Ever wondered why boiling water is 100°C and not some other number? Hasok Chang’s Inventing Temperature uncovers the surprising struggles behind something we now take for granted. From a flask shaken for a week, to frozen mercury in Canadian tundra, this is the story of quirky, frustrating, and ingenious experiments which gave us the standard thermometer which measured the temperature reliably. It’s part history, part philosophy, and surprisingly, a real page-turner.

Following up from the previous article, an introduction to AI and LLM, let us see how AI and LLM are changing the landscape of coding.

2025 is proving to be the year when AI has finally broken through. Here is an introduction to the topic with no assumption of any background knowledge - well, almost none.

The field of algorithms is vast. Humans have been designing algorithms since antiquity, e.g. GCD algorithm. Of course, algorithms are the backbone of the current information age. Here are just a select few which have fascinated me because of their simplicity and cleverness.   

Every undergraduate course in Computer science covers a range of data structures: Arrays, Linked-lists, Trees, Graphs, and Hashes. However, there are yet more data structures, some quite well known and some not as much. Here are a few of them which I think are especially noteworthy since they are clever, minimal and quite useful.

Empire of the Ants (original title: Les Fourmis) is a French science fiction novel by Bernard Werber, published in 1991 and translated into English by Margret Rocques. This is a review of the book.

This is a short review of the classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn, which shook the world of science at the time and continues to inspire lively debates even now. This review refers to the 4th edition (50th Anniversary edition) published in 2012. And yes, this is the book that introduced the buzzword Paradigm and Paradigm shift!

Here are 5 Ruby methods that are very helpful but may be not very widely known yet

Every web application needs access to certain credentials to communicate with downstream services. How should these credentials be stored in a Rails app?

With Rails 7 (late 2021), there was a bold new set of features launched called Hotwire or HTML over the wire. After developing multiple applications using it over the past couple of years, this is an introduction to the topic for those interested in getting into it. Some familiarity with basic web development technologies and Ruby on Rails framework is assumed.