Blog

📚 "Speak Friend and Decode: How 8-Year-Old Me Cracked the Moon Runes Before Second Breakfast"
When I was eight years old, I received my very own copy of The Hobbit. I opened the cover, and there was a treasure map! A real map, right there in my new book! I was hooked from the very first moment.
Read more

🖥️ "Progress Bars in Python: A Complete Guide with Examples"
Learn how to create Python progress bars using tqdm, progressbar2, alive-progress, and Tkinter, with best practices for better UX and app performance.
Read more

📚 "How I Met Bilbo Baggins And What I Found In His Hobbit Hole."
I first met Bilbo Baggins when I was eight years old.

I grew up in Midwestern America in the early ’70s on a farm about ten miles from the nearest small town. We had electricity, running water, and basic comforts, but we lived in a manner that today we would call mostly off the grid. We grew a significant part of our food in two huge gardens, raised livestock, and relied on ourselves for most of what we needed. We had dogs and horses, and a motley crew of feral cats that hung out in the barn.

I spent a lot of time by myself. It was quiet, peaceful, even idyllic, but also, at times, a little lonely...
Read more

🖥️ 📐 “Fractals in Code: Exploring the Mandelbrot Set with Python”
In the 1990s, I was a young Gen Xer. Pearl Jam filled the air with "Jeremy." The X-Files convinced us the truth was out there. Fractals were everywhere you looked. You saw them on posters, TV, screensavers, and in the latest Star Trek movie.
Read more

🖥️ "Git Remotes: A Complete Guide with Examples"
Learn about Git remotes, their purpose, and how to use them for version control in your project. Includes practical examples.

Git is a popular version control system (VCS) used in software development to track changes to files over time. It facilitates collaboration by allowing developers to work simultaneously without overwriting each other's contributions. Because all developers maintain complete local copies of the project's history, individuals can work independently offline and safely merge their changes when ready. A remote repository, or remote, is a version of yor Git project that's hosted in the cloud through an online hosting service such as GitHub or BitBucket.
Read more

🖥️ 📐 "Sklearn Linear Regression: A Complete Guide with Examples"
Linear regression is a fundamental technique in statistics and machine learning that helps model the relationship between variables. In simple terms, it allows us to predict an outcome based on one or more influencing factors. It is widely applied in real estate pricing, sales forecasting, risk assessment, and many other fields.

In this tutorial, we'll explore linear regression in scikit-learn, covering how it works, why it's useful, and how to implement it using scikit-learn. By the end, you'll be able to build and evaluate a linear regression model to make data-driven predictions.
Read more

🎤 I'm on a podcast! (Podcast, EDRM Illumination Zone)
"Dr. Mark Pedigo, a PhD data scientist, sits down with Kaylee & Mary to talk about his journey to data science, the life and death problems he has addressed using data science, including a study of mothers and infants in Mississippi, and another diving into data about opioid prescribing providers. Mark talked about his first programming job for an educational software company, where he evaluated the quality of burps to add to a game..."
Listen to the podcast

🖥️ 📐 “Exploring Julia Sets with Python”
In the 1990s, I was a young Gen Xer, Nirvana smelled like teen spirit, OJ Simpson pervaded the news, Seinfeld was the hottest thing on TV, and fractals were everywhere in the popular imagination — on posters, on TV, in the mountains of the latest Star Trek movie, on aspiring programmers' computer screens...
Read more

📐 “Fractals, A Very Short Introduction - Book Review”
Years ago, I had the opportunity to meet Benoit Mandelbrot, the “Father of Fractals”, at a mathematics conference. He was a towering figure in fractal geometry, surrounded by enthusiastic students eager to speak with him. I asked him to sign my copy of The Fractal Geometry of Nature, which now holds a proud place on my bookshelf. Recently, while browsing my local library, I came across a tiny volume called Fractals: A Very Short Introduction. I picked it up on a whim and read through it in a couple of days...
Read more

🖥️ "Python Lambda Functions: A Beginner's Guide"
Lambda functions in Python are powerful, concise tools for creating small, anonymous functions on the fly. They are perfect for simplifying short-term tasks, streamlining code with higher-order functions like map, filter, or sorted, and reducing clutter when defining temporary or throwaway logic. They also offer an elegant solution for improving code readability in simple scenarios. This article will explore what lambda functions are, their characteristics, and how to use them effectively. In this guide, we'll provide a complete guide to lambda functions in Python, covering their mechanics, syntax, and how they compare to standard functions, with simple examples to illustrate key concepts. We explore common use cases, such as using lambda functions within functional programming paradigms and their efficiency relative to standard functions.. Practical examples and best practices are included to help you effectively incorporate lambda functions into your Python programming...
Read more

🖥️ "Case Study: Building Software in Python"
DataCamp Course: Learn to build a real-world application—a mortgage calculator—while mastering core software engineering principles. You'll design modular Python code, use inheritance to expand functionality, and ensure quality through best practices like the DRY principle, PEP 8 compliance, and automated testing with pytest. By the end, you’ll have the skills to create efficient, maintainable, and scalable software solutions for real-world challenges.
Go to course

🖥️ “ChatGPT’s Influence on Industries”
Given its extraordinary potential, ChatGPT and its successors will undoubtedly shake up many industries. An early example was none other than Google, specifically its search engine. As early as December of 2022, Google went on “Code Red,” due to ChatGPT’s ability to deliver direct answers, not just endless lists of links. According to CNET, CEO Sundar Pichai reported that he “upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses.” Microsoft entered into a $10B partnership with Open AI and enhanced its own search engine, Bing, with ChatGPT. Google attempted to answer in kind, but a botched demonstration of its language model, Bard, led to a 7% drop in its stock price...
Read more

Update (February 24, 2025): Even at the time, I suspected my initial reaction to Generative AI was too generous. It was obvious AI would automate many jobs, which despite the ever forward march of progress, sucks for those involved. However, I did not foresee that AI would shake up the technology world, not just by replacing jobs, but by being so expensive that companies would shift money from existing departments by laying off a bunch of folks to move it into AI. I also did not take into account the "Elon factor."

👔 “1904 Labs Supports Personal Growth”
St. Louis is famous for being the site of the 1904 World's Fair, given in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana purchase. Many wonders of the modern world were on display: the X-Ray machine, the infant incubator, the electric streetcar, and perhaps most importantly of all, the ice cream cone. St. Louis was also a major center for ragtime music at the turn of the century. John Stark & Sons, the sheet music publisher, was based in St. Louis. Among a multitude of important works published by them was “The Maple Leaf Rag” by Scott Joplin, a popular piece of its time...
Read more

🖥️ “How to Import Data with the pandas read_csv Command”
In any data analysis project, we seek to discover useful, actionable insights from a given set of data. If we’re lucky, this data may already be packaged for us; if not, we may need to collect it ourselves. Either way, once the data is stored, we will need to read it into a program to perform analysis. The software package pandas is often used for this purpose. It is a powerful library that works with the Python programming language. Within pandas, the tool of choice to read in data files is the ubiquitous read_csv function...
Read more

📐 "On the lower central series of the free nilpotent groups of finite rank" (Research Article based on my dissertation - Communications in Algebra, with my dissertation advistor, Russell Blyth)
In their article, “On the derived subgroup of the free nilpotent groups of finite rank” R. D. Blyth, P. Moravec, and R. F. Morse describe the structure of the derived subgroup of a free nilpotent group of finite rank n as a direct product of a nonabelian group and a free abelian group, each with a minimal generating set of cardinality that is a given function of n. They apply this result to computing the nonabelian tensor squares of the free nilpotent groups of finite rank. We generalize their main result to investigate the structure of the other terms of the lower central series of a free nilpotent group of finite rank, each again described as a direct product of a nonabelian group and a free abelian group. In order to compute the ranks of the free abelian components and the size of minimal generating sets for the nonabelian components we introduce what we call weight partitions...
Read more

📐 "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences"
I recently started a job in which I, trained as a mathematician, am working with a number of colleagues who were trained as physicists. At lunch, this situation led to a discussion of the connections between the two fields, which in turn led to a discussion of Eugene Wigner’s article “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” I reluctantly admitted that although I had heard and read about the article, and thought I understood its general gist, I had never taken the time to read and digest the article for myself. To remedy this sad state of affairs I decided to carefully read it and provide a summary to increase my understanding of the article. I hope that you, the reader, find it helpful as well...
Read more