Stochastic Randomness

Deadlocks and Legislature

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 22:09:50 +0530

When two trains approach each other at a crossing, both shall come to a full stop and neither shall start up again until the other has gone.

— Illogical statute passed by the Kansas Legislature

Wow, what an example for deadlock!

Source - Wikipedia article on Deadlock

"Impact of earthquake in Haiti. Gruelling sight - http://bit.ly/8La8N0"

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:13:28 +0530

“Impact of earthquake in Haiti. Gruelling sight - http://bit.ly/8La8N0”

- Source

"Piaget’s Theory . The best-known developmentally-based conception of intelligence is certainly..."

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:50:10 +0530

“Piaget’s Theory . The best-known developmentally-based conception of intelligence is certainly that of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1972). Unlike most of the theorists considered here, Piaget had relatively little interest in individual differences. Intelligence develops in all children through the continually shifting balance between the assimilation of new information into existing cognitive structures and the accommodation of those structures themselves to the new information. To index the development of intelligence in this sense, Piaget devised methods that are rather different from conventional tests. To assess the understanding of “conservation.” for example, (roughly, the principle that material quantity is not affected by mere changes of shape), children who have watched water being poured from a shallow to a tall beaker may be asked if there is now more water than before. (A positive answer would suggest that the child has not yet mastered the principle of conservation.) Piaget’s tasks can be modified to serve as measures of individual differences; when this is done, they correlate fairly well with standard psychometric tests (for a review see Jensen, 1980).”

- Jean Piaget

"Fake Hillary : Global Warming is caused by a Man. Fake Sara Paulin: And i believe god is just..."

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 23:52:42 +0530

“

Fake Hillary : Global Warming is caused by a Man.
Fake Sara Paulin: And i believe god is just hugging us closer!

Hilarious. Hilarious

”

- From Saturday Night Live!

"On the theory side, recognizing a problem has been harder than solving it. Since you are asking..."

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:05:06 +0530

“On the theory side, recognizing a problem has been harder than solving it. Since you are asking about problems that are already recognized to be problems, the answer is probably none. On the practical side, I don’t think I have any more insight into that than most other people.”

- Leslie Lamport on Some of the important problems in distributed systems.

"Set theory serves as Foundations of Mathematics. The significance of this is that all questions of..."

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:42:00 +0530

“Set theory serves as Foundations of Mathematics. The significance of this is that all questions of provability (or unprovability) of mathematical statements can be in principle reduced to formal questions of formal derivability from the generally accepted axioms of Set Theory”

- Set Theory - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"With the exception of a few girls who were not unintelligent, but simply lacked interest in these..."

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:28:24 +0530

“With the exception of a few girls who were not unintelligent, but simply lacked interest in these questions, we were unable to obtain any systematic data showing the existence of special aptitudes, as all the students from every age group with average or above-average intelligence made the same efforts and showed the same understanding.”

- Jean Piaget on To Understand is to Invent - The Future of Education

"To understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied..."

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:24:10 +0530

“To understand is to discover, or reconstruct by rediscovery, and such conditions must be complied with, if in the future individuals are to be formed who are capable of production and creativity and not simply repetition!”

- Jean Piaget on To Understand is to Invent - The Future of Education

"That’s my favourite and a kick in my butt! Most great scientists know many important..."

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 23:35:22 +0530

“

That’s my favourite and a kick in my butt!

Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say “Well that bears on this problem.” They drop all the other things and get after it. Now I can tell you a horror story that was told to me but I can’t vouch for the truth of it. I was sitting in an airport talking to a friend of mine from Los Alamos about how it was lucky that the fission experiment occurred over in Europe when it did because that got us working on the atomic bomb here in the US. He said “No; at Berkeley we had gathered a bunch of data; we didn’t get around to reducing it because we were building some more equipment, but if we had reduced that data we would have found fission.” They had it in their hands and they didn’t pursue it. They came in second!

You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No’, you just go to your boss and get a `No’ easy. If you want to do something, don’t ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don’t give him a chance to tell you `No’. But if you want a `No’, it’s easy to get a `No’.

”

- I love your quote “it’s always best to assume a yes for anything you want to do in life.” Going on my wall now!

Richard Hamming: You and Your Research

I love this. On a broader scale, I’ve learned that it’s always best to assume a yes for anything you want to do in life.

(via timoni)

(via senthilnambi)

We need: A programmable Twitter client

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 23:58:13 +0530

Isnt Tumblr close enough to this execpt for the focussed discussion part? It allows you to do pretty much everything!

senthilnambi:

Hmm Supertweets. That sounds familiar. (Most of the posts are gone, but there is enough.)

rsscloud:

Unix had a shell language. DOS had a batch language. Lotus 1-2-3 had its macro language. Emacs is a programming tool as much as it is a text editor. We have gotten out of the habit of making programmable end-user products, but they are still just as important today as they were a couple of decades ago.

Every few weeks Scoble and I have an hour-plus conversation about what’s on each of our minds. The last few years it’s been all about Twitter of course, just like everyone else (or so it seems).

Lately our conversations have been ending up in the same dead-end.

Seems all good ideas begin and end with a phrase like: Of course they’ll never do it.

The “they” in the conversation is Twitter Corp, of course.

But we kept talking, and Scoble re-stated an idea that he’s been promoting publicly called SuperTweets, which was more or less exactly the idea for RSS enclosures, which led to podcasting. I didn’t need to pitch anyone to make that one happen, so those were happier times.

In our dead-end brainstorming I think we’ve been making an incorrect assumption, that all would be good if Twitter would just become an extensible metadata platform, allowing any developer to latch any data they wanted on any tweet, with Twitter storing at least a pointer to the data with the tweet, if not the actual data.

Now I think this was incorrect, because it assumed there would be client developers who are creative or brave enough to work with one another without waiting for Twitter to tell them where to go. I actually think the developer space around Twitter has been so scared of Twitter Corp for so long that even if they knew exactly how to turn the market upside-down they’d never risk pissing off the mother ship. So I think there’s virtually zero percent chance of any disruptive stuff coming from the developers. And without disruption, TwitterSpace will remain moribund and stuck.

Unless…

Of course you’ve read the title of this post so you know what I’m going to say. :-)

What if there were a relatively simple and low-power programming language built into a Twitter client that allowed power users to build their own little apps on top of Twitter. User interfaces for grouping tweets, or flowing groups of ideas to two places, Twitter and somewhere else. So that the bits that end up on Twitter are coherent and useful to people who don’t use the client, but somehow more useful to those who do.

And on the reading side, I want to add features that not everyone will want, but perhaps more people than just myself. And I don’t want to have write a whole client just to have those features.

For example, it’s been about two years since I first asked for an “unfollow-with-timeout.”

Use-case: Someone is live-tweeting a conference I don’t care about and hogging up all my bandwidth. I want to unfollow them for just a day. Now I don’t think the client guys are going to implement this anytime soon, but it’s the kind of feature a few hundred people would kill for.

I’d also like a “block-with-timeout” feature.

Shouldn’t have to block someone to remove a single tweet from view. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve blocked people just to get a turd they sent to me out of my @replies tab.

So I suspect the answer to Scoble’s void is we need a programmable Twitter client.

PS: I’m sure some or most of the comments will be from people who say they don’t need one. Okay maybe they can skip the comment because I know that most people don’t want this, at least until someone ships a script that they can’t live without. :-)

senthilnambi: The bastard sleeps for 8 hours and 54 mins…how in...

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:12:04 +0530

senthilnambi:

The bastard sleeps for 8 hours and 54 mins…how in the world?

(via meaningfulthings)

Wanna be there to see it ;) bitchville: Left my heart in… by...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:30:39 +0530

Wanna be there to see it ;)

bitchville:

Left my heart in… by vaggelisf

"Evolution is a fact. Beyond Reasonable doubt, beyound serious doubt, beyond sane, informed,..."

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 21:26:42 +0530

“Evolution is a fact. Beyond Reasonable doubt, beyound serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.”

- Richard Dawkins on The Greatest Show on Earth

Windows NT vs Linux, Bloated everywhere

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:12:38 +0530

Is Linux Kernel is Bloated, Torvalds says yes its so!, But Is it not already self evident? Also, here is another one - “So do you think each version of Linux kernel is really providing marginal new features, all the while increasing the size of the kernel ?”. Also, “The word bloat is historically associated with Microsoft Windows because each major updates in the form of Windows Service Packs installs 100s of MB data on your machine.” Just dont always talk crap about MS, yeah they have a 10 year gigantic NT codebase just as Linux Kernel is!.. “maybe they are bad in some sense, but that does not mean they are down to earth stupid!” All softwares bloat and creep and always gets worser over the time, Also, its quite easy to get lost in direction. its not just a problem with Microsoft, its inherent to software development. Sheesh!

The real article

"You can say, “It just plugs right into your existing framework, it works on unmodified java,..."

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:40:36 +0530

“You can say, “It just plugs right into your existing framework, it works on unmodified java, it’s a static analysis that points you to bugs in your code and you yipee!”. That’s much easier to absorb than, “Here’s a whole new way of thinking about programming””

- Simon Peyton Jones on Functional Programming in the book, Coder’s at Work

Douglas Crockford on Internet

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:47:26 +0530

The whole web is built on one mistake over the other. We have a big pile of accidents - Douglas Crockford

"Thats not teaching how to program, thats how you teach where the semi-colon goes. Jamie on..."

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 22:07:55 +0530

“Thats not teaching how to program, thats how you teach where the semi-colon goes. Jamie on Coder’s at work”

Awesome story of Procastination

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:33:03 +0530

Awesome story of Procastination

9970.) Every day I wake up and do the same thing that I did the day before. At night I tell myself I am going to change and try to do new things and live my life, but nothing ever changes. I want to try so many new things in my life, but I never do any of them. I am secretly afraid of failure, and never living up to anything, but at night I still tell myself that tomorrow I will try something new.

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 18:14:09 +0530

(via blogsecret)

Maybe for the rest of us, the militant atheists, Richard dawkins...

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:17:07 +0530

Maybe for the rest of us, the militant atheists, Richard dawkins gotta be a person to worship right ;) Just kidding..

friendlyatheist:

via www.owned.lv

Richard Dawkins, LOL!!!