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Dan Drake 🦆

@ddrake@mathstodon.xyz

mastodon 4.6.4

Former #softwareengineer, current #mathematician, college #math, #computerscience and #datascience lecturer in #stpaulmn #Minnesota at #Macalester College. (And, starting fall 2026, Saint Olaf College in Northfield, MN.) I'm searchable on tootfinder.

Here, have a hashtag-y list of things I'm interested in (no particular order):

#math, #geometry, #origami, #crochet, #Linux, #emacs, #bicycling, going #hiking, #sciencefiction, #science fact, #mtbos #csed

432 Followers

134 Following

23 Posts

Joined November 08, 2022

blog-ish:

https://ddrake.prose.sh

linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ddrake2/

website:

https://dandrake.github.io

Posts

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz · May 10, 2026

Replying to @noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz

@noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz ah, so you're working on the diagonals -- and the full function can be described as: ((x XOR y) mod 3) == 0 ? But doing the four possibilities for the bits, isn't that equivalent to NOT XOR? 0 0 -> 1 0 1 -> 0 1 0 -> 0 1 1 -> 1 Did I get my bitwise ops right?

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz · May 10, 2026

Replying to @noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz

@noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz it's not the colors or the tiles that are expensive. It's paying someone to take out the current flooring and actually do the tiling -- which is expensive enough with a trivial pattern, but here they would have to carefully follow a drawing. I *could* do it myself, maybe, but I am busy and not so skilled, so the resulting floor would probably be pretty wonky.

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz · May 10, 2026

Replying to @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz

@noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz btw, what are the details of your drawing? I'm guessing you started with a 1-d array of bits, and generate a new row with your function. What's the % 3 operation? Looks like mod 3....but that gives you three states.

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz · May 10, 2026

Replying to @noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz

@noneuclideandreamer@mathstodon.xyz I want my bathroom tiled with that pattern! (...and, coincidentally, I am going to be doing a big bathroom remodel project soon...doing that tiling would make it take longer and cost more....but I would have such an amazing bathroom floor!)

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 29, 2026

Very interesting idea for I-94 in the Twin Cities: make it into a subway!

https://streets.mn/2026/04/28/half-the-work-is-done-the-clear-cut-case-for-a-subway-in-the-i-94-trench/

As someone who lives in between the downtowns, this would be awesome. Covering the I-94 trench would fill in and connect the "south of the interstate" and "north of the interstate" neighborhoods, making it easier to get around this area, and with a stop on Snelling, would make it easy for us to get to either downtown very fast.

It does seem like this is a hopeless dream; I really don't see MnDOT taking this seriously -- but lots of ideas like this seem impossible until they aren't. And the reasoning seems sound: you want underground rail via cut-and-cover -- and we already have the "cut", which makes it cheaper.

I'm not so sure about the article's claim of 16 minutes from downtown to downtown -- that's an average speed around 40 miles per hour, which seems ambitious if you stop, say, twice. But even at 20-25 minutes, that would be nice.

#twincities #stpaul #minneapolis #i-94 #transit

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 21, 2026

Just updated to @zotero@fosstodon.org version 9 -- and the Read Aloud feature looks amazing!

https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-9/

I was recently thinking of replacing some podcast listening with listening to research papers via text-to-speech. There are generic apps for this, but they are a bit expensive and I would have to get the PDFs out of Zotero and into those apps -- even better is to have that read-aloud feature right in Zotero. Oh my I'm looking forward to this on my phone.

#zotero

fosstodon.org

Zotero (@zotero@fosstodon.org) - Fosstodon

Dan Drake 🦆 @ddrake@mathstodon.xyz · Apr 20, 2026

If the Wu-Tang Clan was from the Midwest instead of New York:

Cows Rule Everything Around Me

(There's an ice cream flavor at Milkjam, an ice cream shop in #Minneapolis, with that name.)