-
I'm giving a guest lecture!
I'm giving a guest lecture on computation and computability and the halting problem! It was impossible to find a good drawing of a Turing machine on the Internet - even on the HMC CS department web pages - so I had to make my own:
( Read more... ) -
Hooray! Obama won!
Obama - the candidate for people who wish they weren't as cynical as they actually are.
Obama - the one who, with Alan Keyes, was the natural experiment that led to the measurement of the crazification factor.
Stealing a quote from that previous article, Don't You Dare Kill Obama (... and we know you're thinking about it). The best reactions I ( Read more... ) -
Answering a question from my Dad
Is Kindle the future of reading?Kinda ( Read more... ) -
Torture is not okay.
Torture is not okay. It is, in fact, never okay. I was reminded of this when I read this description of a Yemeni man who was tortured into confessing by a despotic regime and then handed over to the US as a terrorist. He then spent 19 months having his mind broken in US "black site" prisons. Then, he was released without charges or explanation ( Read more... ) -
The Future of Science Fiction is a bunch of fantasy books based on the Bible.
Modern sci-fi has a problem. It can be summed up in two quotes: [The present is] too complex, with too many huge sci-fi tropes: global warming; the lethal, sexually transmitted immune-system disease; the United States, attacked by crazy terrorists, invading the wrong country. Any one of these would have been more than adequate for a science- ( Read more... ) -
Half-staff American flag
It seems like the flag has been flying at half-staff a lot recently. I haven't been able to dig up any data on how often this has been the case, so I'm asking you all: Do you know of any reference where I can see when, for the past few years, the flag was to be flown at half-staff? I see it so often that we are either living in extremely tragic ( Read more... ) -
Halloween!
I like Halloween. But mostly I really like staying home and handing out candy and eating the candy I should be handing out.
This year I realized that I had a nice confluence of technology, and so I used the projector to project the mirror-mirror-on-the-wall face onto the blinds of the front window. Now people have to walk in front of an animated ( Read more... ) -
Determining who the asshole is, and visualizing impersonal statistics
In any given situation, the person who is claiming that something is the end of the world is almost certainly an asshole. This is a handy rule of thumb, and applies pretty well across the board, with the possible exception of people talking about global thermonuclear war or other extinction-level threats (large asteroids, etc ( Read more... ) -
Sierra Summer Trip
Between August 30 and September 8 I went on an 8 day backpacking trip through the Sierras with my dad and brother. It was completely fantastic ( Read more... )
