February 2012
11 posts
English, the lightest weight programming language... →
A presentation on Metafor, a system for turning stories into programming scaffolding.
WatchWorkaround for lack of “tail call optimization” in JS
January 2012
38 posts
Teaching Semantics with a Proof Assistant: No More... →
By having students use a proof assistant instead of just writing proofs and having them graded, the feedback loop between proof ideas and proof verification is tightened, leading to students being better at writing proofs.
WatchSymphony of Science bonus track: The Cosmic Dance (Mindwalk Remix)
“I’m going to make a framework called Homeopathy where you’re...”
– via tilgovi
“John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States. He was born in 1790 and...”
– President John Tyler’s grandsons are still alive!!
A Minimalist Global User Interface, by Rob Pike →
I built a similar system once as a text editor plugin which let you execute selected Python code. The only way to pass arguments was to type or paste them. Pike’s interface provides a way to pass one argument via selection. You could allow an arbitrary number of selection-based arguments by having the user select the command then each of the arguments in turn. I haven’t tried it,...
Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index,... →
by Russ Cox
Elsevier — my part in its downfall →
Let's Play: Ancient Greek Punishment →
Flash-based art game about, you guessed it, ancient Greek punishment.
WatchBuilding a better foot by combining the best ideas from nature and engineering
WatchTED: John Hunter on the World Peace Game
Watch1923 silent film: The Einstein Theory of Relativity
“As a professor, one of the things I’m interested in doing is teaching people how...”
– Professor Alan J. Perlis
The Time Hack →
The author performs a number of activities, tracking the actual and perceived duration of the activities.
Isomorphism is not Enough →
Eight lazy ways to lose weight - New Scientist →
moot on prismatic identity →
“TRESOR is a secure implementation of AES which is resistant against cold boot...”
– TRESOR Runs Encryption Securely Outside RAM
“CryptDB is a system that provides practical and provable confidentiality in the...”
– CryptDB
Ending the Infographic Plague - Megan McArdle →
In short: lots of popular infographics are wrong. Don’t forget that “don’t believe everything you read” applies even when there are pictures involved. (I wonder what it would be like to live in a society with developed grammatical evidentiality, so that every statement had to be marked with what kind of evidence the speaker has for it. Especially if it was customary to...
WatchHow the golden angle fills a circle (by Charlie Loyd)
This helped me visualize how, by moving around a circle in strides of the golden angle, you partition it as smoothly as possible – for a fixed stride – as time increases indefinitely.
I think it’s equivalent to say that the golden angle is the only fixed stride such that every new division turns the largest gap into the smallest gap (and...
December 2011
31 posts
The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing... →
(I always thought the system would work better if we only bought stock that we wanted the dividends from.)