January 2012
8 posts
“Leisure in this sense is both the crucible of all durable human meaning …...”
– Mills Baker, reviewing Josef Pieper’s “Leisure: The Basis of Culture”
Repositories of science
The first scientific paper with more than 1000 authors (1055, to be precise) was
published recently1. It documented the first results from the large hadron
collider.2
I think a paper in a journal is an antiquated way to desseminate results this
complex, created by teams this big.
There is a precedent for a system that can track, manage and publish the work of
large teams on a single, though...
Computation in the wild
Karl Schroeder wonders why SETI has come up empty-handed1.
The mystery deepens almost by the day, because we’ve now identified 700
extrasolar planets and the count is increasing rapidly. We should shortly be
racking up lists of Earthlike worlds, and we’re closing in on good estimates of
how many there must be in our galaxy. And the number is in the billions. So one
central...
The CS assignment I wish I had
When I came out of academia and started working in the real world, by far the
biggest gap in my CS education was that I had no idea of the real monetary
cost, and associated tradeoffs, of accomplishing computational tasks.
With the goal of rectifying that, I wish I had been given the following
assignments in some sort of advanced systems course, where people work in teams
and the team with the...
“…most books are old. This is not a disadvantage: this is precisely what...”
– Solitude and Leadership, by William Deresiewicz.
Iteration
Consider the acclaimed painting by Matisse, Large Reclining Nude.
It is a landmark piece of abstract art. But what made it special was that Matisse documented the evolution of the work from beginning to end, taking photographs of the intermediate phases over the five months he worked on it1. It started with some realistic depth and detail, and ended up with an abstract representation. And the...
“To write is to make a clearing in the wilderness in which, almost literally, you...”
– Writing Undoes Me, by Pico Iyer.