Best Buy: A Blogging Resource

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I hope you have noticed the face-lift I have given the blog. I spent many hours wrestling with html within the Google Blogger environment where stuff goes on behind the scenes, thwarting your efforts to use CSS. Fortunately there are many great meta-blogs on using Blogger which provided the solutions every problem I had.

I have 2 pcs, both running Windows XP (!). I use Chrome, myself, and I have IE8 on both machines. Beyond that I have no way to see how my efforts look on any other type of machine (e.g. iPhone, iPad, etc) or browser (Safari). I happened to be in Best Buy picking up some iTunes gift cards (10% off) and of course, couldn't resist checking out the various computers on display.

It occurred to me I could also review my blog's appearance. So I tried everything from smartphones running android and IOS5 through tablets to an iMac with a 27in display. I was pretty happy with the rendering of my static page, and I may add some more of them in the near future. I highly recommend the exercise - go to your nearest big computer store and see how your blog looks to other users!

PS: I apologize to anyone visiting the Boulder Best Buy wondering why every computer in the shop is tuned in to some odd blog they never heard of!

Strata of Monte Carlo

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This will be the final Monte Carlo related post for a while. Good job, really, I can't keep coming up with titles! I am hoping this one will pull together some of the the themes nicely and show a really cool way of implementing MC integrations using a procedure called "stratification".

I wanted to show the process by animating at least one of the charts in this post, but after hours of reading about the R "animation" package and trying to figure out how to use SWFTools, I gave up! If any kind soul wants to help me figure out how to animate a series of charts produced in R, don't hold back! I will put up the R code I used to generate the charts in this post - feel free to download and experiment with it.

In my previous posts, we have seen that
  • The absolute error of an integration depends upon the number of trials
  • The absolute error depends upon the degree to which the integrand fills the space bounding the simulation
  • We have the flexibility to change the size and shape of the space bounding the simulation if it suits us
Stratification makes use of all these ideas.
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