of English/Latin alphabets into a readable Unicode version with styling but still into a text that can be copied/pasted anywhere without any special app, and then transform the input text into some interesting Unicode symbols (that can also be copied/pasted anywhere as text). […]