September 2008
33 posts
McCain’s Suspension Bridge to Nowhere →
“It’s that utter power vacuum that gave McCain the opening to pull his potentially catastrophic display of economic “leadership” last week. He may be the first presidential candidate in our history to risk wrecking the country even before being voted into the Oval Office.”
Why can't we divide by zero? →
“The reason that the result of a division by zero is undefined is the fact that any attempt at a definition leads to a contradiction.”
Salman Rushdie in conversation with Jeffrey... →
With storytelling that mixes political intrigue and high drama, romance and magic, Jeffrey Eugenides and Salman Rushdie discuss the ways in which the novel is a reflection on war and politics, gender and society, fantasy and rumor, individuality and public life, and how the brutal past still influences our present world.
How to Securely Outsource Cryptographic... →
Susan Hohenberger, Anna Lysyanskaya. “How to Securely Outsource Cryptographic Computations.” TCC 2005.
“We address the problem of using untrusted (potentially malicious) cryptographic helpers.(…) We present two practical outsource-secure schemes. Specifically, we show how to securely outsource modular exponentiation, which presents the computational...
David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon commencement... →
(…) learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an...
“I think that comedy is the quintessential human reaction to the fear of death.”
– Umberto Eco (interview with The Paris Review)
“My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about...”
– P. J. Plauger, Computer Language, March 1983
“Life has no meaning the moment you loose the illusion of being eternal.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre
“We take almost all of the decisive steps in our lives as a result of slight...”
– Austerlitz (W. G. Sebald)
“When the winds of change are blowing, some people build shelters; others build...”
– Chris Bucchere
Greasemetal - Greasemonkey for Google Chrome →
Greasemetal is a userscript runtime for Google Chrome. The runtime hosts userscripts (tiny javascript files that modify the webpages being displayed) to be executed on Google Chrome, similar to what Greasemonkey does for Mozilla Firefox, or Greasekit does for Safari.
Lamb(da)
Urgh, failng to internalize lambda currying: http://tinyurl.com/675zbz
@timbray you say curried lambda, I hear Rogan Josh
“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and...”
– Miriam Beard
What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? →
(…) Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world’s C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S. counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love sarcasm and listen...
The Clay Sanskrit Series →
Sanskrit literature, taken as a whole, is—it seems almost ridiculous to have to say this—a surpassing cultural achievement, like ancient Greek literature (though the Sanskrit corpus is, at a conservative estimate, a thousand times larger than what has survived in Greek), and like the literary monuments in classical Chinese or classical Arabic, to say nothing of comparatively young...
How the Large Hadron Collider Might Change the Web →
Before the year is out, the LHC is projected to begin pumping out a tsunami of raw data equivalent to one DVD (five gigabytes) every five seconds. Its annual output of 15 petabytes (15 million gigabytes) will soon dwarf that of any other scientific experiment in history. The challenge is making that data accessible to a scientist anywhere in the world at the execution of a few commands on her...
Physically Unclonable Function -Based Security and... →
“In this paper, we propose hardware-based approaches to RFID security that rely on physically unclonable functions (PUFs). These functions exploit the inherent variability of wire delays and parasitic gate delays in manufactured circuits, and may be implemented with an order-of-magnitude reduction in gate count as compared with traditional cryptographic functions.”
“What keeps mankind alive?
The fact that millions are daily tortured
Stifled,...”
– Tom Waits (What Keeps Mankind Alive)
Interesting talk with Neil Gaiman...
“If you’re interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute...”
– Black Belt Bayesian
“Nobody knows
How cold it grows
And nobody sees
How shaky my knees
Nobody...”
– Nick Drake (“Poor Boy”)
The incredible journey taken by our genes →
Scientists have known for several years that modern humans emerged from sub-Saharan Africa within the past 100,000 years. (…) After emerging into the Arabian peninsula, some of our ancestors took sea routes along the south Asian coast to reach Australia 50,000 years ago. Only later, about 40,000 years ago, did we enter Europe - its cold and its Neanderthals making it far less hospitable -...
Us and Them →
“It’s the guy who’s smart enough to be just as disgusted as Will Hunting by the game we call “education,” but stupid enough to not play it, that we should be worried about. He’s the guy that might make us all look like assholes someday.”
August 2008
6 posts
“We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
– Samuel Beckett