Free Thought
goodmath | May 11, 2007 Today's a mighty cool example of bizzare language design, called GammaPlex In terms of language
design, it's nothing particularly special: it's yet another stack language
with a befunge-like graphical syntax. What's unusual about GammaPlex is that it's strongly focused on graphics. It's got built in support for ascii graphics, OpenGL, and mouse input.
Gammaplex is by far the most complicated of the pathological languages that I've discussed. It's got a lot of instructions, and a lot of weird tricky little things in how the machine works - and frankly, most of them aren't particularly…
clock | May 2, 2007This was released to public today:
Conceived by Mathematica creator and scientist Stephen Wolfram as a way to bring computational exploration to the widest possible audience, The Wolfram Demonstrations Project is an open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts in science, technology, mathematics, art, finance, and a remarkable range of other fields.
Its daily-growing collection of interactive illustrations is created by Mathematica users from around the world, who participate by contributing innovative Demonstrations.
Interactive computational resources have…
goodmath | April 29, 2007 Since my post on datatypes for my π-calculus language, I've gotten a bunch of
questions from people who (I guess) picked up on the series after the original post where
I said that the idea of the series was to see if I could create a programming language
based on it. The questions are all variations on "Why design another programming language? Do you really think anyone will ever use it?"
I'll answer the second question first. Of course I realize that the chances that anyone
but me, and maybe a couple of readers, will ever use it are close to zero. But that's not the point.
Which brings us…
catdynamics | April 25, 2007if you want to help find planets, in the comfort of your home (as opposed to staying up all night on cold clear winter evenings), there is a place that you can go...
systemic is a web-site/blog run by Prof Greg Laughlin at UCSC to play with planet data
they do a lot of stuff, testing stability, inclination models, planet interactions etc all setup to run at the click of a button, you provide CPU cycles and eyeballs to look over the output.
systemic includes both synthetic data - testing observations of model systems, and real data, so users can run "solutions" for know systems, trying to fit…
oracknows | April 25, 2007A lot of readers (well, a couple, anyway) have been asking me about the recent article by Peter Duesberg in the most recent issue of Scientific American entitled Chromosomal Chaos and Cancer. I suppose it's because I'm not only a cancer surgeon (which in and of itself is not enough to qualify me to comment on this topic) but rather because I'm also a cancer researcher and a molecular biologist (which, I submit, does make me qualified to comment on this topic). Peter Duesberg, as you may know, is the controversial scientist who is perhaps the foremost advocate of the discredited hypothesis…
drorzel | April 18, 2007I've got another long lab this afternoon, so I'm stealing an idea for an audience-participation thread from James Nicoll:
Name five things we didn't know in the year that you were born that make the universe a richer place to think about.
This is actually a really interesting exercise for showing how rapidly the world has changed in the last N years. I'm not all that old-- to put it in pop-culture terms, the Beatles broke up before I was born-- but when I try to think about the landscape of science since then, it's astonishing how much the world has changed:
My own field of laser cooling,…
stoat | April 17, 2007Its EGU time again. Monday was a bit of a blur (technically I got to my hotel on monday, about half past midnight. Travelling Air Austria is a lot more pleasant than RyanAir, though).
Tuesday was better, partly because I gave up on the stupid "personal programme" stuff the site lets you build on-line and simply got one of the huge book-blocks of sessions.
Morning: global dimming/brightening. More stuff pretty well confirming the old: that GD masked increasing GHG forcing up till 1980 ish; and we've seen "brightening" since then (e.g. Wild). nb the conf search engine is here.
Ray Bradley…
goodmath | April 16, 2007 Now that things are settling down a little bit, I wanted to get back to the stuff I was writing about π-calculus. But looking back at what I've already written, I think I did a terrible job of introducing it. So I'm going to start over, and try to be more clear.
I'll start with a basic refresher of what π-calculus is for, and a bit of history for where it came from.
When computer networks first appeared and came into relatively widespread use, one of the problems that smart people recognized quite quickly is that communicating systems are fundamentally different from the kinds of…
drorzel | April 10, 2007I forgot to link to Sunday's New York Times article about D-Wave and their controversial claim to have made a working quantum computer, which prominently features quotes from the world's second funniest physics blogger:
Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Canada, fired the first shot. He wrote in his much-read blog, called "Shtetl-Optimized," that Orion would be as useful at problem-solving as "a roast beef sandwich." In an e-mail message to me, Dr. Aaronson denounced Orion as "hype." He said that he could…
goodmath | April 9, 2007 In addition to the classic {L|R} version of the surreal numbers, you can also describe surreals using something called a sign expansion, where they're written as a sequence of "+"s and "-"s - a sort of binary representation of surreal numbers. It's fully equivalent to the {L|R} construction, but built in a different way. This is a really cool, if somewhat difficult to grasp, construction.
It's based on ordinals (which we also called birthdays) Remember, ordinals are the numbered generations of surreal numbers. Ordinal 0 contains the value 0; ordinal one adds the values +1 and -1; ordinal…
thusspakezuska | April 6, 2007This is the first of several discussion posts for Week 3 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on Joy of Science in the Category section.
This post deals with the readings by Margolis, Fisher, & Miller (MFM), and Ginorio, Marshall, & Breckinridge (GMB). (Summaries are available here.)
"Feminism is not a unitary concept", Ginorio, Marshall, & Breckinridge (GMB) tell us. There have been many efforts to categorize different types of feminism. GMB refer to one of the most well-known, Alison Jaggar…
retrospectacle | April 5, 2007SETI used to do it, too. That is, have a volunteer program to chip in your CPU's processing power to help solve some problem (in SETI's case, look for ET). Now your idle Sony PS3 can be put to a similar use, but a bit more earthly.
The recent launch of a software update for Sony's Internet-enabled PlayStation 3 (PS3) games console has seen more than 50,000 owners sign up to take part in a medical-research project called Folding@home. The success has now led to discussions to make dozens of other such 'distributed computing' projects PS3-friendly.
Such projects are designed to create a virtual…
goodmath | April 4, 2007 Coming back from games to numbers, I promised earlier that I would define
division. Division in surreal numbers is, unfortunately, ugly. We start with
a simple, basic identity: if a=b×c, and a is not zero, then c=a×(1/b). So if we can define how to take the reciprocal of a surreal number, then division falls out naturally from combining it the reciprocal with multiplication.
This is definitely one of my weaker posts; I've debated whether or not to post it at all, but I promised that I'd show how surreal division is defined, and I don't foresee my having time to do a better job of explaining…
aardvarchaeology | March 30, 2007In recent years, I've bought three copies of a useful piece of software as part of package deals on computers. The software licences include free on-line upgrades, and hardly a week goes by without an offer of some tweak or patch to improve the workings of things. I gratefully partake.
I've been a loyal customer of this software company for almost 20 years. But when I heard what the newest version of their product is like, I began considering alternatives. And in the past few days, I have received offensive messages from them that made up my mind real quick.
Dear Reader, have you heard of…
evolvingthoughts | March 27, 2007
Many words in English come directly via Latin or indirectly via French from Latin, and they have a meaning in English that is sometimes quite different from their etymology, occasionally leaching back into French.
Two such words are instruction and information, and both have peculiar meanings when used in the context of genetics.
Instruction is particularly interesting. The OED tells us that it has the following etymology:
[f. L. instruct-, ppl. stem of instruÄre to build, erect, set up, set in order, prepare, furnish, furnish with information, teach, f. in- (IN-2) + struÄre to pile up…
clock | March 26, 2007Pediatric Grand Rounds: Vol 1 Issue 25 is up on Musings of a Distractible Mind. The theme is Tom and Jerry.
oracknows | March 26, 2007The latest Pediatric Grand Rounds has been posted at Musings of a Distractible Mind, delivered in Tom and Jerry style.
Gee, obviously, Dr. Rob isn't aware that Tom and Jerry are a nefarious Jewish plot to corrupt Muslim youth. After all, an Iranian "expert" tells us this is so.
goodmath | March 20, 2007 In my earlier post about John Backus, I promised to write something about his later work on
functional programming languages. While I was in a doctors office getting treated for an awful
cough, I re-read his 1977 Turing Award Lecture. Even 30 years later, it remains a fascinating read,
and far from being dated, it's positively astonishingly to see both how far-sighted Backus was, and how little progress we've actually made.
Backus started from a pretty solid perspective. Almost all of the common programming
languages that we see - ranging from Backus's own 1950s version of Fortran, to the…
catdynamics | March 14, 2007In the building where I usually work, there are four doors on the ground floor.
The main front door, that I usually exit during the day; a back door that I usually enter and leave at the ends of the day; and a left and right side door.
The door to the left leads to a parking lot, with no sidewalk right where the cars turn into the lot entrance, but it is closer to the post office and coffee; the door to the right leads to a nice sidewalk, but it is set back from the main road, and closer to the downtown restaurants.
Two summers ago, the front door was blocked for many weeks by road…