Advice from Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang: Forget about the tools … buy a decent book and type in the programs by hand. One at a time thinking as you go. After 30 years you will get the hang of…
Monthly Archives: July 2011
How to design a quiet room
How would you design a quiet study room? If you know a little about acoustics you might think to avoid hard floors, hard surfaces, parallel walls, and large open spaces. The reading room of the Life Science Library at the…
NASA and bank bailouts
From astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: The US bank bailout exceeded the half-century lifetime budget of NASA. Source Other NASA-related posts: After two days, I’d turned into an idiot Good enough for Google and NASA Team Moon
Posted in Science
Friday miscellany
Space photography LIFE’s top 21 space photos A photo history of the space shuttle Math New results in space filling Applied topologist audio interview Funny Little Calculus Text Markov chains and magic tricks C++ Why is C++ so fast? Why…
Posted in Uncategorized
Maybe C++ hasn’t jumped the shark after all
A couple years ago I wrote a blog post Has C++ jumped the shark? I wondered how many people would care about the new C++ standard by the time it came out. I doubted that it would matter much to…
Golden Carnival of Mathematics
Welcome to the 79th edition of the Carnival of Mathematics. By tradition, each edition begins with a bit of trivia about the number of the carnival. Gold has atomic number 79, so this is the golden edition. There is an…
Sorting
From Knuth’s book Sorting and Searching: Computer manufacturers of the 1960′s estimated that more than 25 percent of the running time of their computers was spent on sorting, when all their customers were taken into account. In fact, there were…
Posted in Computing
From the world, to the world
Edmund Harriss describes an interesting pattern he sees in mathematics and constructivist art in his interview on Strongly Connected Components. For most of history, mathematics and art have been fairly direct abstractions of physical reality. Then in the 20th century…
Friday miscellany
Diagrams Tech company org charts Beer diagram Education Advantages of printed textbooks 16 things a CS major should do before graduating Math What Alan Turing did for his PhD 13 surprising Fibonacci appearances Computing The implementation of functional programming languages…
Posted in Uncategorized
