Building a PC: Start to Finish

Building a custom computer from parts to operating system can be a fair amount of work, but highly rewarding. It enables the computer to be built much better for the price, and in turn you can get much better performance. Previous Build About four years ago, I decided to build a customized PC (my previous build). Not specifically…

PCA: Principal Component Analysis

PCA ,or Principal Component Analysis, is defined as the following in wikipedia[1]: A statistical procedure that uses an orthogonal transformation to convert a set of observations of possibly correlated variables into a set of values of linearly uncorrelated variables called principal components. In other words, it is a technique that reduces an data to its most…

The Opportunity Cost of War

Today, it is fairly common to turn on the news, read a book, listen to a lecture in history and for the speaker to discuss the cost of a war. Quantifying the cost is usually done in dollars, assessed by how much money was actually spent or how many lives were lost. The victor and…