ntownsend

The LulzSec twitter feed now appears to be empty.

Lesson learned: the public can (and must) stop big telecom putting Canada in a digital ghetto.

Alton Brown is the reason I started caring about food preparation. Good Eats is unlike most food shows in that its primary motivation is teaching the audience about food and the hows and whys of its preparation. I find that most food shows are about demonstrating individual, usually either uninteresting or impractical, recipes, or stroking the ego of the presenter. Throwdown With Bobby Flay, I'm looking at you.

Libertarian clap-trap. Governments and pies only become a bad combination when there is no meaningful oversight or regulation. Your point of view makes sense in America where this is the case.

The case is similar in Canada. I think this recent article by Jesse Brown reflects the reality for a lot of broadband-connected Canadians with similar viewing habits to broadband-connected Americans: http://www.torontolife.com/daily/informer/from-print-edition...

RIM has extremely talented engineers and developers, but it does not have a culture where engineers can say "We are doing the wrong thing" and have any decision-makers take notice. This is the fundamental problem with RIM. They have completely failed to effectively use the talent they have. If I were another technology company, I would definitely be trying to poach talent from them.

(Disclaimer: I'm a former RIM employee.)

And on that note, the creator has made the common mistake of performing the calculation speed_of_light * age_of_universe to determine the radius of the observable universe.

Space has expanded during the lifetime of the universe so the objects that emitted light at the edge of the observable universe have moved further away since emitting the light. The estimated distance to the edge of the observable universe is more like 47 billion light-years: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#DN

The visible universe, however, is a bit smaller since we can only see as far as the surface of last scattering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_rad...

I had very similar thoughts when I read the book. It seems to me that if there is no desire for class mobility then strata are not evil.

However, humans being what they are, it seems impossible to guarantee that lack of desire. This is (kind of) demonstrated by Bernard's discontent and by John the Savage's inability to cope with the society. Both were weak cases. Bernard because he was privileged, and John because he was a total outsider that was not acclimated to the culture.

You can set a few other parameters like your size, too. Unfortunately, no one else can see it. I was the biggest sperm you never saw.

...we'd need an impossible computer that could simulate years worth of exact quantum-level physics in a cubic meter of space...

...it might take a little more than the ten years to come up with any sensible code with hope of growing into an AI though...

Dude, you are all over the map.

... he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain.

At best, you could say it's a measure of the amount of irreducible complexity for an encoding of the required proteins. We don't seem to have a measure of the system, by which I mean the thing that models the relationships and interactions of the proteins (and their components) with each other and their environment.

In 2006, nearly half the population of Toronto was a "visible minority". It's estimated that more than half are now. Similarly, half of the population is foreign-born.

In JavaScript, Arrays are not actually arrays. They're not a contiguous block of memory. They're just Objects (i.e. hash tables) that key on integers.

If you look at the indices it will look like you have a bunch of undefined elements in the array, but no memory has actually been consumed for those indices in the array so nothing is wasted.

Whoops. You're right. I'm embarrassed because I do know the difference.

The argument that XML can have various different structures for storing a person's name, while JSON provides one simple solution, doesn't fly. You could run into something like { "Person": { "property": { "type": "first-name", "value": "John" }, "property": { "type": "last-name", "value": "Smith" } } }

This begs the question, "Why would you do something that convoluted?" Well, you can ask the same of the XML examples, and the answer probably boils down to requirements (or incompetence?).

I found that book a little too precious.

Yes. Yes, it is.

Relax, buddy. It's a joke.

I've just thought of the first app I'll make for the iPad. It will be a version of top. Seeing as the thing only runs one process at a time, it should practically be a one-liner.

In the case of real-valued functions of one variable (which is the case at hand), if the function has a minimum and is convex then the minimum is global. If the function is strictly convex (also this case) then it will have at most one global minimum.

No, in this case, a convex function is one where you can draw a straight line between any two points on its graph and not have the line intersect the graph at a third point.

I don’t have a paper to show you, some great insight into how von Neumann architecture is totally lame.

If it weren't for the von Neumann architecture the author wouldn't have pretty code to look at. I suppose he could write a post about the arty setting of switches and attachment of patch leads on his personal ENIAC.

It seems to me that the requirements for the existence of code meant to program a computer (and look pretty) are a memory to store the code and an automatic method of retrieving, and carrying out, the instructions in the code. That sounds a lot like the von Neumann architecture.

Also, I don't follow the analogy to pre- and post- relativistic physics. There was a shift in the intuition and the models used, but the object of study didn't change. Physics stayed the same. Electrons didn't change their behavior because we came up with new models for them. Similarly, in computer science, a shift in intuition and models doesn't change the nature of computation. The travelling salesman problem is still NP-complete.

For those interested in learning more about the character of Perleman and some of the controversy surrounding the Poincaré conjecture and it's proof, here's a great article from the New Yorker (dated Aug. 28, 2006): http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact2

One of the reasons that mathematics is so vast and powerful is because people have focused their efforts in specialized areas. If math weren't so broad that a single person could understand it all then it would be pretty unimpressive.

I disagree the characterization that mathematicians don't try to broaden their horizons. Like scholars of any subject, mathematicians follow their interests, which often take them to places never expected to be. To me, that fits the bill for "broadening horizons". And if they don't seem to move far outside of their focus of study, well, I say it has to be this way because mathematical material is often so dense and precise that it takes a very long time to understand what's going on in any one subject.

Most of the Internet == Wikipedia?

Good catch. I'm using "paradox" very loosely here. What I was trying to say is that we ignore the shortcomings of ZFC: undecidable statements, unnecessarily strong axioms added (regularity and replacement). In some ways avoiding Russell's paradox have made ZFC a weaker theory.

I agree, there was a vast effort, but that was decades ago. As I said, most working mathematicians don't concern themselves with these issues and just stick with ZFC.

Procedural programming is still mathematical.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the original post, but I'll go with it...

You also have category theory, proof theory, model theory, recursion theory, type theory... They all fail as "foundations" because they all emit paradoxes. In some cases these can effectively be ignored because they don't play into anything (ZFC, for example), and in others they can be ignored because we can work around them (e.g. category theory).

In fact, few working mathematicians actually care about mathematical "foundations" because there is no way to know if they are "correct".

For an excellent treatment of how doing mathematics is a subtle and dynamic interplay of the "Greek" and "Babylonian" approaches I recommend Imre Lakatos' "Proofs and Refutations" (http://books.google.ca/books?id=EjQqJT4Z-VoC&lpg=PP1&...). It's presented as a Socratic dialog and is simply fantastic.

I could not say that it is "mostly" about cost of living (edit: or standard of living, which is subjective).

Who's whining here except you about how the suburbs get a bad rap for being evil? Why don't YOU work to make YOUR urban center better, fix the schools, stop crime, and stop hiding from the big, bad city in the sprawl and disposable lifestyle of the cushy suburbs?