Learning to Learn.
It wasn’t until I was actually done with my undergraduate years at college, and had already gotten my self a job, that I learned the most valuable lesson of life: The programmer that wants to advance himself cannot afford to…
Cliff Stoll, another cool dude.
This morning one of my high school friends (Thomas) told me about Clifford Stoll. So I watched his TED conference video. Boy is he animated. Inaddition to having pursued a KGB computer infiltration (an article, book, and NOVA documentary), he…
Dymaxion mapping.
Ok, so I’ve been away awhile. I visited the Maker Faire, and San Deigo Amphib Base (twice). Two days ago I read Benford’s Cosm, start to finish. And learned that the nucleus of heavier elements are ellipsoidal rather than spherical….
the Maker Movement
I’ve been ruminating on the subject of personal liberation/gratification/independence that comes as a result of the do-it-yourself attitude. With sites such as Instructables, magazines like MAKE, radical changes in class structure occurring at major universities and development in the third…
The half-derivative
When I was in college, I once had this crazy notion of a half-derivative. We’d been taking nth-derivatives in physics, and I wondered “why stick to integers?”. Well, as it turned out, others had been there before me. At the…
Intelligence Expelled
Today I read about one of the most ironic events of which I’ve ever heard. You can’t make this kind of thing up. The atheistic PZ Meyers (a biologist and associate professor University of Minnesota, Morris), was kicked out of…
The Dryer Protocol
I’m becoming increasingly interested in systems engineering, but still don’t really know much about the subject. One thing that I read about recently (though I completely forgot where) was about how to choose a robust cooperation protocol, using the communal…
Bitstreams
This past weekend I spent an inordinate amount of time writing a small set of code that will allow the fetching of bits (rather than bytes) from a FILE *. For now this only supports reading, not writing. It’s meant…
Weekly Summary of Noospheric Echolocutions
This past week I finished my reading of Mandelbrot’s most recent book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. I actually didn’t like it that much. I found the book to be especially light on details; for a mathematical empiricist Mandelbrot didn’t actually…
Enlightened Materialism
I keep finding interesting stuff on this old HD; Here’s a documented e-mail conversation between myself and a high-school friend Jeff Peoples on materialism and the mind. It was dated 2004-04-07 and appears to have been written in response to…