http://www.tangentspace.net/cz somewhere near the beginning. Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:04:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en So, how was *your* Thanksgiving? I had a typically uneventful one. No turkey dinner, but I did break down and make a trip to Carls Jr. when I got hungry that night. I spent the rest of the night writing up two of the Mathematica projects for ACM11. That took about ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/thanksgiving-recap/ This entry isn't supposed to make sense to anyone but me. There's a saying to the effect of: when you have before you what appears to be an insurmountable task, the best way to approach it is to start at the beginning and work your way through to the end. I ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/mark-it/ One time, I think on Writer's Almanac, I heard Robert Frost referred to as the K-mart of American poets (this must have been before Walmart rose to its eminence). I found that, and still find it, amusing. Anyhow, here's one of my favorite Frost poems, Fire and Ice: Some say the ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/fire-and-ice/ One of my hobbies is dreaming up interesting problems for the Mathematica course. Next week, we're going to finish up with programming and cover the graphics subsystem, so I'd like to give them a project that integrates programming with visualization. A natural candidate is something involving the curated world data ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/electrodynamics-question/ Yesterday, I was Gtalking with one of my friends and listening to Youtube at the same time. He mentioned that this weekend he's going to a Metallica concert, so I decided to give him a sample of what I consider good music. Then I asked around and found that other ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/my-first-youtube-playlist/ I spent some time today thinking about random graphs. One question we considered was: if we take a random graph where each pair of nodes is adjacent with probability p, what is the probability that there is a path connecting each pair of nodes? No idea yet... I decided to relax ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/testing-graphs-for-connectivity/ Wolfram sent ChapterZero a press release about Mathematica 7, which has just been released. Now how did they know I pull for them like that? I'm usually not a fan of proprietary software, and it took me a long while after hearing about Mathematica to start using it, and an even ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/mathematica-7-is-here/ I picked up the last copy of Toll the Hounds from my local Borders on Saturday night. I just started reading it tonight, and frankly am underwhelmed. The frisson of joy that paused me momentarily as I went to pick it up from the coffee table seems to have been ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/toll-the-hounds/ For tens of thousands of years human beings whittled tools and farmed soil and ate animals. And now there are people who have themselves bioengineered so that their excrement emerges from their anus ready-wrapped in polythene. Such people have achieved the ultimate in human evolution; their shit does not stink. That's ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/quote-of-the-day/ Over at the Curvature, Cara wrote a nice piece satirizing the ridiculous statement that some people make, that legalizing gay marriage will lead to loss of freedom of speech. Supposedly the government would go after those who speak out against homosexuality, or churches who deny gay people the right to ... http://www.tangentspace.net/cz/archives/2008/11/q-what-do-douglas-hoffstadter-and-cara-have-in-common/