". . . a logical machine following definite rules may never come to a conclusion. It may go on grinding through different stages without ever coming to a stop, either by describing a pattern of activity of continually increasing complexity, or by going into a repetitive process like the end of a chess game in which there is a continuing cycle of ( Read more... )

So, computers suck. All the best things about them, like Lisp, involve varying degrees of willfully thumbing one's nose at standard distinctions like "function vs. data" and bypassing layers of logical bureaucracy to bridge the distance between human instruction and physical hardware state as directly as possible. There's really not a lot of excuse ( Read more... )

You know that a rainbow appears when sunlight is refracted by tiny droplets of water, with each color of light being diverted through a slightly different angle and bouncing back from the raindrops to meet the observing eye. But if that's all there is to a rainbow, why don't the billions of differently colored light rays from billions of raindrops ( Read more... )

Heh heh heh heh heh . . .

"In education, as elsewhere, the broad primrose path leads to a nasty place."
-- Alfred North Whitehead, "The Aims of Education" (1916)

"My life has been one long series of mistakes."
-- Shunryu Suzuki

A couple of months ago, a seed was planted in my brain when Santo got all zen on me. Since then, I've had the growing sensation of something being ( Read more... )

As the marginal cost of transmitting information tends toward zero, the overhead associated with processing it tends toward infinity.

Poetry represents what we don't yet have words for. Words represent what we don't yet have math for.

In an earlier post I explained how genomic association studies run into a special case of the Birthday Problem in identifying genes mediating variance on complex traits. But there's a second problem they run into as well, which is analogous to the Winner's Curse in auction theory: in a silent auction where none of the bidders are sure just what the ( Read more... )

"Math is meaningless. That's what gives it its power."
-- Santo D'Agostino (in conversation)

This point goes deeper than it appears to.

1. I'm currently unemployed and looking for ways to not burn through my savings this year.

2. I happen to be taking a stats course that's required for my program.

3. I'm in a room that's mostly full of 2nd year psych majors who haven't had to do math since 10th grade and freak when they see a sigma.

Sometimes life just hands things to you.