40th Anniversary in this Universe

StefanL, 24.11.14, 09:21

Venkatesh Rao, who is the only person, we do not know personally but is still linked in our blogroll above, wrote a very nice birthday rant for his 40th one on the 20th of November. We even commented in earnest, a thing we only very rarely do nowadays. Happy birthday and happy ten years to follow for sure, Venkatesh!

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On Knowing about Knowing

StefanL, 28.08.11, 22:10

In arriving at proofs, I have often been struck by the apparent alignment of mathematics with psycho-analytic theory. In each discipline we attempt to find out, by a mixture of contemplation, changes in presentation, communion, and communication, what it is we already know. In mathematics, as in other forms of self-analysis, we do not have to go exploring the physical...

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Slave Labor

StefanL, 30.04.10, 07:42

For one thing, it (robotics) make the metaphorical dominance of the machine, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform it labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not...

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Resultate Russischer Wissenschaft

StefanL, 30.08.09, 10:04

Eine Anwendung von Markow Ketten für das "WorldWideWeb-Suchergebnisproblem". The PageRank of a webpage as used by Google is defined by a Markow chain. It is the probability to be at page i in the stationary distribution on the following Markov chain on all (known) webpages. If N is the number of known webpages, and a page i has ki links then it has...

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2 More from Thomas Jay

StefanL, 29.06.09, 22:02

All you scientific thinking liking people out their, get your monthly dose of TJP Food now. As nourishing like ever before.

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Thomas Jay Peckish II on Life and Death

StefanL, 22.06.09, 05:40

Skills are important. A surgeon screws up, a person dies. A programmer screws up, a process dies. The stakes are identical. Unless you think a process is worth less than a human life... On the other hand, SW is penetrating everything these days, even the innards of airplanes, but most probably, all of that is done in a real programming language...

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Carver Mead not quite believing in Unschärfe

StefanL, 02.01.06, 22:51

Carver Mead, eminent physicist of VLSI- and analog-digital fame, does not quite believe in the commonly accepted uncertainty principle or at least he does not take for granted some of the heuristics derived off of Heisenberg's very important theorem. It may have gone under in my Brian Brain comment last week but that link, the story behind it and comment deserve...

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The hardware myth

StefanL, 14.03.04, 22:03

Habe heute auf der blendobox einen interessanten Artikel von Tom Fürstner über die Verwandlung von HW in SW gelesen: Soften your hardware, baby! Ich muss da ein weiteres Mal hinzufügen, daß es seit 1979 keine Hardware im strengen Sinn mehr gibt. Seit Masatoshi Shima den Zilog Z8000 fertig hatte und Lynn Conway und Carver Mead ihr Lehrbuch über VLSI-Design samt...

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