You have arrived at the mid-week hump. Have a $container of $beverage and enjoy some reading before you speed along with the rest of your life.

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Disaster Costs, 1900–2024

We look at some natural and man-made disasters of the past hundred-ish years, and how they've changed with the past 40 years.

Full article (4–10 minute read): Disaster Costs, 1900–2024

Flashcard of the week

I never read Algorithm Design with Haskell (Bird, Gibbons) because it's not very relevant for the kind of work I do at the moment, but I did glance at the first few pages of it and ended up bringing this flashcard out of it.

How come scanl can take an infinite list when foldl cannot?

The answer I have written for the flashcard contains a lot of explanation (this is somewhat of a flashcard anti-pattern – oops) so I'll paste it verbatim:

The question relies on two different meanings of the phrase "can take". None of the two proposed functions will ever terminate on an infinite list (unlike, say, foldr which can short-circuit out of the tail). However, scanl produces intermediary results as it goes along, and these can (through laziness) be fed into the next function, which might in turn short-circuit out of the iteration even if scanl itself is unable to do that.

Next premium newsletter, featuring multi-criteria shortest path and forecasting 2026

The next premium newsletter is being written, though it might take a couple of weeks to get it ready.

It will contain a brief introduction to multiple-criteria shortest path finding to better understand a board game my children received on Christmas. It will also – if I can get it done in time – contain my rationales for the ACX 2026 forecasting competition. (The personal notes section also contains some stuff about migrating my son from NetBSD to FreeBSD, and reinstalling the FreeBSD home server which has had a broken ZFS mirror since summer.)

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(I have increased the price for new subscribers because (a) the archive of premium newsletters has grown, and (b) I have been told people want to support the blog with more than $2 per month. But I also don't want to price anyone out – if you cannot pay for the premium subscription for any reason, reach out to me and we'll come to an agreement.)

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