Went in for day surgery this morning to repair a torn tendon. I expected to have a pretty well useless right arm for a week or so until everything healed up. I hadn't expected to be conpletely fuzzy-headed.

-- hendrik

Tuesday afternoon I tripped and fell at home. I injured my right leg. Although I could still hobble a bit then, trying to get to French class was no longer an option ( Read more... )

Walking back from where I parked my car today, I realized how difficult it is to make sure specifications are satisfied, once you start looking at them formally. There are specifications with obvious meanings, and obvious algorithms to satisfy them. But ( Read more... )

I heard on Friday that my brother Willlem, who lived in Winnipeg, had died. So I've gone off to Winnipeg for a week to do what I can to help settle his affairs and organize a memorial service. It's keeping me pretty busy.

-- hendrik

I can't say I understand very much of it, but The Physical Interpretation of Daseinisation seems to present a formulation of quantum mechanics in which there's a true state space for quantum systems, which provides actual states for the system to actually be in, independent of any measurements we might want to perform on them. It then identifies ( Read more... )

I've just encountered project Xanadu, which seems to have been the original attempt at a true hypertext system -- or at least, one of the early, visionary ones. It seems still to be alive, and its web site and its Australian affiliate have some interesting ideas and critiques of the present web.

About 40 years ago I had been writing an Algol 68 compiler. I started it at the University of Alberta. It wasn't finished after I spent about two and a half years on it, and I decided that was enough. I has essentially a complete, functioning front end, and a fairly incomplete draft of a code generator. The whole thing was written in Algol W ( Read more... )

I wonder if the propensity of networks to cancel potentially long-running, coherently plotted series during the first season is inhibiting people from starting to watch them, thereby exacerbating the problem.

My calendar is broken. It's stubbornly stuck on March, but when I go outside in this lovely weather, it's obviously May.

-- hendrik

Multidimensional time

In which the author probably reveals his ignorance about quantum mechanics,

or

A little knowledge is a dangerous thingSo it turns out, in Kaluza-Klein theory, it's quite easy to unify electromagnetics and gravity relativistically. And the math is beautiful. So beautiful as to be quite convincing, except for one detail. ( Read more... )