This is an archive of links from February, 2007. For current links, go to the main linkroll page.
Wednesday, Feb 28, 2007
Do Dietary Antioxidants Increase Mortality?: New meta-analysis published JAMA seems to think beta-carotene, vitamin A and E supplements do. Here is article over at JAMA.
Why Have So Many U.S. Attorneys Been Fired? It Looks a Lot Like Politics: NYTimes editorial piece about the recent spate U.S. Attorneys fired by the Bush administration.
Lust for Height: Ingredients needed to build one of the tallest buildings in the world? A small patch of land, a lot of money, and a huge ego. Good article about the current global skyscraper construction projects. The Shanghai World Financial Center, slated to be finished in 2008, will come in at #2 after Taipei 101, current the tallest building in the world. They will both be towered over by nearly 1,000ft by Dubai's Burj Dubai to be finished in 2006. The article also mentions plans revealed in November to build a 1,000ft tower in Boston designed by Piano.
The Crumbs' Underground Comics: Terry Gross interview with Aline Kominsky Crumb and Robert Crumb on NPR.
Minims: "minim n: a statement expressed in proverbial or sentential form but having no general application or practical value -- compare maxim." My favorite is minim #30, "No one achives immortality in his own lifetime."
Paul Krugman: We can do something about global warming: some interesting stats about California, which has engaged in consistent but conservative energy conservation since the 70s. The average Californian use a third less total energy than the average American, 60 percent as much electricity, and emits 55 percent as much carbon dioxide.
Dow Average Falls 416 Points After China Sell-Off: The major marktes fell 3-4% on Tuesday, sparked in part by a 9% slide in Chinese stocks.
MacTeX Distribution: it looks like MacTeX is the TeX distribution of choice OS X. Darwinports didn't have one.
Octopart: an electronic parts search engine. Search results include links to the datasheet and price/availability from various vendors.
Monday, Feb 26, 2007
Birds Eye View VIII: amazing satellite photo of an F-15 flying over the shuttle launch pad.
Sunday, Feb 25, 2007
Science Made Stupid: hilarious.
House Party: this very cute flash animation explains how various drugs (including alcohol) effect brain chemistry to induce altered states.
Startup News: Y Combinator has launched a reddit clone for entrepreneurs.
Shor, I'll do it: Scott Aaronson gives a non-techincal explanation Shor's quantum factoring algorithm in a attempt to dispel the "quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in efficiently" exponential-speedup misunderstanding. I applaud the attempt, although I don't think I'm any closer to understanding Shor's factoring algorithm.
week246: of
Baez's This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics is out. In a
particularly non-techincal TWF, Baez talks about two books, Peter
Woit's Not
Even Wrong
Daniel P. Friedman: A Celebration: talks (slides, video) from a conference in celebration of Daniel Friedman's 60th birthday. Lots of good stuff. Olin talked (video) about his loop work.
Thursday, Feb 23, 2007
Tumblr: free tumblelog hosting.
Every Bite You Take: short article on Slate about Sysco, the Wal-Mart of food distributors.
PixelMachine: SuperJer hacks up a raytracer in weekend. Eye candy and source code for download.
Concept: Actuarial escape velocity: ouroboros explains actuarial escape velocity. Life expectancy at age 65 increased 1 year from 1999-2000, which puts us at 20% of escape velocity.
The Second Carnival Of Mathematics: is up over at goodmath. Lots of good math links, go check it out.
The Unapologetic Mathematician has had such a flurry of flurry of group theory posts lately, I can barely keep up:
- A few more facts about group actions
- Conjugacy classes in symmetric groups
- Conjugation
- Group actions
Some Xilinx links:
- Spartan-3E Starter Kit: Xilinx low-cost development board. Features a 500k gate FPGA, flash, 64Mb SDRAM, Ethernet, VGA and lots of other goodies. Everything you'd need to build design your own networked computer.
- EE178, Digital Design with FGPAs: a digital design class at SJSU based around the Spartan-3E starter kit. They have lectures, labs and a verilog tutorial online. Everything you need to get started.
- Starter Kit Design Examples: some simple reference designs showing off various features of the starter kit.
- PicoBlaze: a soft 8bit microcontroller that takes about about 10% of the 500k gate Spartan-3E XC3S500E.
- Spartan-3E FPGA and Spartan-3E Data Sheets: techincal docs on the Spartan-3E FPGA.
Lisp CPU: some notes on building a Lisp CPU for an FPGA like the starter kit above. I didn't look in detail, but seems incomplete.
Thursday, Feb 22, 2007
The Failure of the War on Drugs: at the Becker-Posner economics blog argue that legalization plus taxes would do a better job reducing drug consumption without the negative side effects of our current, insane (choice of word mine) drug policies.
Is Snap Preview hte most hated Web 2.0 function ever?: Yes. Yes, it is.
Erythrocyte G Protein as a Novel Target for Malarial Chemotherapy: paper in the peer-reviewed open access journal PLoS Medicine. Popular press summary here.
Classic Texts in Computer Science: list of classic texts in computer science, with links.
Online Mathematics Textbooks: we've linked to some of these before, but there are a few worth mentioning: Allen Hatcher's book on Algebraic Topology and A Course in Commutative Algebra by Robert Ash.
An introduction to commutative and non-commutative Grobner Bases: paper by Mora.
Simplicial complex vs. symplectic geometry: they are completely different but I keep mixing up the terms.
Wednesday, Feb 21, 2007
First woman honored with Turing Award: IBM's Frances Allen won the Turing Award for her work on optimizating compilers.
Some The
China Study
Algebraic Topology: being taught by John Baez. Discussion at the n-Category Cafe.
Sunday, Feb 18, 2007
Back from a long hiatus. Links for today:
How Not to Talk to Your Kids: longer article about Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell's research on praise (you are smart vs. you worked hard) and child performance. We linked to a related livescience.com article earlier.
Apple to re-enter the sub-notebook market: I couldn't be more excited to hear Apple is going to come out with an ultra-portable laptop. I have a Mac mini at home and would prefer to use OSX on the road, but until now Apple doesn't have anything that can compete with my seemingly indestructible <3lb Thinkpad X40.
ONE: A Space Odyssey: short, hilarious animated lego parody of "2001 A Space Odyssey".
A
Star Is Made: Where Does Talent Really Come From: article from NYT
Magazine about expert performance research from Anders Ericsson, one
of the authors of The
Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
Special Sauce: another reason not to eat fast food (as if you need more reasons.) I couldn't stop laughing.
Asana-Vinyasa Guide for Ashtanga Yoga: handy reference.
Quantum hype: a nice collection of quantum computing-related links.
Hardware Design and Functional Programming: a Perfect Match
Isabelle theorem prover links:
- Isabelle: the Isabelle home page at University of Cambridge.
- the Isabelle/HOL tutorial (pdf), which we link to again for your convience.
- The Archive of Formal Proofs: a collection of proof libraries and examples for Isabelle.
- two solutions to the POPLmark challenge in Isabelle/HOL here and here.
- Haore Logics in Isabelle/HOL: a paper
Proof General: an Emacs package for running various theorem provers, including Isabelle.
Saturday, Feb 10, 2007
A quiver springs his voice and breast: great poem about teaching math.
Republic or Empire: Chalmers Johnson writes a National Intelligence Estimate on the United States, or the problem of balancing democracy and imperalism.
Smart
Strategy: Think of the Brain as a Muscle: children who learn
something about how the brain works and were told "[they] could make
it work better" did better. I hope to write on this topic more. I
have a copy of
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
India won't be a superpower until it alleviates poverty: India's recent growth (four years at 8 percent) is great and all, but it still has a long way to go.
Vanity links: Two more of our patents from Connected Components Corp. got issued, Method and apparatus for optimizing code and Method and apparatus for doing program analysis, bring the total to four. We have five more published applications pending. Intel is of course the assignee for all of them.
9
Resume Tips That Should Be Screechingly Obvious (But Apparently
Aren't): somehow this bubbled up on reddit. Maybe for humor
value? If you're still sending out resumes, go read Nick Corcodilos'
book, Ask
the Headhunter: Reinventing the Interview to Win the Job
Why I Hate Beauty: essay about the contrast effect and why images of beatiful people lead us to have unrealistic expectations about our own mating options.
The story behind Eijiro: talks about the history of the most popular Japanese/English dictionary on the net, original written "for translators by translators."
Three Lectures by Hans Bethe: on quantum physics, given in 1999 by the then 93-year-old physicist to his neighbors at hte Kendal of Ithica retirement community. "[T]he lectures hold appeal to experts and non-experts alike." I haven't watched yet, a 500Mb download isn't going to happen in India.
Quantum Computing Demo Announcement: announcement on the D-Wave blog about two demos, on Feb 13 and 19, of their 16-qubit quantum computer. For perspective see Scott Aaronson's The Orion Quantum Computer Anti-Hype FAQ. They have gotten a lot of press lately, google for more.
MIT Course Catalgoue 2006-2007
Melatonin as an anti-aging therapeutic for the brain: semi-techincal article about evidence melatonin may help prevent aging and help neurodegenerative diseases, with links to the original article. Maybe I should try melatonin for my jetlag when I go back to Boston.
How HIV-1 kills: Implications for the Treatment and Prevention of AIDS: talks about how HIV-1 replication, and in particular the production of glutathione peroxidase protein, consumes several essential nutrients, the deficiency of which can cause a variety of AIDS symptoms. There is evidence that suppliments can relieve some symptoms.
Carnival of Mathematics: Inaugural Edition: first addition of the carnival of mathematics at Abstract Nonsense.
Type-Level Computation Using Narrowing in Omega (ps, sorry, I couldn't find a pdf): from Tim Sheard, author of Putting Curry-Howard to Work. Discussion on LtU.
Thursday, Feb 8, 2007
Denial: Excellent essay about heresy, past and present, and denial as a modern tool to supress heretical ideas. My favorite quote (quoting journalist David Roberts):
"We should have war crimes trials for these bastards [climate change deniers] ... some sort of climate Nuremberg."I'm better start planning my escape to South America.
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: free text of the book from Project Gutenberg.
Music wants to be free: the Economist summarizes Steve Jobs' essay (linked below) about DRM and selling music, without linking to the actual article. Way to go guys, great bit of online journalism there.
How Well Are American Students Learning?: The 2006 Brown Center Report on Education. One part that looks particularly interesting (discussed Mathematics Weblog) is:
Part two looks at the "happiness factor" in education, analyzing international data to see whether students' self-confidence and enjoyment of math and the relevance of lessons that students experience in classrooms are correlated with higher math achievement. Do nations with happier students score higher on math tests than nations in which students are not quite as happy?I haven't read it yet, but the answer seems to be: they are in fact inversely correlated with higher math achievement, and happier students do not score higher.
Nicolas Bourbaki:
is an allonym (great word) under which group of (mostly) French
mathemticians have been writing rigorous books
Mathematics under the Microscope: downloadable web book under creative commons license about mathematical thinking from a cognative science perspective, that is, what is happening in our brains when we do math, and what does that say about how we should teach math and what it means to be a mathematician. Looks interesting. He also has a companion blog.
A Structural Approach to Reversible Computation: discussion at LtU with links to other reversible computing resources.
Isabelle/HOL: A Proof Assistant for Higher-Order Logic: This book, by Nipkow et al (isn't he one of the authors of Term Rewriting and All That?) introduces interactive proof in Isabelle. A pdf is available online.
Wednesday, Feb 7, 2007
The antioxidant myth: a medical fairy tale: Diets high in antioxidants are good for you, but suppliments are not. If you liked this go read Unhappy Meals (linked below) and go eat some food.
A "Yakuza War" has started in Central Tokyo: a "senior member" of a Yakuza gang was shot and killed by another gang this morning at 10am on a busy street near Shibuya. Details from someone who works nearby, with some Yakuza background information. Crazy.
Thoughts on Music: an interesting read DRM and the music marketplace from Steve Jobs.
Maxima: the computer algebra system.
NESL: A parallel programming language: with nested data parallelism.
Tuesday, Feb 6, 2007
The Supermodel School
of Poetry: review of Carla Bruni's latest album, No
Promises
Paul Muldoon, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and has co-written rock songs himself (he collaborated with the late Warren Zevon), has not heard Ms. Bruni's album, but said, "anything that expands our sense of what poetry might be, that poetry is not a scary object written by a bunch of dead guys to be held at arms' length, is really good news."reminded me very much of goals of former Poet Laureate Billy Collins' Poetry 180 project, designed "to make it easy for students to hear or read a poem on each of the 180 days of the school year." All the poems are online. They've also published two
collections
of poetry.
Drugs!
- Scientific American Mind: Smarter on Drugs: discusses coming nootropes (smart drugs), measures of intelligence, including g, and finally takes the editorial position that we should be free as individuals to choose if, when and how we use these drugs, and the gov't should stay out of it. Amen.
- Confessions of a middle-aged Ecstasy eater: A 50-year-old anonymous writer tells the story of how he discovered ecstasy.
- Drug Test: amateur cyclist takes a variety of performance-enhancing drugs (EPO, testosterone, steroids, etc.) and tells you all about it.
The Downside of the Boom: China's Poison for the Planet: long, good, critical article about China's environmental impact, not just locally, but around the globe.
Time for Reading: a call for "slow reading." "I have increasingly come to believe that the key to reading is rereading." There is only rereading.
Basics: The Turing Machine: Turing machines introduced at goodmath.
Design of Computer Algebra Systems: rants against the lack of safety of computer algebra systems (CAS) and includes list of surprises that might trip up a new user of Mathematica. A CAS that produces an answer and a machine-checkable proof of the answer's correctness sounds like just what Andrej wants. (I was hoping for something meatier from the title.)
Tarski's indefinability theorem: at Wikipedia
John Longley's research pages: lots of good stuff on types and game semantics, including Notions of computability at higher types I and Strategem, a "cool ML program illustrating some surprising programming applications of recent ideas in game semantics."
The Monad.Reader: electronic Haskell magazine. Here's a link to the latest issue, issue 6. I had a blog post about this, dropWhile, foldr and laziness.
Computational Types from a Logical Perspective I: or you can buy it here for $20. Why would anyone do that?
Parsec: home page for Parsec, a Haskell parser combinator library.
JRM's Synax-rules Primer for the Merely Eccentric: a tutorial on Scheme macros.
Sunday, Feb 4, 2007
week244: Baez's latest This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics. He motivates this paper, The Euler characteristic of a category, by talking about ways to measure the size of a category. This ties in to his page on counting and week70, where he talks about moniods, term rewriting and homotopy theory, which then brings us to week115 and week118 where he talks about homotopy theory (I haven't read those yet.) Mark turned me on to Baez (I wish I had worked through Baez's Gauge Theory book with him and Dimitri), and he is slowly becoming one of my intellectual heros.
FON: FON is a WiFi community where
you can log onto any FON hotspot for free if you put a FON wireless
router on your network (regular $30, right now free). You can also buy a $3 day
pass if you aren't part of the FON network, or you can get profit
sharing when people use your hotspot if you don't want in-kind
exchange.
When WiFi hotspots first started showing up, they were all open. I'm
not sure why, but at some point people started closing them, and it
was much harder piggy back on someone else's WiFi. It is unfortunate
we need a company to make this happen (which world would you rather
live in: free WiFi everywhere, or you get to pay T-Mobile $30/mo for
WiFi found only in Starbucks, big hotels and airports?), but it seems
like FON is doing it right. I "bought" a free wireless router that
should show up in a couple weeks.
Wireless
Internet for All, Without the Towers: NY Times article about
Meraki, a startup out of MIT, to use mesh WiFi networks to solve the
last mile (or last 10 yards) problem.
The screen cracked on my Casio Exilim a few weeks ago. Wikipedia has
pages comparing models of the Casio Exlim and Canon Digital
IXUS Elph.
Web
Texts of Andrew Wohlgemth. Mathematical Deduction.: Three papers
on Deductive Mathematics.
RZ:
a tool for bringing constructive and computable mathematics cloesr to
programming practice: a paper. There is also a post about RZ at Mathematics and Computation with a
link to the source. Discussion
at LtU.
currying:
a nice macro in scheme for defining curried functions Haskell- and
ML-style.
Baez's crackpot
index: funny.
Stringing
physics along: a review of The
Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a
Science, and What Comes Next
The
Turing Machine: Introduction to the Turing machine, with Haskell
code for a Turing machine interpeter, by Mark at goodmath.
Trying Really
Hard To Like India: accruate, funny travel writing about India.
Saturday, Feb 3, 2007
Texas Is First to Require Cancer Shots for Schools: Texas is the first state to require sixth graders to have the anti-HPV cervical cancer vaccination. Texas? Who would have thought it? Gov. Rick Perry signed an executive order. Way to go, Rick!
Youth and war, a deadly duo, FT article about theory put forth by Gunnar Heinsohn, University of Bremen, in his book Sons and World Power (not available in Engish) that in countries with relatively large youth populations, violence tends to happen.
Meta-Compilation of Language Abstractions: Pankaj Surana's dissertation, discussion on LtU
High-Normal Uric Acid Linked with Mild Cognitive Impairment in the Elderly: APA Press Release with a link to the paper.
What's the differnece between <span> and <div> tags?: A simple question answered for HTML idiots like me.
Friday, Feb 2, 2007
Telomerase activity evolves with body mass, not lifespan (pdf): This paper generated a lot of popular press, but only this article at The Scientist had a link to the actual article summary at Aging Cell.
Refuse to be Terrorized: essay by security expert Bruce Schneier.
Basic Concepts in Science: A list: John Wilkins is collecting blog posts, articles, etc. introducing basic science concepts. Need a science clue? Save a nickle, take a look.
Some computer Go links:
- SGF file format FF[4]: the SGF file format specification
- The computer-go Archives: archives of the computer-go mailing list
- Specification of the Go Text Protocol, version 2, draft 2
- Winning ways: a low-detail article in the Economist about the recent success in using Monte Carlo in small-board computer Go programs.
The Truth about Online Dating: a summary of current online dating research. Jeana gets a few references.
Thursday, Feb 1, 2007
The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure: a recently published meta-study on procrastination in the Psychological Bulliten by Universy of Calgary professor Piers Steel has spawned a large amount of press (for example, here and here) and would probably be an interesting read if they weren't charging an outrageous $12. I'll wait for the (paperback) book.Good Ideas I Have Had In The Past Year: funny
Some Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs links, the textbook by Ableson and Sussman used in MIT's introductory computer science class, 6.001 (not The Society of Invasive Cardiovascular Professionals):
- the SICP Web Site at the MIT Press with the complete text in HTML
- someone converted it to pdf, download here. It looks like the difference between SICP.pdf and SICP-alt.pdf is that SICP-alt.pdf has a table of contents, list of exercises and an index.
- video lectures of Ableson and Sussman teaching 6.001
Law and Order in Algorithmics (pdf): Fokkinga's PhD thesis. The pdf links on his homepage don't work (I emailed him) but I found it through here.
The Almighty
Facts: a review of
The Knowledge Deficit
Love's Loopy Logic: Article in Psychology Today about mating intelligence, bulit-in biases we have when evaluating potential mates and relationships, differences in male-female mate selection strategies, and, finally, how modern, age-segregated schooling might lead to miscalibrated biases.
The Structure and Interpretation of the Computer Science Curriculum (pdf)
The Role of the Study of Programming Languages in the Education of a Programmer (pdf): Daniel Friedman, Indiana University
Comonadic Functional Attribute Evaluation (pdf): discussion on LtU
The Essence of Dataflow Programming (pdf): discussion on LtU
Concrete Abstractions: An Introduction to Computer Science Using Scheme: another out of print book with full text online
Categories, Types and Structures (pdf): another out of print book, by Andrea Asperti and Giuseppe Longo, available from Giuseppe Long's download page.
Toposes, Triples and Theories: the out of print book by Michael Barr and Charles Wells, with corrections.
Recursive types for free!: draft paper by Philip Wadler