!markdown ( Read more... )

There's a petition up on the British Government's e-petitions website, called "teach our kids to code". Despite being plugged by geek luminaries like Ben Goldacre, it's received barely a thousand signatures at the time of writing. I think this issue is much more important than that ( Read more... )

Occasionally, when I link to my post complex numbers made straightforward, people tell me "but students are used to extending the number line with fractions and surds and negatives already, you should just tell them that you're extending it again in an analogous way!"

So here's an example of someone who was hopelessly confused by complex numbers ( ( Read more... )

I'm currently running a lot of benchmarks in my day job, in the hope of perhaps collecting some useful data in time for an upcoming paper submission deadline - this is the "science" part of "computer science". Since getting a given benchmark suite built and running is often needlessly complex and tedious, one of my colleagues has written an ( Read more... )

A couple of months ago, I decided to re-evaluate my long-held hatred for Radiohead and their works, by sitting down and listening to their first five albums in a row. I learned that my teenage self was wrong: Radiohead are capable of producing good music. However, they don't seem to be capable of doing so consistently. Some of their albums I ( Read more... )

Today I shall be mostly listening to Radiohead, in an attempt to find out if they're as bad as I remember ( Read more... )

Here's a pattern I see a lot in imperative languages:
sub doStuff {

# do this
code
code
code
more code

# do that
code
code
code
code
more code

# do t'other
code
code
code
code
}
That is, a long subroutine with different sections separated out by vertical whitespace ( Read more... )

You may have seen this image, on a poster or a fridge magnet or a birthday card or some other flat surface:


( Read more... )

It occurred to me recently that programming comes in several flavours, and that how much I enjoy a programming task depends strongly on which flavour predominates. The flavours I've identified so far, in descending order of how much I like them, are the following:

Data munging: You have a large mass of data in some fairly generic form, and must ( Read more... )

Dear Facebook,

You know I'm not single. If you track IP addresses, which I'm sure you do, then you also know that I share a computer with my girlfriend, and thus even if I were inclined to stray, I wouldn't do so from here.

So could you please stop showing me adverts for hot singles I could meet in my area?