This summer, cruising down the I-5 through California’s Central Valley to the Los Angeles Basin, I unwittingly stumbled upon a most exasperating development: the country strip mall . First, let me state that I don’t hate. I’ve got nothing against Petco, Starbucks, OfficeMax, et al. When overcome by the desire for a…
A new information-theoretical model of human sensory perception and memory sheds light on some peculiarities of the nervous system.
In 2007, I met Philip Wadler at a conference, who mentioned to me that he wanted to teach lambda calculus to his eight-year-old children.
Investigation to find a better rational approximation for pi. Can we get out more digits than we put in? Chance to win a prize if you can do bette
Random numbers are critical for cryptography: for encryption keys, random authentication challenges, initialization vectors, nonces, key-agreement schemes, generating prime numbers and so on. Break the random-number generator, and most of the time you break the entire security system. Which is why you should worry…
Probability theory might be the most useful area for programmers, but it is also a blurry field, difficult to learn right. You might check this book for details, and there is also an free, online draft version available. The Logic of Science
There is a certain phenomenon that seems to happen in almost every online community of user-generated content. A community is created: the ...
The following is a "photographic" gallery of fractal patterns found while exploring the planet with Google Earth. Each is provided with a KMZ file so the reader can explore the region for themselves. Readers are encouraged to submit their own discoveries for inclusion, credits will be included. Besides being examples…
Interactive proofs — mathematical games that underlie much modern cryptography — work even if players try to use quantum information to cheat.
Conrad Wolfram's 2010 talk on reforming maths education to teach real-world computational methods using computers.
Posted by Joshua Bloch, Software EngineerI remember vividly Jon Bentley's first Algorithms lecture at CMU, where he asked all of us incoming Ph.D. ...
Learn about the basics of multi armed bandit testing & algorithms, the difference b/w multi-armed bandit testing and A/B testing, its application in the real world.
When my friends hear me say that I’m buying a lottery ticket for a big draw I often get ...
Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…
