About

Hi, I'm Alex, (aka "Anachronist" and "Axl"). Welcome to my blog. This blog is sporadically updated when I am inspired to write something that involves science or math or other technical subjects.

I make no attempt at mathematical rigor in my posts. Here you'll find empirical explorations and thought experiments.

This blog started in 2010 when I co-founded a start-up, Arcadia Research Labs. My business partner had developed some analysis techniques to extract predictive information from seemingly random time series. We intended to apply the algorithms to medical device data to predict likely future events. Because medical data was so hard to obtain, and financial data was so easy to obtain, we started out using financial data for analysis. We were excited about the potential value in our methods, but the company eventually folded due to internal tensions resulting from the balance of work available for each founder to run the company while maintaining other employment.

While the company was running, I started a mathematics blog on the Joomla-based corporate website. Years later, I discovered that Blogger could be made to work with MathJax, which is needed to display mathematical formulas. Not all themes work with MathJax, apparently. You might find the appearance of this site change as I explore new themes.

Alex Matulich
Mountain View, CA
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmatulich/

Popular posts from this blog

Syncing Office 365 Outlook to Google calendar using Power Automate

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When my employer switched over from the Google office suite to Microsoft's Office 365, it caused unexpected disruption in my family. I had been sharing my work calendar with my wife (sharing no details, just busy times). It became an integral part of her calendar, to help her coordinate (between her job and my job) who picks up and drops off my son from school, and to let her know when I was free to take a phone call during my work day. Since the switchover to O365, my ability to share a calendar externally was eliminated. Based on documentation I could find, it should be possible, but the option doesn't appear in my employer's implementation of Outlook. I can view my personal Google calendar in my work Outlook calendar, but I can't share it the other way. Microsoft's Power Automate provides a way to solve this problem. It lets you create flows of data, triggered manually or automatically by events, to move data around, not only among the Microsoft products but ...
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Whose hands are biggest? You may be surprised.

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A recent project to create an ergonomic handle for 3D printing led me down a path that introduced me to anthropometric measurements of the human hand, which in turn revealed some interesting facts about hand sizes. I had no idea that hand size is dependent on nationality, but I found a number of research articles on this topic. For those who don't want to read further, the answer to the title question is: Based on the data found, Filipino males have the biggest hands, by a significant margin. In fact, the margin is large enough that this population may be considered an outlier from the general human population with respect to hand size. Even Filipina females have larger hands than most males of other nationalities. On the other end of the spectrum, Vietnamese females and Indian females have the smallest hands. Now you can read on for the whole story, or you can skip down to the chart at the end. Idea for a toy My unintentional investigation into hand sizes started while de...
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New approach to screw threads in OpenSCAD

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This is an intellectual exercise with a practical end-result. There are better approaches to this problem, but the approach I describe here is interesting. A screw thread from a stack of discs Imagine a stack of 50 coins, stacked so that each coin is slightly offset from the one below it, with the offset moving around in a circle with each new coin. Here is what it looks like for fifty coins 20 mm in diameter and 0.5 mm thick, offset by 2 mm from a center of rotation, and stacked with a rotation offset of 30 degrees per coin ( click to enlarge any image in this article ): Obviously, this is a spiral stack of coins. But it also approximates screw threads. The thread profile looks like a sinewave rather than the trapezoidal profile of machine screw threads. Indeed, others have observed this, and used the freeware parametric CAD program OpenSCAD to make screw threads by extruding an offset circle while twisting it, as in this model on Thingiverse , for example. From a distan...
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