Jason Elliot Benda's Home Page

Who Am I

Hi. I'm Jason. I'm a mathematician by training; I have bachelor's and master's degrees in Mathematics. I'm also autistic, which you can read more about here if you feel so inclined. I'm not a computer scientist or a web developer (though I'm married to someone who is both of those things), which is probably why my code looks like it was written by someone who didn't know any better 25 years ago. Some of this, seriously, that's not that far off.

What's New

Old Stuff

It says at the top that this is Version 13; most of it is still under the Version 12 branding, and will be untill I get things tidied a little bit. I've decided that I should use the 13 branding for everything I've done since 2020, which is actually quite reasonable, since JEBHP 12 dated to 2008 and was really last updated in 2014.

So here, from the Archives, are what files I know to exist from previous versions of my home page:

• Version 5
• Version 7
• Version 8
• Version 9
• Version 9½
• Version 10
• Version 11
• Version 11
• Version 12

There are some subtle versioning issues with some of the "alternate" directories. For example, I have a link that's supposed to be a picture of my seat for the New Jersey-Columbus game of 31 December 2000; if you look at a slightly different location in a different directory structure, you see a different picture.

I might be able to fix anything that's broken in the above links, but it might just be broken, too. If you see something that you're wondering about, let me know.

New Stuff

• 20Aug21.xhtml -- 20-Aug-2021 This is a letter to a friend of my mother's who wanted advice from me about buying a computer. I contend I'm the wrong person to ask, and I told my mother this, but she was rather insistent.
• palatability.xhtml -- 15-Jan-2022 This reminds me of my old Standard Criterion Calculator. There's some math behind it here, as I'm calulating a function with three inputs. I don't tell you what the function is, though.
• electionsim.xhtml -- 17-Jan-2022 This is my first (recent) Big Project: an Election Simulator. It uses a continuous rather than a discrete electorate, and it computes the winners of the election based on several different electoral methods (which I have taught when teaching voting methods in General Ed Math).
• testcrap.xhtml -- 02-May-2022 I don't know what most of this page is doing. The legible part of the page is testing a particular formatting (to make it look like I wrote a letter on a yellow legal pad). The text of the letter (which has to do with my autism diagnosis) is available here.
• 30Apr22.html -- 03-May-2022 Another redirect/fakeout page, this one to the link in the description of the last link.
• 04May22 Bob.html -- 04-May-2022 Also a redirect page, it's also a letter (more or less an open letter now, I guess) to someone about my autism diagnosis.
• gamblingtax.xhtml -- 10-May-2022 This is a calculator to simulate the additional income tax burden of gambling winnings (or any other unusual taxable income).
• mentalhealth -- directory -- 18-Jun-2022 This is the directory where all my autism writings live.
• .. -- directory -- 07-Dec-2022
• drtpapers.xhtml -- 17-Apr-2023 This is a Decoder Ring Theatre fan project, where I make newspaper mockups.
• documents -- directory -- 28-Jun-2023
• images -- directory -- 28-Jun-2023
• stylesheets -- directory -- 12-Jul-2023
• earthtrig.xhtml -- 27-Aug-2023 This is a recent project, computing distances on Earth. Originally I was the trig consultant on a similar project my wife did.
• javascripts -- directory -- 07-Sep-2023
• stringer.xhtml -- 11-Sep-2023 Another version of the old String Manipulation pages (here and here), the first part is a response to a video I found on Facebook, and the second part was something I used to help me with another project.
• drtcast.xhtml -- 13-Sep-2023 Another Decoder Ring Theatre fan project, this one tracks the cast lists for the main shows' episodes.
• . -- directory -- 24-Sep-2023
• decimalization.xhtml -- 24-Sep-2023 This was mostly an exercise in being able to do it, but it deals with decimalization of currency and computations without decimalization.
• apportionment.xhtml -- 24-Sep-2023 This was a bigger project: simulating various apportionment methods. There's still some bits that are a little broken; I lost heart when I realized that most of the data that I thought was original was from 1940. Ties are still a problem. I did learn a lot from this one, though.
• ictmstate -- directory -- 26-Sep-2023 This was a project that was a few weeks in the making, parsing and analyzing data from the team standings at the ICTM State Math Contest.
• index.html -- 26-Sep-2023

Non-Smoking Advisory

Jason Elliot Benda's Home Page continues to have a strict non-smoking policy. If your computer is smoking, please extinguish it immediately. Thank you for your cooperation.