Intellectual Land Grab
The Libertarian think tank CATO recently published a small, trite piece that attempts to establish The Case against Literary (and Software) Patents. Being a Libertarian, I actually agree with the position; I just don’t think that this article fully explored…
Fully Homomorphic Encryption
I didn’t know it at the time I posted my idea on secure computing, but others have been working on the idea for quite some time. It turns out that Craig Gentry recently published Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices….
Building Linguistic Structure
Yesterday, I had an interesting thought. My advisor once made the cultural observation that many people in Computer Science invent their own language and then immediately write a self-hosting compiler. I agree that a compiler is quite a feat of…
Decentralized Garbage Collection
When I visited Washington D.C. for ASPLOS/VEE, I was working on my paper about cascade failure, and had distributed systems on my mind. Some of the papers at the joint conference were about garbage collection. One of the more interestring…
Automatic Thesaurus
Last week, I landed on another PhD worthy research project. Given a very large corpus of sentences, such as a digitized version of the Library of Congress, or a less noisy version of the Internet, how can you automatically generate…
Preventing Cascade Failure in Networks
For some reason I was thinking about the cascade failure problem that I mentioned before my Holiday Hiatus. I discovered that this problem has gone largely unsolved when attending ACSAC ’08, and it’s been in the back of my mind…
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…
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…
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,…
Car PC
I’ve kinda been looking at the computer market recently, So I decided to goto Fry’s today, just to look around. While there I saw on the display of motherboards, some tiny Mini-ITX systems. They were all a bit underpowered, but…