Hippasus is MMORPG designed to teach players math; the magic system for the game is based on solving mathematical problems.


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So, my friend Jonathan Walton pointed me to this amazing book on Google Book Search. I'll quote him about it:

Right after the Taiping Rebellion, a former British officer named Augustus Lindley wrote what is basically a pulp version of his (possibly fictional or exaggerated memoirs) of fighting on the side of the Taiping against the British and ( Read more... )

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I talked to John today, and realized that my denotational semantics for my little language makes no sense. I'm only half-annoyed by this, because it means that I'll have to learn domain theory properly in order to fix it, and to learn domain theory I need to get comfortable with category theory, because domain theory is a PITA without the language ( Read more... )

In which is it shown that if your dad is a chemistry professor, asking "Why?" can be dangerous awesome.

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I think I've written the most polymorphic non-toy two-line ML program ever.

val cross : (('a -> 'b -> 'c) -> 'd -> 'e -> 'f) ->
(('g -> 'h -> 'i) -> 'j -> 'b -> 'c) ->
('a -> 'g -> 'h -> 'i) ->
'e -> 'd -> 'j -> 'f

Here's the definition:

let cross outer inner f init xs ys ( Read more... )

Via Jim Henley, a book meme:

• One book that changed your life: Without question, that would be Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. This book literally changed how I saw the world  -- for days after I read it, angles were askew and colors were different, because everything I looked at I saw through the new frames of reference Ellison had created.
  
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"Those both sound like excellent subjects for postdoctoral research."

-- John

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