Author Archives: mathscinotes

Mosquito Magnet Testing

Posted on 24-July-2023 by mathscinotes

I do not like mosquitoes — who does? To reduce the number of mosquitoes at my Northern Minnesota cabin, I decided to buy a Mosquito Magnet (Figure 1). I bought it last year, and while it ran for a while, it soon gave me an error warning (fast flashing LED) and stopped working. I live in a remote location, and getting things serviced is difficult, so I put it away for when I had time to look at it. Continue reading →

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Great Escape Nationalities

Posted on 16-October-2022 by mathscinotes

I recently watched a series of videos on WW2TV about the escape of 76 prisoners of war from Stalag Luft III in Germany (now Poland) — an event now known as The Great Escape. The story was immortalized in a large-budget Hollywood movie called The Great Escape. Continue reading →

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WW2 US Submarine Torpedo Firings Versus Time

Posted on 24-March-2022 by mathscinotes

I recently noticed that combinedfleet.com has excellent summaries of the WW2 US submarine patrol reports that are very easy to scrape for data. These patrol reports are interesting because they provide accurate data as to the rate of torpedo firings by US submarines and some indications as to the mix of torpedoes being fired. Like all WW2 records, not every patrol recorded the weapons used and it is difficult to know how accurate the hit count is. Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, History Through Spreadsheets, Military History | 3 Comments

UK Warship Losses in the Mediterranean During WW2

Posted on 6-December-2021 by mathscinotes

Most of my naval history reading has been about the Pacific War. This means I have not read much about the Battle of the Mediterranean. I recently heard a historian (Drach) say that the UK lost 135 major warships in the Mediterranean Theater during WW2. I must admit that I was surprised at the high losses and decided to investigate further. This theater saw numerous major battles (examples like Taranto, Cape Matapan) and some real technology innovations (example in Figure 1). Continue reading →

Posted in History Through Spreadsheets, Naval History | 9 Comments

Was Ulysses Grant a Butcher?

Posted on 28-November-2021 by mathscinotes

This post uses a combination of data from a Github repo by Jeffery Arnold that contains a fantastic amount of Civil War battle data and some Wikipedia scraping to generate similar tables. I should note that my casualty results are significantly different than Bonekemper's because there are large differences between sources of Civil War casualty data. The reasons behind these differences are complex, but the Arnold repo has data from a number of sources. I chose his Wikipedia file because it is easy to check where the data came from. Continue reading →

Posted in Excel, History Through Spreadsheets, Military History | 7 Comments

Duplicate Drach's U-Boat Tonnage and Sunk Charts

Posted on 14-November-2021 by mathscinotes

I am a huge fan of Drachinifel's naval history channel. The other day, Drach was participating in the Armchair Admiral's program, during which he presented two charts on the Battle of the Atlantic that I have never seen before: (1) A chart of tonnage sunk by U-boats versus time and (2) a chart of U-boats sunk versus time. The unique aspect of the charts was that the data points were colored based on whether the Enigma cipher was broken at the time and whether centimetric (microwave) radar was deployed. These charts really got me thinking about the impact of technology on the struggle against U-boats. Continue reading →

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Excel Generated Traceability Matrix

Posted on 27-October-2021 by mathscinotes

I recently needed to generate a table that showed how every user requirement generated by our Marketing Department was mapped to one or more system requirements. This table is known as a flowdown table. For all sorts of reasons, none of them good, our requirements database could not generate the report. I decided that Excel would be the appropriate tool to generate the table we required. I should note that a Python version was also developed and will likely be used in the future. Continue reading →

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MacArthur's Photo on Nimitz's Desk?

Posted on 12-October-2021 by mathscinotes

Quote of the Day Asking for help isn’t giving up, it is refusing to give up. — Charlie Mackesy I have been reading a couple of books about Admiral Chester Nimitz and his conduct of the Pacific War during WW2. … Continue reading →

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Sunken Ships at Ironbottom Sound

Posted on 11-September-2021 by mathscinotes

I just finished watching a series of videos on the Guadalcanal Campaign by Drachinifel, whose work is superb (Figure 2). The marines derisively referred to this campaign as Operation Shoestring because of the resource limitations. Things were no better for the sailors. Unlike many WW2 island campaigns, more sailors died in the battles than ground troops (link). The Allies, and in particular the US Navy (USN), had to learn the hard way that the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) was a force that deserved respect. Many Allied ships were sunk while learning this lesson. Continue reading →

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US Navy Ship Numbers Versus Time

Posted on 4-September-2021 by mathscinotes

My reading and watching lectures on Mahan have motivated me to look at how the US Navy grew and shrank over the years. Fortunately, the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) have an excellent page on the size of the US Navy over time. Unfortunately, the data is scattered throughout the page and it must be scrapped so that I can consolidate and graph it. This post is about using Power Query to scrape the data from the page and generate a graph in Excel of the number of active ships in the US Navy over time. Continue reading →

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