The GNU’s Thumb
Alright, So I’ve been thinking about keeping my home directory in git recently. I have a machine that I can dedicate to storing a ‘master copy’ and I’ve no problem with creating scripts and minor utils to help things along….
Bounding Problution.
Problutions (noun, pl.): the problems that are an inherent part of solution to a very difficult and complex problem. These problems arise from within the solution itself, and are extrinsic to the original problem. Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit…
Eclectic Tastes in Music
I don’t usually listen to music at all, The only band that I know for sure that I like is Rush (and that’s primarily because they have works inspired by Rand, in addition to a light sprinkling of non-traditional psychedelic…
Graph of the English Language
Dictionaries are really great tools, but they can only go so far. The really good ones (The OED) will give the user a really good ‘feel’ for the word, a sense of the connotations that go beyond the straightforward definition….
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…
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…
Printed Circuits
My laptop broke, so I took it apart to see what was wrong (a personality trait developed in early childhood). All signs point to a hardware problem, one that I’m incapable of fixing. This situation is absolutely galling. Like most…
Class Inheritance as a cyclic graph
This is a highly speculative idea. Lately, I’ve been dreaming of a system where inheritance would be extremely general. None of this hierarchical nonsense. I’m looking for something with more flexibility. I’m looking for dynamic binding, done as late as…
The Three types of Existence
I know that I promised a post about process composition and software architecture, but this just can’t wait. Last night I had a really nice conversation with one of my high school friends about the nature of existence. It all…