Welcome to Eightfold Way
Hello, I am Daniel Sank. Until now, I’ve avoided writing a public journal1 because I generally think it makes more sense to organize information by topic rather than by author. For example, I’m usually more interested in Stack Overflow posts regarding a particular code pattern as opposed to posts written by turb0c0der733t. I put my detailed math and physics notes in a github repo, and more Q&A style writeups on Physics Stack Exchange. However, occasionally I suppose a person has something useful or interesting to write down which doesn’t quite fit into one of those formal settings, or which is of a more personal nature and so should be organized by author. Well, at least I feel that way some times, so I figured I’d write a public journal. Also, Bernardo told me to do it.
What is this?
I think this journal will be mostly a set of notes introducing topics more completely developed elsewhere. For example, I might give an intuitive discussion of the signal to noise ratio in an IQ demodulator, and then link to a more complete discussion. I’d also like to use this journal to discuss topics less suited to formal writing, such as opinions about movies and books, minor one-off projects, and discussions about longer term projects that simply haven’t solidified enough to be written down more carefully elsewhere. There will also be octopuses.
What’s with the name?
I’m a physicist and I like octopuses (a lot. Well I like physics a lot too. I like physics and octopuses a lot). The Eightfold Way is a term given to an amazing geometrical way of categorizing subatomic particles.2 Also octopuses have eight arms. And I just like the name.
[1]: “Blog” is a terrible ugly word.
[2]: The term’s use in physics is derived from the Eightfold Path notion in Buddhism.