blog.evanchen.cc
This is a retro-post for the Mystery Hunt 2023, for which I played a somewhat minor role on the organizing team (teammate). You can play at interestingthings.museum. There is an ongoing list of write-ups about the hunt being kept at puzzles.wiki, and you may also be interested in the reddit AMA from teammate. Puzzle shoutout… Continue reading Mystery Hunt 2023
There's a common error I keep seeing on OTIS applications, so I'm going to document the error here in the hopes that I can pre-emptively dispel it. To illustrate it more clearly, here is a problem I made up for which the bogus solution also gets the wrong numerical answer: Problem: Suppose $latex {a^2+b^2+c^2=1}&fg=000000$ for… Continue reading A common type-error on the OTIS application
A while ago someone asked me how COVID had affected the students I worked with. I replied that, on average, the pandemic had tripled my students' productivity. And I'm gonna brag about it like the proud teacher I am.
Couple Thanksgiving presents for y'all: Errata List now on GitHub The list of errata is now version controlled on GitHub: https://github.com/vEnhance/egmo-book-errata.So now you can actually see a changelog of the ocean of typos as they come in.Shout-out to the crew working on the Japanese translation of the book for finding way more errors than I… Continue reading Two updates on the EGMO textbook
Some people have asked me why I anti-recommend JavaScript for beginners on my website FAQ. This post will try to give a few reasons why. Some notes: I’m referring to base JS. I like TypeScript a lot for example (it’s high on my tier list of programming languages for beginners). And I know about eslint,… Continue reading Why Evan does not like JavaScript as a first language
don't ask why it just came in my head Quandary So you have a fair coin that you found on the ground, or at least that's what everyone says. But on each of N times that you've tossed it around, you see every flip has been heads. For which value of N should you start… Continue reading poem
By popular request, Twitch Solves ISL is renewed for a second season which will begin on Friday, 18 November 2022. As in the past, streams will start at 8:00pm Eastern time on Friday nights, and last 1-4 hours depending on how much coffee I drank that morning. I've scheduled 26 episodes for the second season… Continue reading Twitch Solves ISL, Season 2
To all my loyal viewers --- After two years, 480 hours, and 102 episodes of Twitch Solves ISL, I've finally decided that it's time for me to take a hiatus from my weekly Friday night streams. So, episode 102 will be the end of Season 1. To answer the obvious question: I'm definitely open to… Continue reading Ending Season 1 of Twitch Solves ISL
信言不美，美言不信。 I get a lot of questions that are so general that there is no useful answer I can give, e.g., "how do I get better at geometry?". What do you want from me? Go do more problems, sheesh. These days, in my instructions for contacting me, I tell people to be as specific as… Continue reading Sometimes the best advice is no advice
I went and took the idea in I switched to point-based problem sets one step further this year. Now the OTIS-WEB page looks like this: Makes it feel a bit more rewarding to complete problem sets, I think. Also gives me the chance to plant easter eggs everywhere, which is always a lot of fun… Continue reading OTIS: The RPG
Power Overwhelming 