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Description: a brain dump of random ideas
Last Update: 15:39:33 03/05/2006
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Additional Info
First Fetched: 00:16:38 01/31/2004
Last Updated: 15:39:33 03/05/2006
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I defended my dissertation and passed last week. This week I ran across Philip Greenspun's article "Women in Science", which claims "Adjusted for IQ and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States". His argument...
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Some Danish newspaper prints some cartoons of Mohammed and Muslims worldwide get angry and violent. Other European newspaper defend their free speech right by publishing the same cartoons in their newspapers, thus making more Muslims angry and violent. Repeat until...
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Because I'm too lazy to maintain a bibtex file, I was forced to scrape all my references together at the last minute. All I needed to do was collect the citations from other papers in the same area. So I...
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A long, tiresome post describes what it's like to be an Atheist. I also don't believe in any supernatural forces or beings. Nevertheless, I believe that religion, in its many forms, has been the most important civilizing force in human...
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It is a silly way to compare programming languages.
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I added my profile to Google Base. It is obvious that someone will design a snazzy dating profile type and the other dating sites will crumble. Before that happens, however, the search facility is going to have to be smarter....
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If America leaves Iraq now, the terrorists will claim they've defeated both super powers and will be emboldened to increase attacks on Arab governments and Western countries.
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Erik Winfree from CalTech's DNA Group gave an excellent talk on computing with DNA. He showed how DNA could be used make interesting patterns by computing simple algorithms. Two things struck me during the talk. First, the computation is still...
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I sympathize with corporations that want to be paid for their intellectual property: music, movies, books, software, etc. The solutions proposed by the EFF to pay "content creators" are silly. Anyway, these still require that companies control distribution of digital...
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Rather than have a single driver per semi-truck, a driver should lead a caravan of semi-autonomous semi-trucks. A human driver in a comfy car can lead a group of robot semi-trucks down the highway. The robot trucks only need to...
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Many condominium and townhouse communities in Chicago are designed such that your large windows face directly into your neighbors' large windows. People can watch you in your living room, kitchen, bedroom and, in one home I saw, even your bathroom!...
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I want a personal PIM server that provides all the Yahoo and Exchange services and allows any interface to be layered on top.
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The Gray Team's entry in DARPA's Grand Challenge is an inspiration to hackers and inventors everywhere.
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Charles Martin, a Google engineer and former UofC professor, gave a very good recruitment pitch at Northwestern today. I think the concern many of us PhDs have is that we'll end up as code monkeys at Google. Why spend years...
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Google should compete with the National Association of Realtor's (NAR) Multiple Listing Service (MLS), a database of classified ads for real estate. The Justice Department has sued the NAR for using the MLS to control the residential real estate market....
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Google runs an internal futures market, where employees can "bet" on how they think the company will do. The aggregate "price" reveals what everyone thinks. I posted this same idea here, which originally came from HP's sales division. For some...
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By now you've probably read the WSJ story on Windows code development. Amitabh Srivastava has finally compelled a large dev group to use the code checking tools deveoped by the PPRC (now the Center for Software Excellence). It would be...
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After Katrina destroyed New Orleans, thousands of people were rushed out of the area into makeshift camps around the country. Unfortunately, some families were broken apart and cannot locate each other. The same thing happens after every disaster around the...
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The Northwestern CS department is moving into a new building soon. Therefore, my computer will be offline until everything is moved and connected at the new place, whenever that happens....
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Reimplement GCC 4.x in SML or OCaml instead of C.
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There are a few interesting mapping apps using Google Maps. For example, HousingMaps plots apartments for rent (listed on Craigslist) on a city map. I've only poked around Google's mapping API a bit, but it doesn't appear to be possible...
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It's now clear to me that robotics will have as big an impact on the global economy as IT has this last decade. As more menial human labor is replaced by cheap machines, chunks of the global workforce will be...
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Though I use Scheme exclusively, I know that PLs with polymorphic type systems are The Right Thing. The primary reason static typing is good is that the compiler can catch a class of errors automatically. A polymorphic type system allows...
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In addition to being brilliant, I'm gorgeous, too. This thermal infrared(?) pic was taken at the Xerox booth at NextFest....
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Beginners on inline skates often wear wrist guards, knee & elbow pads, and helmets. But noone protects their tailbone, or coccyx. My friend hurt her ass pretty bad, and another woman said her sister broke her tailbone while skating and...
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RSSCalendar packages your calendar events as vCal/iCal messages in an RSS feed. Others can subscribe to your feed and see the events on your calendar. This is an excellent idea and should be adopted by other services. In Chicago, Metromix...
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I'm told that, at the recent Microsoft conference for CS academics, Gates said he is very concerned about the shrinking enrollment in undergraduate CS. The TechNews newsletter has a story on this decline every day. Some have speculated that undergrads...
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With the growing interest in program specifications, I'm surprised few people have looked at Speckle. This system demonstrates the obvious: if you've got specifications, then a compiler could use it to optimize your code. So now you get verification and...
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I've long wondered what exactly Intentional Programming really is, but various explanations on the web have been vague or circular. I think I get it now. It's about creating domain-specific languages. You use their editors and tools to create a...
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Google Scholar brought up this old paper: Programming Language Requirements for the Next Millennium. From the abstract, "we believe that the community [of HPC] can benefit from a small, stable programming language with abstraction features that support the development of...
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