In which I explain things interesting, remarkable or silly.
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Andreessen-Horowitz has always been the most levelheaded of the major current year VC firms. While other firms were levering up on “cleantech” and nonsensical biotech startups that viol…
Robotics is one of those things the business funny papers regularly wonder about; it seems like consumer robotics is a revolutionary trillion dollar market which is perpetually 20-years away -more…
This post is inspired by the “metacademy” suggestions for “leveling up your machine learning.” They make some halfway decent suggestions for beginners. The problem is, thes…
The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings. They’re fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the …
Journalism, in the ideal world, is supposed to inform the citizenry of facts important to their well being. Modern journalism seems to involve issuing press releases from the oligarchical reptiles …
It’s not often I get excited about papers from the physics community. The field I used to love has turned into a dreary ghetto of noodle-theory wankers, experimental particle physics bureaucr…
I’ve been looking for a decent TSDB for years now. Took a shot at writing one in Lush using HDF5 (as others have done), but the experiments I did raised more questions than I got answers. I&#…
There’s an old theory that memory is actually encoded in part in RNA. The argument is pretty simple: there’s no obvious way for all that sensory data to be captured in synapses as long …
I meant to write about this when I started my blog in 2009. Eventually Lush kind of faded out of my consciousness, as it was a lot easier to get work doing stuff in R or Matlab or whatever. The guy…
There are a number of things that people theoretically know how to do, but which aren’t possible because of how software gets made. Some of these are almost forgotten, but there are at least …
I used to work next to the center for nanotechnology. The first indication I had that there was something wrong with the discipline of “nanotechnology” is I noticed that the people who …
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
If this isn’t a Zawinski quote, it should be. I have avoided the JVM my entire life. I am presently confronted with problems which fit in the JVM; JVM libraries, concurrency, giant data: all …
While cold war jets are an old interest of mine, almost everything built to fight the cold war fascinates me. All ages are characterized by madness; only a few have that madness captured in physica…
The obsolescence of the slide rule is mostly un-mourned, but as with many technological obsolescences, we have lost something valuable with its demise. The type of thinking which goes along with us…
Software development is a funny profession. It covers people who do stuff ranging from register twiddling in device drivers and OS guts, to people who serve web content, to “big data” s…
It seems that every day, some computer monkey comes up with a new and more groovy serialization protocol. In the beginning, there was ASN.1 and XDR, and it was good. I think ASN.1 came first, and l…
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
One of the things which confronted me when I got interested in quantitative finance is the varieties of different kinds of quant. Now I realize this is pretty simple. Quants come in three basic var…
These are apparently America’s top under-25 entrepreneurs. Allow me to summarize: they are: A guy who rents airplanes to wealthy bored people. Not a bad idea, but … being the Avis of av…