CS101 – Introduction to Computing Principles Welcome to CS101 — the essential ideas of computing via little phrases of Javascript code. For interested teachers, here is a demo and discussion of this approach. From Stanford! When I taught CS 101 at
Free and Open Source Licenses
Interesting discussion here. But many FOSS-based transactions are not commercial in the foregoing sense. Instead, software subject to a FOSS license may come into a product without the producer knowing that this has happened or, in any realistic way, assenting to
memories
For some reason, all copies of an early variant of RTLinux called “myrtlinux” by its Italian “author” have disappeared from the web, but thanks to some archives we can find some fragments from old days. For example, within a year
R.L. Moore topologist and racist
If you read this down to the bottom you get a little hint, but you have to read something like this to understand what that little hint means. In graduate school she was very much alone, though she was a
limits of state diagrams
Here’s a graph of a simple state machine of somewhat under 512 states that models a dumb fifo queue. The initial state is “e” for empty. We can append 1,2 or 3 to this queue and can delete the first
Computer science as a failed discipline again
As a senior researcher, I am saddened to see funding agencies, department heads, deans, and promotion committees encouraging younger researchers to do shallow research. As a reader of what should be serious scientific journals, I am annoyed to see the
Oh snap – Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing
He was a real mathematician except that he only learned one little bit of mathematics and then didn’t learn any more. He was no practical organizer and, well, if you had Turing around in the place you wouldn’t get it
Peer review in the electronic age
In academic computer science, conferences are often more important than journals, but The current system of publication in biomedical research provides a distorted view of the reality of scientific data that are generated in the laboratory and clinic. This system
Continuing mathematician sanity thread: Boltzmann
[Boltzmann] Opposition to his ideas was harsh and his moods were volatile. Despondent, fearing disintegration of his theories,he hanged himself in 1906. It wasn’t his first suicide attempt, but it was his most successful. This kind of expresses the mood
More computer science as humbug [updated with Brazil dream sequence]
Continuing my experiments in academic papers, I sent a paper on automata and circuit verification to CAV2010 (here’s an updated version with some corrections and better references). I actually got one carefully written and well informed review. Sending a paper