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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
I’ve seen much recently piggy-backing on the Wisdom of Crowds. Much of the Web 2.0 seems highly focused on exploiting this phenomenon: Datamining the crowd: Yahoo and Google both have an Answers service that purports to harness the wisdom explicitly….
Last week I had to attend an all day course for new TA’s (even though I won’t become a TA until at least next year). For lack of a better spot to record the notes I took during the class,…
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…