A blog of Python-related topics and code.
Scraping a Wikipedia table with Beautiful Soup
Posted by: christian on 24 Apr 2018
The Beautiful Soup Python library is an excellent way to scrape web pages for their content. I recently wanted a reasonably accurate list of official (ISO 3166-1) two-letter codes for countries, but didn't want to pay CHF 38 for the official ISO document. The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 contains this information in an HTML table which can be scraped quite easily as follows.
How old are the world's nuclear reactors?
Posted by: christian on 19 Apr 2018
Most of the world's currently-operational nuclear reactors were built in the 1970s and 80s and with an expected lifespan of 30–40 years are coming to the end of their predicted lifetime. Many will need to be decommissioned in the not-too-distant future.
Bertrand's Paradox
Posted by: christian on 17 Apr 2018
Bertrand's Paradox is an illustration of the need to define the mechanism for picking a random variable carefully for its associated probability to be well-defined.
The hanging chain: part 2
Posted by: christian on 28 Feb 2018
The previous blog post described the normal modes of a chain swinging under its own weight. Here we describe the motion of a chain after an arbitrary displacement as a linear combination of such normal modes.
The hanging chain
Posted by: christian on 26 Feb 2018
The description of the oscillations of a hanging chain was a problem in mechanics solved by Daniel Bernoulli in the 18th century and which led to the discovery of the class of functions known as Bessel functions.