January 2008
63 posts
“At its heart, mathematics is about understanding the underlying structure...”
– T. V. Ranman, in Thinking of Mathematics —An Essay on Eyes-free Computing
American Scientist Online - The Easiest Hard... →
Picking team members is way harder than it seems.
“Dad, how many slices of pizza are left?” “Billions and billions! Oh wait, no, I...”
– A spot-on Carl Sagan impression
The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World |... →
Indeed.
“[I am reminded] of a story related by Bertrand Russell about when he was...”
– John Allen Paulos, in his book Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up. Review of the book in 3quarksdaily.com.
“We’re meant to die. It’s what makes anything about us matter.”
– Aeon Flux
The artist as mad scientist →
A nice article on Natalie Jeremijenko. By the way, here’s a discussion about science as a public enterprise between her and physicist Lawrence Krauss.
Jennifer Ouelette in Cocktail Party Physics:Another problem we’re all too familiar with is the tendency of scientists to lapse into “lecture mode” rather than having an actual conversation with their listeners. It’s that tendency that inspired this Walt Whitman poem (which Alda read aloud during the event): When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the...
tehn with two fifty six from tehn on Vimeo. Totally cool! monome.org
Maybe we couldn’t be so easily convinced to wage unnecessary wars if people cared as much about soldiers and foreign civilians as they do about actors. — marco
“[…] coming to school is always a little traumatic. You’ve got to give up...”
– Seymour Papert
“But 90 per cent of what we teach in school math is irrelevant today. A lot of it...”
– Seymour Papert, in an interview with Geraldine Doogue
“We’re driving faster and faster into the future, trying to steer by using...”
– Marshall McLuhan
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
– Alan Kay
“I tell them [intelligent design advocates] they ought occasionally to think less...”
– David Attenborough
Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really... →
“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.”
– Alan Kay
“Nosotras opinamos que newton es un gran hombre, bno era :P
y qreemos que...”
– A comment in Tecnología Obsoleta
“It’s so cold outside. At least I have a PC running now so the room is warm...”
– Chris Morrell in Twitter.
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter...”
– Dr. Seuss
The Science Creative Quarterly » SCIENCE VS.... →
The Science Creative Quarterly » SCIENCE VS.... →
I realize that I’m not capable of multitasking. At least not consciously.
DevTopics | 101 Great Computer Programming Quotes →
“The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether...”
– Edsger W. Dijkstra
Iwata Asks: Super Mario Galaxy →
Interviews about the development of Super Mario Galaxy.
“Our world might be a better and more enlightened place if all of us dropped the...”
– J. J. S. Boyce.
I always found it incredible. He would start with some problem, and fill up pages with calculations. And at the end of it, he would actually get the right answer! But he usually wasn’t satisfied with that. Once he’d got the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was obvious. And often he’d come up with one of those classic Feynman straightforward-sounding...
“Así como el hierro se oxida por falta de uso, así también la inactividad...”
– Leonardo da Vinci.
How much publicity do you think I would get if I ran on a platform of “true” representative democracy, ie if I was elected President, I would work with top notch computer security dudes to set up a website where everyone could vote each time I had to make a decision. It would have to have *major* voter fraud detection, and there are still some people who don’t have Internet...