Linkroll

Wednesday, Jan 31, 2007

Why some ideas stick and others don't: review of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip and Dan Heath. Thumbs up:

I'm betting "Made to Stick" won't find as many readers as have its now-glamorous predecessors ["The Tipping Point" and "Freakonomics"]. But I'd also bet that the readers it does find will end up more profoundly changed by it.

Arrows: a short introduction to arrows over at haskell.org. They have a good bibliography with papers that give examples and applications of arrows, such as functional reactive programming.

A Gentle Introduction to Category Theory by Fokkinga

Adam, over at Tailors Today (who I am happy to see is writing again), made a poster of every book he's read. He has a tutorial if you want to do the same thing.

Fragment Future: essay about multicultural communities and trust, drawing on some work by Harvard's Robert D. Putnam. Interesting but disheartening for those of us who think mixing everything up in the giant cultural blender is a good idea.

Universal algebra at Wikipedia and A Course in Universal Algebra, a free version of the book by Stanley Burris and H. P. Sankappanavar.

The Last Question, a short story be Isaac Asimov.

Read Feingold's opening statement: transcript of Russ Feingold's powerful opening remarks to the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing, Exercising Congress's Constitutional Power to End a War.

Tuesday, Jan 30, 2007

Omega-3, junk food and the link between violence and what we eat: very interesting article talks about omega-3 vs. omega-6 fatty acids and links between diet and behavior. A quote:

The UK prison trial at Aylesbury jail showed that when young men there were fed multivitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids, the number of violent offences they committed in the prison fell by 37%. Although no one is suggesting that poor diet alone can account for complex social problems, the former chief inspector of prisons Lord Ramsbotham says that he is now "absolutely convinced that there is a direct link between diet and antisocial behaviour, both that bad diet causes bad behaviour and that good diet prevents it."

Google's Moon Shot: an update from the New Yorker on Google's book scanning project.

You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.): introduction to monads by sigfpe

Generalising Monads to Arrows: discussion on LtU.

Theorems for Free!: with discussion (and more) at LtU.

Variable substitution gives a monad: another monad example from sigfpe, which references The Dual of Substitution is Redecoration by Uustalu and Vene. Also see the (bare) F-algebra page at Wikipedia.

Why Learning a Language May Make You Forget Your Old One: at least temporarily. An article about a study at University of Oregon's Memory Lab, showing that people studying a second language may have trouble recalling words in their native language, an effect dubbed "first-language attrition." The actual paper can be found here.

The Mystery of Consciousness: Steven Pinker on the science of consciousness.

Monday, Jan 29, 2007

Unhappy Meals: a long, good article about the current state of American's diet by Michael Pollan author of The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.

Two Dozen Short Lessons in Haskell: draft of a textbook on functional programming used at the Univ. of Oklahoma. A pdf version can be found here.

PHY771 Quantum Computing Since Democritus: lecture notes from the (ongoing) class at the University of Waterloo.

You and Your Research by Richard Hamming

Was 9/11 really that bad?: David A. Bell, author of The First Total War, tries to put 9/11, and our subsequent response, into historical perspective.

ps2pdf: a site to convert postscript files to pdf online (uses ghostscript). Why is anyone posting postscript files anymore? Google lets you view postscript files as html, why not download them as pdf?

Sunday, Jan 28, 2007

On unreasonable effectiveness:

• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences by Eugene Wigner, joint winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics by R. W. Hamming (with alternate link)
• On the Unusual Effectiveness of Logic in Computer Science (pdf) by Halpern, et al

Natural deduction reading for beginners: a reading list over at LtU

On cellular atomata, comonads, monads and zippers:

• Evaluating cellular atomata is comonadic and The Monad Hidden Behind Every Zipper over at sigfpe
• Functional Pearl, The Zipper (pdf) by Huet.

Classical versus Quantum Computation: Fall 2006, taught by John Baez and Derek Wise. The first few lectures start by introducing lambda calculus and connections to category theory. They have lecture notes, exercises and solutions, blog posts over at the n-category cafe and lots of references. This is what MIT's OCW should be.

To fix US schools, panel says, start over: The ideas mentioned in the article don't seem that radical. This was interesting:

One of the biggest proposed changes - the state board examinations that would allow qualified 10th graders to move on to college - would eventually add up to $67 billion in savings that could be reallocated elsewhere, the report estimates.

Saturday, Jan 27, 2007

CCCs and lambda calculus links:

• Categories: Products, Expotentials, and the Cartesian Closed Categories and From Lambda Calculus to Cartesian Closed Categories over at goodmath
• Cartesian closed categories and the lambda calculus by John Baez, with lots of links and references
• This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 240), discusses games, cartesian closed categories, the lambda calculus and the full-abstraction problem for PCF, with lots of references.

Lecture notes on the lambda calculus: Peter Selinger's lecture notes on the lambda calculus.

Wikipedia lambda calculus articles:

• Lambda calculus
• Typed lambda calculus: notes that typed lambda calculi of the lambda cube are all strongly normalizing and are therefore consistent.
• System F: also known as the polymorphic lambda calculus. The article doesn't give a full definition of System F.
• Lambda cube

Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools

John's Combinatory Logc Playground: Lambda calculus and combinator interpreters and minimal languages, with a collection of related links.

'There is no war on terror': Finally someone, a gov't official no less, Britian's director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, tells it like it is:

He said: "London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, 'soldiers'. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a 'war on terror', just as there can be no such thing as a 'war on drugs'.

"The fight against terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement of our laws and the winning of justice for those damaged by their infringement."

An impassioned call for a "culture of legislative restraint" in dealing with terrorism. Go read.

The Declining Quality of Mathematics Education in the US: The title speaks for itself.

Stop the Iran War Before It Starts: Scott Ritter, former Marine intelligence officer, chief weapons inspector for the UN in Iraq from 1991-8 and author of Target Iran: The Truth About the White House's Plans for Regime Change talks about how Democrats can avoid another debacle in Iran.