Now that Maple 15 is out, I thought I should share this little application I made: GoalTracker.mw. It is an application partially inspired by the BMI tracker in Nintendo's WiiFit application; you could easily use it to track a weight loss goal. But it could also be used to track other quantifiable goals. I am posting it here mostly because it takes advantage of two new features in Maple 15.

Back when I was working at the University of Waterloo, I found several copies of a VHS tape sitting on a dusty bookshelf full of old Maple boxes and manuals. The tape's cover had a line drawing of Issac Newton on it and the title "Maple V: The Future of Mathematics".

There was...

I was recently asked a question on using regular expressions with ?type , and I thought it was interesting enough, to share here.

This year I am organizing East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD) 2011 at the University of Waterloo, on April 9th. 

ECCAD is a long running series of annual one-day meetings for those interested in...

The Canadian Lotto649 draws are randomized the old fashioned way, the draws are held using a Ryo-Catteau Tulipe ball machine made by a well respected French Company. The draws are video recorded in a secure studio, and broadcast live.  There is no reason to suspect that these draws might not be random, but let us look at some ways we might detect it if it were not random.

You could look at the Lottery draws as a generator for a binary sequence as I did in my previous post, but as Robert Israel pointed out in the comments, that encoding can hide some non-random behavior (e.g. if the number 25 appeared in every draw, that encoding would not appear less random).