ACSAC 2008
So, I went to ACSAC the other week, and sketched out some crazy notes: It seems that nobody is really working on large scale distributed systems reliability. By this I mean things like the Internet and the Power Grid. Both…
Application to Grad School
I’ve been at UCI for a whole quarter now and it looks like I never posted the application that did so much towards getting me here. Although I am now working on web browser security, rather than parallel computing, my…
P vs NP
We’ve reached the NP-completeness section of my Fundamental Algorithms class, and I’ve noticed something interesting about P and NP. class P NP-complete Euler tour Hamiltonian Cycle 2-SAT 3-SAT Shortest path Longest simple path We have problems from a variety of…
Neologisms
Yesterday at the pub I was involved in a very extended (civil and remarkable productive) dialog about morality and society. We touch on many topics in the course of discussion, one of them being the difference between reason and faith….
Probability Programming
Yesterday a very interesting speaker, Eric Hehner, gave a talk at the graduate seminar: TITLE A Probability Perspective ABSTRACT This talk could be called “probability meets programming”. It draws together four perspectives that contribute to a new understanding of probability…
Mawwiage…
It’s been 4 days since Californians voted to deny rights to a certain minority of its population. Let’s look at a few of the arguments against gay marriage: It protects our children from being taught in public schools that “same-sex…
Can an Instutition be immoral?
Last night I was embroiled in a long argument with my flatmate about the Government. I used the typical Libertarian claim that the government was an immoral institution because it uses coercive force to collect taxes. Of course, he countered…
Function calling notation.
I was reading Yegge’s rant Rhinos and Tigers, and he mentioned that: So it’s kind of unfortunate when you have to use functions, because if you have to say, you know, HTMLElement.getChildren.whatever, it gets inverted with functions: whatever(getChildren(HTMLElement)). You have…
An interesting series of questions.
I caught this scribbled on a piece of paper, as I was cleaning my desk today. Is there anything more valuable than human life? If No: Then when reason have we to live? If Yes: Then do such things justify…
Children’s Books of Science
Today I decided to send the following email. Usually, when I do such things it doesn’t make any difference. But it still never hurts to try. We’ll see what becomes of my efforts this time. Dear PZ Myers and richarddawkins.net,…