Personal blog. I write about what I learn as I am learning it

The Millionaire next door (book review)

I finally finished reading “The Millionaire Next Door” by Thomas Stanley and William Danko. Early this summer at a garage sale in my neighborhood I got a copy of the first original edition from 1996:

And I say “finally finished” because it was hard to go through it, I was a bit disappointed but I still got a few good things out of it (details towards the end). Continue reading “The Millionaire next door (book review)”

Hall’s Marriage Theorem Meets the DraftKings Entry Form

This is the last post in my accidental Fourier-Motzkin trilogy (part one: the method; part two: the baseball lineups), and it’s about the bill coming due. Because when you use elimination to throw variables out of a model, the mathematics is very clear about what you keep — and very quiet about what you lose. I found out exactly what I’d lost the first time DraftKings rejected a lineup my spreadsheet swore was legal. The story runs straight through a beautiful piece of combinatorics called Hall’s marriage theorem, so we’ll pick that up along the way.

A neural network approach to college football rankings

The usual image of an artificial neural network:

Single-layer feedforward artificial neural network diagram

What follows is a paper that I wrote in the Spring of 2001 for an “Introduction to Neural Networks” class that I took as part of my Master’s degree. It is mostly a review of someone else’s paper on the subject, except that I wrote the network in Excel and ran it on that year’s football season games. Fun, fun.

A Fourier-Motzkin Elimination Example: DraftKings Lineups

In my last post about Fourier-Motzkin elimination I promised a real example involving baseball, and I keep my promises. This is the story of how a dusty 19th-century math trick ended up picking my daily fantasy lineups — and how I stumbled into a genuine Fourier-Motzkin elimination example without fully realizing that’s what I was doing until much later.

Continue reading “A Fourier-Motzkin Elimination Example: DraftKings Lineups”

Your money or your life (book review)

Just finished reading “Your Money or Your Life” (1992), by Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin:

I first heard of the book last year from the Mr. Money Mustache site and then from many other sources in the financial independence movement. It turns out 2017 is the 25th! anniversary of the book and the authors had been organizing seminaries and workshops for years before the book, so this “thing” has been going on for a long time.