223 posts
Stephen Wolfram explains the concept of ruliobiology, a metamodel of biology. Explore the interplay of natural selection, adaptive evolution and computational irreducibility.
A visual introduction to big O notation.
How to lovingly handcraft your own git repositories
How to think about the work
Richard Feynman
Ruby library based on astronomy and astrometry books - rhannequin/astronoby
Clicky's privacy-friendly, real-time website analytics service is simply the best way to monitor, analyze, and react to your website's traffic in real time.
Simple, powerful, first-party analytics for Rails. Contribute to ankane/ahoy development by creating an account on GitHub.
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
Build a multitasking operating system and kernel with an interactive shell!
Become a computer operating system and try not to anger the user!
NandGame – Build a computer from scratch. –An educational puzzle game. Solve a series of tasks where you build increasingly powerful components. Starts with the simplest logical components and ends up with a programmable computer.
You’re the OS! –Become a computer operating system and try not to anger the user!
A non-mathematical introduction to Kalman Filters for programmers – Pravesh Koirala –Read my manifesto on Code as an alternative to Mathematics. Code for this article can be found on this Colab Notebook should you choose to follow along. Why Kalman Filters? Kalman filters are ingenius. If you have never heard of them, then a very intuitive (and arguably reductive) way to think about them is to
Opinion | How Shoddy Data Becomes Sensational Research –Academics are addicted to p-hacking, data torturing, and other statistical sins. We must break these habits.
Memory Allocation –For those of you learning C or C++, this article is a great and detailed tutorial. Also useful if you are studying operating systems.
Tell me how this is simple word completion. Can this be broadened to a more complicated network. Could it be used for some kind of semi-intelligent navigation?
Prompt:
Assume a map that is described in sentences, with node names and costs to go between nodes. Here is map1:
Node A costs 5 to got to Node C and 10 to go to Node D Node C costs 100 to go to node E and 50 to go to node F Node D costs 10 to go to node E and 100 to go to node F
What is the best route to go from Node A to node E? And what is the best route to go from Node A to node F?
Response:
To find the best route from Node A to Node E, we need...
Line maze algorithm –If you are experimenting with Robots and want to solve an intricate maze that has lines. this articles has some good insights and algorithms.
Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes –An interesting walk down history lane… of computers
Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!
The Missing Semester of Your CS Education –Classes teach you all about advanced topics within CS, from operating systems to machine learning, but there’s one critical subject that’s rarely covered, and is instead left to students to figure out on their own: proficiency with their tools. We’ll teach you how to master the command-line, use a powerful text editor, use fancy features of version control systems, and much more!
Laurence Tratt: Why We Need to Know LR and Recursive Descent Parsing Techniques –Nice article about something I learned and actually really enjoyed in college but havet thought much about over the years. All about top down and bottom up parsers. About unambiguous and ambiguius grammars. About LR and recursive descent parsers. And more…
A Nibble of Geohashes in Go – by Kurt – Get Code –This is a really cool algorithm that i never heard of. Also geohashes are not too hard to compute and have very useful and unteresting properties. the concept of a z-order curve is explained. That too is a useful model and concept. The author says: “Latitude and longitude as a locality-preserving string.”
A Complete Guide to Lock Convoys | Dave Kilian’s Blog –A very interesting concept and scenario that affects scale in surprising ways. In the category of everything old is nee again, this was identified and named back in the 1970’s!
A Nibble of Content-Defined Chunking –A great explanation of a really cool algorithm. “How de-duplicated, incremental file transfer works “
Math for Future Scientists: Require Statistics, Not Calculus –I totally agree with this. Ive used or needed to use statistics ans probability a lot more often than calculus: “The case for ending calculus requirements for science majors.”
The What, the Why, and the How of Bloom Filter – The Lean Software Boutique –Have you ever wondered how does Medium recommend blogs to read or how does a platform with millions of users tells if a username is available or ta…
View the latest news and breaking news today for U.S., world, weather, entertainment, politics and health at CNN.com.
Things You Should Know About Databases– Things You Should Know About Indexes and Transactions. This post covers internal workings of indexes and transactions of RDBMSs.
Algorithms from scratch: RANSAC: RANSAC stands for Random Sample Consensus. In my opinion, it is the best type of algorithm: simple but very powerful and useful. It is…
SymPy is a Python library for symbolic mathematics. It aims to become a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS) while keeping the code as simple as possible in order to be comprehensible and easily extensible. SymPy is written entirely in Python.
Interactive articles about physics, math, and engineering. Amazing explanations. Watches. Gears. Gps.
Bartosz Ciechanowski Interactive articles about physics, math, and engineering. Amazing explanations. Watches. Gears. Gps. May 8, 2022 at 06:29AM
Great list of top publications
Engineering & Computer Science – Google Scholar Metrics Great list of top publications April 14, 2022 at 10:28PM
Kalman Filter: An Algorithm for making sense from the insights of various sensors fused together. An Algorithm that is an Astrologer for the Sensor fusion process.It can predict a estimate for you and would correct itself if its… April 4, 2022 at 05:01PM
Aho/Ullman Foundations of Computer Science This book has been taken out of print by W. H. Freeman. You are welcome to use it if you like. We believed in 1992 it was the way to introduce theory in Computer Science, and we believe that today. January 28, 2022 at 03:29PM
Predictions Scorecard, 2022 January 01 – Rodney Brooks
January 2, 2022 at 02:50PM
Timeline of the human condition | Milestones in evolution and history Milestones in evolution and history December 26, 2021 at 01:58PM
Our team of educators and scientists has reviewed and organized the best free teaching resources for K-12 through college. Go Entire Collection Activities Videos Visualizations Featured Resource Living Landscapes: ...
The goal is not to introduce Climate Education as a standalone topic, but to integrate it with the core curriculum of Science, Mathematics and Social Sciences.
Climate Change Education Across the Curricula, Across the Globe The goal is not to introduce Climate Education as a standalone topic, but to integrate it with the core curriculum of Science, Mathematics and Social Sciences. December 3, 2021 at 07:46PM
Argo (oceanography) – Wikipedia
December 3, 2021 at 07:45PM
Minimax algorithm and alpha-beta pruning This article will teach you about the minimax algorithm and alpha-beta pruning, from a beginner’s perspective. November 27, 2021 at 07:32PM
The world's best free documentary collection - Simply the best Documentaries
Documentary Mania – Free Documentaries Online The world’s best free documentary collection – Simply the best Documentaries August 22, 2021 at 08:50PM
Lesson summary: In this lesson we will learn about the concept of point, vector, normal and matrices. These concepts are used everywhere in CG, whether in modelling, simulation, animation or rendering. They are the essential ingredients of any graphics application.
Geometry (Points, Vectors and Normals) Lesson summary: In this lesson we will learn about the concept of point, vector, normal and matrices. These concepts are used everywhere in CG, whether in modelling, simulation, animation or rendering. They are the essential ingredients of any graphics application. June 9, 2021 at 05:58AM
Press the power button on your system, and after few moments you see the Linux login prompt. Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes from the time you press the power button until the Linux login prompt appears? The following are the 6 high level stages of a typical Linux boot process. BIOS
math and logic formula parser and evaluator. Contribute to rubysolo/dentaku development by creating an account on GitHub.
rubysolo/dentaku math and logic formula parser and evaluator. Contribute to rubysolo/dentaku development by creating an account on GitHub. May 31, 2021 at 03:19PM
The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …? May 29, 2021 at 12:54AM
The Sudden Rise of the Lab-Leak Theory Scientists and political commentators are no longer dismissing the possibility that COVID-19 emerged from a Chinese laboratory. What changed? May 29, 2021 at 01:00AM
The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences. May 29, 2021 at 01:16AM
A Wiki website of Calls For Papers (CFP) of international conferences, workshops, meetings, seminars, events, journals and book chapters in computer science, communications, software engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, networking, signal processing, systems etc.
WikiCFP : Call For Papers of Conferences, Workshops and Journals A Wiki website of Calls For Papers (CFP) of international conferences, workshops, meetings, seminars, events, journals and book chapters in computer science, communications, software engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning, networking, signal processing, systems etc.
I use this website as a memory dump for gamedev things i might need in the future. I will update it with new things when i feel like it or when i need to forget things to make room for more. If you have any questions ask on twitter.
Note: This is for my own personal memory dump so it's written to
Amazing math magician at ETech
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Hi there! This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science. When preparing for technical interviews in the past, I found myself spending hours crawling the internet putting together the best, average, and worst case complexities for search and sorting algorithms so that I wouldn't be stumped when asked about them. Over the last few years, I've interviewed at several Silicon Valley startups, and also some bigger companies, like Yahoo, eBay, LinkedIn, and Google, and each time that I prepared for an interview, I thought to msyelf "Why oh why hasn't someone created a nice Big-O cheat sheet?". So, to save all of you fine folks a ton of time, I went ahead and created one. Enjoy!
Ruby scientific library
IDEA is a series of nonverbal algorithm assembly instructions, created by Sándor P. Fekete and Sebastian Morr.
Since 1972, Runbeck Election Services has preserved the integrity of the American democratic process and provided a trusted election experience.
Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, aggregated from sources all over the world by Google News.
VisuAlgo was conceptualised in 2011 by Dr Steven Halim as a tool to help his students better understand data structures and algorithms, by allowing them to learn the basics on their own and at their own pace. Together with his students from the National University of Singapore, a series of visualisations were developed and consolidated, from simple sorting algorithms to complex graph data structures. Though specifically designed for the use of NUS students taking various data structure and algorithm classes (CS1010, CS1020, CS2010, CS2020, and CS3233), as advocators of online learning, we h...
DNSimple makes it easy to manage your domains. It is lovingly crafted by the hardworking DNSimple team.
PDFtk is a simple tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. It comes in three flavors: PDFtk Free, PDFtk Pro, and our original command-line tool PDFtk Server.
The Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Maine is dedicated to instruction and research in the Mathematical Sciences.
Q&A for computer enthusiasts and power users
With YourFonts it's really simple to turn your printed characters into a font.
Learn for free about math, art, computer programming, economics, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, finance, history, and more. Khan Academy is a nonprofit with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
The 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow.
Create and share videos for free with Animoto's video maker. Combine your photos and video clips with music to make professional videos that’ll impress.
A journal defending science and technology for, not on, human beings
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Nice overview of choices of IDEs for Python and data science
Great collection of statistics demonstration tools
A really clear visual explanation of what a Markova chain is and what it is good for.
I’m trying to get smart about Kalman filters. This is a great resource
Posted in r/compsci by u/adriansky • 125 points and 3 comments
Inter3sting variations on tries
There are lots of algorithm libraries. This one is a nice one!
I’m back looking at statistics. This KS test is one of the basic statistical tests to compare two samples.
More good explanation of how to see if two sets of observations seem to be coming from a single distrbution.
Really really interesting use case for REDIS, and a great scalability pattern
More about the famous Kalman Filter
A useful bit of mathematics. Claims that calculating this is a vital first step in robotics research
A classic - the books and the guy
For robot reasons I have been diving into linear algebra and have done a pretty thorough search of resources for this. This is one of the pretty simple summaries.
More Kalman Filter links. This one is one of the best.
Ive been doing a deep dive on Kalman Filters. Here are one of the best explanations. Beware it's hard.
Seems like a comprehensive but short and sweet set of basic math notes for problem solving. College level.
Standard Deviation is an Inferior Measurement*
Interesting bit of statistics esoterica…
tags: standard deviation statistics mean
Seems like a comprehensive but short and sweet set of basic math notes for problem solving. College level.
Ok you don’t need this more than once every decade, but if you do need help in remembering how complicated trigonometry scenarios work this is a beautiful tool. When you are working on navigation and Kalman Filters, its a helpful reminder of those sines and cosines!
Myo | How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Quaternions
Quaternions are a really complicated mathematical concept which are used extensively in 3d robotics. They are really hard to understand. This article helps.
tags: Quaternions robotics 3d
Design follows data structures
If you’re interested in algorithms, optimization and big-O you will like this.
tags: optimization bigo design datastructures
There are lots of algorithm libraries. This one is a nice one!
tags: algorithms computer science
This is very interesting and cool way to use ruby for fancy cli scripts, like people often use AWK. I haven’t quite figured out how to use it but it’s cool!
Markov Chains explained visually
A really clear visual explanation of what a Markova chain is and what it is good for.
tags: markovchains visual explanation
In the world of machine vision, the equivalent goal is to win the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge. This is a competition that has run every year since 2010 to evaluate image recognition algorithms. (It is designed to follow-on from a similar project called PASCAL VOC which ran from 2005 until 2012) Click to read the article.
Check out some really cool images: Soviet model makers built this spacecraft based on the designs and notes of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Late in his life, much of Tsiolkovsky’s theoretical work focused on ideas about transporting humans into space on board rockets. Although this model, reflecting the scientist’s ideas, grossly overestimates the living space available on board a rocket, it does convey a sophisticated understanding of the physical constraints of space travel for that time. Among Tsiolkovsky’s concerns were the effects of acceleration and weightlessness on the human body.
Check out this article that shows off how visualizations can help you understand how algorithms work. It’s an amazing piece of work: Creatively, he figured out how to illustrate an algorithm so I can better understand how it works; Technically, the code that implements these visualizations is itself very clever and elegant; and Aesthetically, the overall effect on the page itself is quite beautiful. I am jealous!
Check out this really interesting article plus lovely animations. I have to go find out how it actually implements the animations. Even though the examples are in Python, what is actually embedded into the page? We shall see!
Visualizing Alghorithms
If you are anything like me, this is something you’ve try to articulate. Here’s a great article on that arcane topic!
What is algebra? | profkeithdevlin:
Is mastery of algebra (i.e., algebraic thinking) worth the effort? You bet — though you’d be hard pressed to reach that conclusion based on what you will find in most school algebra textbooks. In today’s world, most of us really do need to master algebraic thinking. In particular, you need to use algebraic thinking if you want to write a macro to calculate the cells in a spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel. This one example alone makes it clear why algebra, and not arithmetic, should ...
I don’t agree that it’s a “major problem for computer science” – by a long shot. But still it is odd that often Computer Science students are not exposed to ‘modern’ source control management systems or version management systems, or maybe even “any” SCM at all.
Version Control and Higher Education — What I Learned Building… — Medium:
We are not doing students any favors by ignoring software like Git at the university level. It’s a major problem for computer science, information technology and design students to not—at the very least—be exposed to some form of version control or source code management during their tenure at school.
Kirk McDonald: Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You – WSJ.com:
According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees.
Now, I don’t know where this gentleman, Kirk McDonald got this statistic but if you are teaching computer science then it’s a pretty sobering statistic. I am going to try digging deeper to see if I can find the source.
Here’s my five-step plan for world domination:
I am creating a comprehensive taxonomy of characteristics of smartphone apps. Much more detailed than a feature list: “is it on android or iPhone” but really micro. I will have 20 different user interface ‘styles’ defined scientifically. I will analyze all 11 different variations on viral growth models and describe them scientifically. I will classify the color schemes, fonts used, left versur right swiping, number of customizable characters, and that’s just the start!
Once I have that, I will have an independent panel of experts score the top one hundred smart phone apps on each of the facets of my taxonomy. With that I will have a 20...
Here’s what I think: If economic analysis says that technology does not contribute to the overall productivity of the country, check the analysis. It’s incorrect.
It’s self evident and obvious that technology – computers, smart phones, tablets, cloud computing, robotics, and on and on make us more productive. I say, send the economists back to the drawing board to look again.
Economic Statistics Miss the Benefits of Technology – NYTimes.com:
The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dot-com revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed substantially in recent years, doubts have re-emerged about whether information technology can power economic growth like the steam engine and the internal combustion engine did in the past.
This is kind of depressing, but I don’t know why – but NASA administrator Bolden says that NASA has no plans to lead another mission to the moon within our lifetime:
“However, he made it clear NASA has no plans to lead its own human return to the Moon under his watch. “NASA will not take the lead on a human lunar mission,” he said. “NASA is not going to the Moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime. And the reason is, we can only do so many things.” Instead, he said the focus would remain on human missions to asteroids and to Mars. “We intend to do that, and we think it can be done.” (from ...
Just tonight I squirted a few shots of Sriracha on my multi-layered-grilled-vegetable parmigiana. And now there’s an article about Sriracha in Business Week!
“…Like ketchup, sriracha is a generic term, its name coming from a port town in Thailand where the sauce supposedly was conceived. When people in America talk about sriracha, what they’re really talking about is Huy Fong’s version. It’s been name-checked on The Simpsons, is featured prominently on the Food Network, and has inspired a cottage industry of knockoffs, small-batch artisanal homages, and merchandise rangi...
Under the header “Natural Gas News Leak” (funny) there’s a story about how the securities market reacted 400ms before a bit of news came out of the government and they reacted by trading on the news. The article has lots of charts and graphs which may say whether or how much money was made or lost. The article says:
“It is worth pointing out that the EIA Natural Gas Report comes out weekly (every Thursday at 10:30) and the market reacts within a few milliseconds. This is because the report centers on one number which makes it easy for machines to process and take action.” (from Nanex.net)
One of the tensions that I have seen in teaching software engineering is whether something should be viewed as legitimate research or part of the craft of computer engineering.
It’s a slippery slope that I myself didn’t have a good articulation for.
I came across this in a newsgroup which I think is a pretty good description. The writer is referring to Researching Information Systems and Computing...
Does Google give a different answer if you reorder the words in the search? What? A trivial question? Have you ever tried to refine a search by reordering the words? Wouldn’t it be useful if you knew for sure that it would or would not make a difference?
Experiment:
ruby rails bureaucrat gem examples rails bureaucrat gem examples ruby These two searches indeed did produce different results! And not just a reordering of the results. There were at least two results in the top 7 which were present in one and not the other.
Q.E.D.
I recently subscribed to the New York Review of Books. Not sure this was a good decision as the last thing I need is more stuff to read. I came to it because I kept seeing interesting articles from the NYRB come up on various blogs and searches.
Here’s quite an interesting book review of “Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism
I remember wondering about this when I was in college — this is before I really knew anything about computers.
I noticed that our computer center charged by the minute of processor time and it was a lot! I remember people freaking out because their random prime number generator ran overnight and the department got billed an unexpected $1,000.00. And they were in trouble!
So it must cost a lot to get these computers to do all these calculations, I thought. So, I asked the local expert, how much does it cost, then, when the computer isn’t doing any calculations? He laughed. He said, it costs the same, whether it’s calculating or not. How weird.
Here’s an interesting ...
Instead of charging extra (‘congestion pricing’) to drive your car during rush hour, how about giving me a reward (a lottery ticket) for driving using less congested routes? That’s a clever idea that is being tested by a Stanford professor:
“[…]So this spring, with a $3 million research grant from the federal Department of Transportation, Stanford deployed a new system designed by Dr. Prabhakar’s group. Called Capri, for Congestion and Parking Relief Incentives, it allows people driving to the notoriously traffic-clogged campus to enter a daily lottery, with a chance to win up to an extra $50 in their paycheck, just by shifting their commute to off-peak times. The program has proved so popu...
Today (May 29) is Manhattenhenge. One of two days every year when sunrise and sunset are exactly aligned with the Manhattan (New York City, New York, USA) street grid. Just a fun fact.
“What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones, signaling the change of season.” (from Sunset on the Manhattan Grid)
I saw this article in the Sunday New York Timestoday which starts promising but then becomes a bit ridiculous and makes a mockery of serious research, in my humble opinion.
It starts with a claim that sounds plausible:
“Recent advances in understanding what psychologists call âembodied cognitionâ indicate a surprisingly direct link between mind and body. It turns out that people draw on their bodily experiences in constructing their social reality....
Great review article:
“In this article I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found in the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoopâs MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting. This framework is depicted in the figure below.” (from Highly Scalable)
Worth reading if you are interested in how Hadoop and friends might apply to the problems that you are trying to solve: “MapReduce Patterns, Algorithms, and Use Cases”
A fascinating article, which is hard to disagree with, although the conclusion is a little counter-intuitive:
“Imagine that the captain of a $5 billion aircraft carrier let his ship sink rather than allow seven volunteers to attempt a repair, on the grounds that the odds favoring their survival were only 50 to 1. Such an officer would be court-martialed and regarded with universal contempt both by his brother officers and by society at large.” (from How Much is an Astronaut’s Life Worth?)
If you agree with this logic, it would be ha...
You can’t be a self-respecting computer or science geek and not have heard about the Fibonacci series. You know, 1-1-2-3-5-8… etc. How about Fibonacci’s Ratio? How about the Golden Mean or the Divine Proportion? Not sure, right?
Fibonacci, and its role in art, design and photography is a little less well known. As I continue to study photography and art I came across this excellent article about that very topic:
“Hopefully, this article has shed some light on a somewhat mysterious subject in the world of photography. Fibonacci’s Ratio is a powerful tool for composing your photographs, and it should’t be dismissed as a minor difference from the rule of thirds.
While the grids look simila...
If you are interested in design and especially design and architecture of software, and you have a philosophical bent, you will enjoy this essay… I can’t even attempt to summarize it’s content, and even the abstract from the paper itself is quite inscrutable:
“Conceptual integrity arises not (simply) from one mind or from a small number of agreeing resonant minds, but from sometimes hidden co-authors and the thing designed itself.” (From Designed As Designer)
What can I tell you. The author is the Richard Gabriel, a luminary of the computer world. Here’s the article: Designed as Designer.
I noticed yesterday that sunset is now occurring at 4:12pm. The day before it was 4:11pm. So sunset is getting later! Summer is almost here, right?
p.s. Before some smart-alec points it out, yes I know that sunrise is still getting later so the **number of daylight hours are still shrinking. **
****It is left as an exercise to the reader to explain why the two events do not occur on the same day – in other words, sunset starts getting later several weeks before sunrise starts getting earlier. Note: the explanation is very complicated.
From the New York Times, How Exercise Benefits the Brain:
“For some time, scientists have believed that BDNF helps explain why mental functioning appears to improve with exercise. However, they havenât fully understood which parts of the brain are affected or how those effects influence thinking. The Irish study suggests that the increases in BDNF prompted by exercise may play a particular role in improving memory and recall.” (from NYT)
Out of left (star) field. Here’s a succinct tutorial on buying a telescope that my friend Ben Gomes Casseresemailed me which I thought might be of general interest. You can see Ben’s own astronomy work here.
If you are thinking of buying a telescope (or giving one as a gift), Ben says:
The place to go to browse is www.oriontelescopes.com. They have advice on entry-level telescopes and such. Have Dick review what is available there and then let me know….I can help select among options. I am not sure what you can get for 500-1000, as ...
An interesting commentary on a couple of patents that issued from the US Patent Office:
“The US patent office no longer grants patents on perpetual motion machines, but has recently granted at least two patents on a mathematically impossible process: compression of truly random data” (from Gailly.net)
Also you might be interested in the topic, there’s a second patent that seems also to be fatally flawed — ...
Fun article about Ben Hescott who has some unique – and impressive – approaches to teaching an abstract topic:
Q. Did you experience an “aha’’ teaching moment?
A. My first time teaching, I was using PowerPoint slides. One student kept saying, “I don’t see it.’’ So I turned off the computer, grabbed a piece of chalk, and went through the material slowly on the blackboard, without notes. Afterward, the kid said, “You’re a really good teacher when you’re not using PowerPoint.’’ That changed everything.” (from The Boston Globe)
You have to read the whole interview!
If I could fool you into believing that a fake rubber hand that you were looking at was really your own hand, how would you react if I took a knife to it? Weird questions that Neuro-science researchers busy themselves with, but really fairly amazing. Here’s an article in Scientific American about the study:
“A knife-wielding researcher is bearing down on your right hand—or is it your hand? You see three arms in front of you, and you can feel your palms dampen with fear-induced perspiration. But is it your right hand the kitchen knife is plunging toward, or a false, rubber right hand?” (from Scientific American)
Over the last several months I’ve been following a series of blog postings by Jamis Buckon the esoteric and quirky topic of writing programs to design mazes.
For reasons that are not clear, Jamis developed an obsession with mazes and has collected a series of articles detailing many different algorithms, their tradeoffs and concepts and writing them up beautifully.
Today in his final installment he summarized the project:
Over the last six weeks I documented eleven different maze generation algorithms. It’s been a blast. I’ve had so much fun researching and implementing these! It’s bee...
This article is called “Fact and Folklore In Software Engineering” and while it is about that, the part that was more interesting to me was the first section talking about Scientific Discourse:
“This article is about why some “facts” refuse to die, and about how to avoid being fooled by opinion disguised as scientific “fact”. We start, therefore, with some observations on science and facts.” (from “Fact and Folklore In Software Engineering”)
Here he goes on to describe “The messy workings of scientific discourse”. It’s clarifying explanation of a process that we understand intuitively but actually ...
This is actually a keynote to a conference, but it had some very interesting ideas in it. The article is called “The New Science of Morality” and it’s by Jonathan Haidt. I don’t know if it makes full sense out of context, but read this section. It makes an important point and it might draw you into reading the whole thing.
“[…snip]Morality is like The Matrix, from the movie “The Matrix.” Morality is a consensual hallucination, and when you read the WEIRD people article, it’s like taking the red pill. You see, oh my God, I am in one particular matrix. But there ...
“That journey will provide reasons for resisting the claim that a deterministic view of the material universe is incompatible with free will. Much of the apparent power of deterministic arguments comes from their focusing on isolated actions, or even components of actions, that have been excised from their context in the world of the self, so that they are more easily caught in the net of material causation.” (from How Can I Possibly Be Free?)
This is from a really difficult article called“How Can I Possibly Be Free?” in the New Atlantis. At ...
I’ve always been a major space travel fan and geek. This video linked from Engadget incredibly had me glued to my seat for almost 40 minutes. Some fantastic super slow motion footage of the launch.
Note especially how the two narrators just love the shuttle and love their jobs. They can’t get enough of it, even after having seen this stuff a million times over.
Say what? I came across this paper; Mathematical Foundations of Consciousness. I generally love this stuff: Mathematics and writings on the nature of consciousness. When I saw this paper the title really intrigued me. Now my math is not strong enough to tackle anything like PhD level math (in fact my math knowledge beyond under graduate level is definitely uneven.) “The self-referential qualities of consciousness place it outside conventional logic(s) upon which scientific models and frameworks have heretofore been constructed. However more contemporary mathematical development has begun to deal with features of self-reference. We shall address Schrödinger’s...
What are high reactives? “Temperament is a complex, multilayered thing, and for the sake of clarity, Kagan was tracking it along a single dimension: whether babies were easily upset when exposed to new things. He chose this characteristic both because it could be measured and because it seemed to explain much of normal human variation. He suspected, extrapolating from a study he had just completed on toddlers, that the most edgy infants were more likely to grow up to be inhibited, shy and anxious. Eager to take a peek at the early results, he grabbed the videotapes of the first babies in the study, looking for the irritable behavior he would later call high-reactive.” (from ...
Ok, probably to a mathematician these are not arcane, but to normal people (oops, sorry, I love mathematicians) I think they might be. Anyway, read and enjoy without any further commentary:
Needle-in-a-haystack Problems: “[snip…]A needle-in-a-haystack problem is a problem where the right answer is very difficult to determine in advance, but it’s easy to recognize the right answer if someone points it out to you. Faced with a big haystack, it’s hard to find the needle; but if someone tells you where the needle is, it’s easy to verify that they’re right[snip…]”
...
The article “Reflections on Trusting Trust” is often mentioned in conversation and cited. I finally tracked down and read this classic, and it is indeed a classic of computer science. And typically for classics, it’s short, clear, readable and impactful: “The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ peoplelike me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect.” (from Reflections on Trusting Trust)
Who would think that an august publication like the Wall Street Journal would pull something like this: I was paying for access to their online edition. I decided to cancel it. Their very rich and sophisticated web site lets me change just about anything, but there’s no mention, anywhere, including FAQ and help, on canceling. Oh, and wait, there’s more: there is an 1-800 number to call. But guess what, they too can’t cancel. They have to forward you to someone else, and wait again, who then tries to talk you out of canceling. Geez.
I was supposed to fly from San Fransisco to Boston today. Monday (2 days ago) I got an email from JetBlue saying, more or less: “Sorry to tell you, but your flight has been canceled. Please call 1-800-xxx to make a new reservation or get a refund.” No explanation of why. I was taken aback, but I guess it happens all the time. After spending 30 minutes on hold, I was able to make new plans which had me leaving a day early (yesterday.) Back safe and sound now. To JetBlue’s credit for the moment, they are waving all change fees and more importantly, any fare differences. From their web site it seems like the flight was canceled due to ‘weather.’ While indeed tonight at 10pm we’re supposed to be in the middle of a blizzard here in Boston, on Monday, when they canceled, the weather today was predicted to ok. I guess they have better weather forecasters than the weather channel!
I wrote the other day about the ‘amusing’ dust-up between the RealClimate blog and Levitt and Dubner, authors of Super Freakonomics. Well today I see in the Wall Street Journal, a defense of Levitt and Dubner, but it’s an odd one. It actually supplies no facts (unlike the article I sited) just a criticism of ‘pro-climate-change’ (forgive the generalization) people ...
I can’t vouch for the accuracy, but it is fun to see a major league cat-fight errupting between academics. Here’s the conclusion:
“May I suggest that if you should happen to need some friendly help next time you take on the topic of climate change, or would like to have a chat about why aerosol geoengineering might not be a cure-all, or just need a critical but informed opponent to bounce ideas off of, you don’t have to go very far….” (from An Open Letter To Steve Levitt)
...
This is actually a pretty cool idea! Here’s a quote from Scott’s post: “I’d like to see a Wheaties box featuring Sally Ride, the first American woman in space (who also happened to be an astrophysicist and Stanford PhD); Internet pioneers Tim Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf; the great primatologist Jane Goodall…” (from: Dear General Mills)
This article is somewhat mathematical but I am sure it still hugely simplifies the logic that led us astray. If you are a pop-math-head like me you will find it interesting: “For five years, Li’s formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.” (from Recipe for Disaster: The Formula that Killed Wall Street)
“NASA’s Phoenix lander may have captured the first images of liquid water on Mars – droplets that apparently splashed onto the spacecraft’s leg during landing, according to some members of the Phoenix team.” (from Newscientist.com)
Now there’s a big topic, eh? A magazine that I don’t normally read has a good, in depth, thoughtful article about the debate between Religion and Science (see what I just did?). It comes in the guise of a book review (oddly the author has, himself, recently come out with a competing book, which does undermine his objectivity a little bit.) Still, it’s an excellent overview. (Funnily enough, the factoid that stayed with me the longest from this article is that Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on the exact same day. Talk about trivia!)
“It is a depressing fact that while 74 percent of Americans beli...
“Revelers will have an extra second to enjoy the New Year celebrations.
Drunken party goers may not notice but, thanks to the Earth’s erratic rotation, the countdown to 2009 will last a moment longer.
British physicists and official timekeepers around the world will insert a “leap second” to bring the most accurate atomic clocks in line with the astronomical day[…]” from Big Ben Adjusted for Leap Second
Happy New Year. Bon Anja, Tur Kos Bon!
Now here‘s a recommendation: “I recently got a hold of what I consider to be the nicest mathematical book in my collection. As a matter of fact, it’s the nicest book I own, period – even though I posses bookshelves teaming with terrific titles on mathematics, science, programming, computer science, photography and so on.” (from Math-Blog)
That goes right onto my wish list!
Check out this post Field notes from a Nature Conservancy meeting: “First, the Nature Conservancy has a strongly science-based policy for making land-purchasing decisions. They take into account things like the minimum viable ecosystem size in determining which acquisitions will actually have lasting impact.
Trouble is, for many areas, the conditions those decisions are based on may change.
Areas near sea level are an obvious example. But so are the more than 10,000 acres of native tallgrass prairie that they have protected in Kansas. How much will that ecosystem change with the projecte...
Check out this post Evidence of a Global SuperOrganism: “So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.” (from: from The Technium)
Another great essay by Kevin Kelley. He’s such a great writer. Here are some other wonderful passages:
“This megasupercomputer is the Cloud of all clouds, the largest pos...
A very interesting article in Edge.org (by the way, an always interesting site.) This one is called Moral Psychology and the misunderstanding of religion: “I study morality from every angle I can find. Morality is one of those basic aspects of humanity, like sexuality and eating, that can’t fit into one or two academic fields. I think morality is unique, however, in having a kind of spell that disguises it. We all care about morality so passionately that it’s hard to look straight at it. We all look at the world through some kind of moral lens, and because most of the academic community uses the same lens, we validate each other’s...
An interesting, quirky, though-provoking — memorable article in Wired about Memory: “[snip…]SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget.” (from Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn?)
The other day I came across this article in the Boston Globe about one of the greats of Computer Science, Seymour Papert, inventor of the seminal Logo programming language and many other important accomplishments. “He was long a jewel of the MIT faculty. Now, after a devastating brain injury, mathematician Seymour Papert is struggling bravely to learn again how to think like, speak like, be like the man of genius he was.” (from In Search of a Beautiful Mind, The Boston Globe)
Hard to believe that I hadn’t heard of it before. So Sad. Read the whole article, it’s worthwhile.
It’s rare that I watch/listen to a whole Youtube. But here you go… [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRRDzFROMx0&hl=en]
“The new image shows tan clouds moving away from the foot of a 700-metre slope, where dust and material made of water ice and frozen carbon dioxide have just tumbled down.” (from New Scientist)
This is one of those times when a picture is worth 1,000 words 🙂
Check out this post from I, Cringely . The Pulpit | PBS: A couple months have passed since I announced Team Cringely, my plan to win the Google Lunar X Prize by landing a rover on the Moon and driving it around. This week the first of the GLX contestants formally registered with more to follow, including Team Cringely, so it would seem that an update is in order. Mostly, though, I want to cover what has emerged as the primary motivation behind Team Cringely, which is literally preserving the entire idea of going to space, an idea that — at lea...
Just a curious fact from Scientific American: “All the bacteria living inside you would fill a half-gallon jug; there are 10 times more bacterial cells in your body than human cells [snip…]”
Have you had this debate? Does cold weather cause people to catch colds more easily or not? Well here’s an interesting article that says there is ‘scientific’ proof that flu infections do in fact spread more during cold winter months: “Researchers in New York believe they have solved one of the great mysteries of the flu: Why does the infection spread primarily in the winter months? The answer, they say, has to do with the virus itself. It is more stable and stays in the air longer when air is cold and dry, the exact conditions for much of the flu season.” (from New York Times)...
Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software gave an outstanding talk at Yale which he has written up on his blog. For budding Computer Science majors, people getting into the computer world or business, there is a lot of good wisdom to be found here: My favorite passage is the discussion about the value put on software, from the perspective of those who are involved in creating it. Here’s how he introduces the topic, but you should really read the whole thing:
“Currently, in the battle between the geeks and the suits, the suits are winning, because they control the budget, and honestly, I don’t know if that’s such a bad thing. The suits recognize that there are diminishing returns to f...
I know that access to my blog is blocked at least by EMC (heard so from friends there) so I will refrain from quoting this article’s first word: “ucking became the subject of congressional debate in 2003, after NBC broadcast the Golden Globe Awards. Bono, lead singer of the mega-band U2, was accepting a prize on behalf of the group and in his euphoria exclaimed, “This is really, really, ucking brilliant” on the air.” (from Pinker on Why We Curse)
It’s actually a serious article about linguistics, culture and human nature. Well written, well reasoned and interesting. Read Steven Pinker, Why We Curse, “What the F***?”
A really interesting experiment reported in various places trigger the sensation of an [tag]out of body experience[/tag]. I read about it first in the New York Times: “Scientists induce Out-of-Body Sensation.” But here are some additional links about it:
New Scientist: “Out-of-body experiences are ‘all in the mind'” Ars Technica: “On-demand out-of-body-experiences: all you need are VR goggles and a stick” Mind Hacks: “Do try this at home”.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQAc_Z2OfQ&w=425&h=350]
Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just posting a pointer to this interesting story over that the ever-legitimate Freakonomics Blog. The depths to which people will sink to get certain words and images on their blogs, it’s just outragous. Shameful.
Check out this post from the always respectable Freakonomics Blog:
“
I blogged nearly a year ago about a study by the evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa wh...
Check out this post from Ajaxian:
"Dheera Venkatraman has released Fooplot, a new website that plots any function, and supports Google Maps-style panning around.
Fooplot is currently using SVG and VML to do the rendering and canvas support is coming for Safari.
For good SVG browsers like Firefox and Opera, 3D plots work too.
In the future, it will communicate with Google spreadsheets and interact with server-side scripts that do curve fitting and other tasks.
(from: Fooplot: function plotting)
When I was a kid I remember reading about this pattern. I never knew it was called a, what, Analemma??? Anyway, Check out this post from Good Math, Bad Math:
...
Check out this post from dzone.com: latest front page:
I just finished a fantastic book called "Algorithms", by Sanjoy Dasgupta, Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani. Even better: this book is free and can be downloaded in PDF form from the authors’ web site.
Kottke points to anamusing set of logic questions posted by “3 Quarks Daily” with the (silly – you’ll see why) suggestion that it might make good dinner table conversation this Thanksgiving (in the US , of course 🙂 I won’t repeat Kottke’s quote of the Rope Burning Question, but you should check it out. The scenario is about two ropes which burn at different rates, but take always take exactly an hour, and you have a lighter. It ends with: “Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it?”
I thought about it for about 60 seconds. Clearly the answer is: “I use a stopwatch.”
I don’t think that’s the answer that Kottke or Abbas Raza had in mind, but that’s the kind of crowd that sits around my table… You?
Saw this in the newspaper today – “Mars Rover Visits Crater, Then Poses for a Picture.. Also here’s an article with some links to the high res snaps of the rover: NASA’s Mars Rover and Orbiter Team Examines Victoria Crater | SpaceRef – Your Space Reference. You gotta love this stuff!
This article: The Role of RSS in Science Publishing: Syndication and Annotation on the Web is a very interesting survey of RSS and issues that folks in the Science community have to be aware of.
I saw these two books in Barnes and Noble. They look quite interesting. I might get them.
The God Theory. I am always interested in the various evolution vs. intelligent design debates, and this book claims to come up with a way to accommodate both into one framework or paradigm.
**The Wealth of Networks. ** This is a fairly dense, scholarly book about networks, social and otherwise. Looks very interesting, but honestly, it may be too thick 🙂
Technorati Tags: book
Looks like this is practically an online book on the topic. Also, WikiPedia has a detailed entry on the subject. (Via Digg)
Technorati Tags: crypto
Pop!Tech 2005 was a great conference, again. I made notes only when something struck me as interesting or memorable or quotable, so this list of memes is very quirky just based on my in-the-moment reactions!
“Barcode of Life” – Robert Hanner.My summary of this is that it is a specific gene sequence that can be found across a very wide spectrum of organisms, which has the characteristic that it is more or less the same in individuals from a single species and very different in individuals from different species. Such a sequence can be used to establish the borders between species. See ...
Interesting and amusing little article from ACM Queue:
“One of the students, Jeremy Stribling, explains how they had developed a computer program to generate random sequences of technobabble in order to confirm their suspicions that papers of dubious academicity were bypassing serious, or indeed, any scrutiny. In fact, the students claim ulterior, financial motives behind this lack of proper peer review.” (from Call That Gibberish?)
Technorati Tags: funny, interesting
If you are interested in the Intelligent Design debate, this is an fascinating and somewhat surprising article about a survey done by the Pew Research Center for the People. As usual with this kind of thing it is useful to know the bias of the folks doing the survey, which I have not looked into at all.
“Despite these fundamental differences, most Americans (64%) say they are open to the idea of teaching creationism along with evolution in the public schools, and a substantial minority (38%) favors replacing evolution with creationism in public school curricula.” (from “Religion: A Strength and Weakness for Both Parties“)
Interesting reading.
Technorati Tags: intelligentdesign, science
The New York Times is running a series on the Evolution/Intelligent Design ‘debate’. Quite interesting. I was startled to see this in the article, though:
Referring to the Discovery Institute, one of the main think tanks pushing the ID agenda, the New York Times says:
“A closer look shows a multidimensional organization, financed by missionary and mainstream groups – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year, including $50,000 of Mr. Chapman’s $141,000 annual salary – and asserting itself on questions on issues as varied as local transportation and foreign affairs.” (from “Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive”, New York Times)
The New York Times series is just beginning (2 articles so far) and seems to be a good survey of the issue.
If you, like me, are a space buff, you will find these pieces about space-shuttle safety very interesting (and follow the links too.) So check these out:
“They’re going to kill more astronauts” (from Terrestrial Musings) and “Nobody’s Perfect” (from Tech Central Station.)
You know I am a fan of the cool little Mars Rovers. Here’s an interesting little bit from Nasa: “Mars Orbiter Sees Rover Tracks Among Thousands of New Images
NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor, starting its third mission extension this week after seven years of orbiting Mars, is using an innovative technique to capture pictures even sharper than most of the more than 170,000 it has already produced.
One dramatic example from the spacecraft’s Mars Orbiter Camera shows wheel tracks of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and the rover itself. Another tells scientists that no boulders bigger than about 1 to 2 meters (3 to 7 feet) are exposed in giant ripples created by a catastrophic flood.
...
Here’s an interesting link that continues on the theme from my previous post on Agent Based Modeling. This isn’t agent based, but it is kind of the most auspicious use of simulation one could imagine: “Computing the Cosmos. One of the biggest computer simulations ever run is illuminating the deepest mysteries of the universe.”
And now for something completely different. I was reading this book: “It’s Alive” over the weekend. Particularly of interest to me was all the discussion about so-called “Agent Based Modeling.” Agent based modeling is a big word for simulations used generally to research and understand systems involving many independent agents. They often have very cool visual displays where you can see, variously the agents traversing their space, growing, reproducing, exchanging, consuming, etc. ...
Amazing little rover “calculates its own location in the universe…..on Mars”: I just can’t get enough of this amazing bit of engineering called the Mars Rover. Get this:
Opportunity also updated its “attitude knowledge,” which fine-tunes the rover’s information about its exact location and position on Mars….To adjust the attitude knowledge, engineers have the rover turn the panoramic camera to the Sun and watch the Sun travel across the sky for 15 minutes. The rover is then smart enough to take the Sun movement data collected from the panoramic camera to calculate its own location in the universe…..on Mars.
This is such an amazing little machine. That’s not even getting into the astronomy, orbitall mechanics, geology, physics, and who knows what other basic science that determines the core algorithms. Hats off to the team who built it.
The 100-Million-Mile Network – Great article about one of my favorite topics, the Mars Rover. There are several really interesting blogs about this project as well, that I’d recommend for the space buffs among you!
I’m not that geeky: I am totally fascinated and entralled with what’s going on on Mars right now. I’ve followed all sorts of sources and recently came across this blog by Susan Kitchens who has very detailed posts about what’s going on. I don’t know who she is or how she’s connected, but it’s a pretty comprehensive way to keep up.
As a software guy I am very interested in how the software for the Rover is put together. I asked Susan whether she could give me some pointers, which led to this recent post in her blog, which I thought was amusing:
“Backing up the Mars Rover Mission: ...
Living in 3d? So here are these really cool 3D Mars Pictures. But my question is, where do I get the specs? I saw these freebie 3D glasses, but who knows if they are the right kind. I will report further if I find out. Faithful readership, please let me know?
Some amazing (Mars) panoramas. This is via Boing Boing. If you look at the navigation device in the bottom right, you’ll see that this site actually is an archive of all kinds of cool 360 degree panoramas!
Wonderful Mars pictures? Unavailable! I was looking around the Mars Rover Web site for some of those amazing pictures, and to my surprise they are now asking for a password to get into the ‘raw images’ area. I’ve got to believe that this is not for security but because their server was getting totally beat up by people like me browsing around.
Hmm, maybe they should use some warez technology? Here maybe for the first time is a very ligitimate, legal, and useful place where Bit Torrent and other clever file sharing technologies could be used as a force for good 🙂
Absolutely stunning animation of recent mars landing. I do not exagerate! Check it out.
