Author: Kyle
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Five-Minute Posts: Five March Madness Thoughts
Editorial note: First off, I realized today that my titles for the first three of these short posts contained a common error. I wasn’t planning on writing five minute posts, but rather posts that took me five minutes to write (by the way, it’s usually been more like ten, but I haven’t done too bad…
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Five Minute Posts: The Hacker Within
Today’s topic: compiling in Emacs Dude! Why didn’t I learn to do this a long time ago? I can’t believe how much it’s helped my productivity. I thought it would be all kinds of work, but that’s not so. “M-x compile” will open a shell (in your present working directory) and let you edit the…
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Five Minute Posts: Shananananana knees, knees
My run this morning was a good deal more pleasant than it usually is when I’m visiting back home. My parents live in Pewaukee now, so there of course aren’t any sidewalks in our neighborhood. However, it’s a lot more pleasant to run in the road when there’s a veritable beach of sand piled up…
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Five Minute Posts: Thriller
My “spring break resolution” is to try to get my posting times down. So I’m going to try to do a five-minute post each morning during spring break. Today’s topic is the twenty-fifth anniversary of Thriller. I’m pumped about dancing Superbowl lizards and spontaneous dancing Chinatowners (thanks NYT). One thing I’m not really pumped about?…
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Special Combined Sunday Judgment/Hacker Within: March Madness
Today’s subject: the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. First, a couple of confessions. (1) It’s a bit of a stretch to throw the Hacker Within label on this post, but I couldn’t pass up an opportunity to integrate my two regular features in one post. (2) Since I have picks to make, and also fair number…
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Dawkins v. Heller, and Other Things I’ve Read, Heard, or Thought About This Week
Priest-Cosmologist Wins $1.6 Million Templeton Prize — Richard Dawkins was in Madison Tuesday promoting The God Delusion. Suffice it to say, reading about Fr. Heller this morning was a significant change of pace from Wednesday’s news. I’m grateful for the juxtaposition though, because in investigating it this evening I found a totally fascinating, though aging,…
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Proof That Programmers Write the Coolest Master’s Theses
You’ve got to check out Phun, a wickedly cool piece of software written by Emil Ernerfeldt at the VRlab. Phun was his Master’s project in computing science, and it’s a terrific 2-D multi-physics simulation. It’s no coincidence, though, that Phun is more commonly described as “the greatest computer toy in the history of the universe”…
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Off Today
I’m gonna take a break from the Sunday Judgment column, and posting in general, today. If you really need a language fix, Safire‘s got the etymology of waterboarding. An added bonus is that it’s a vicious, though typically subtle, indictment of this horrifying practice. Also, congrats to Wauwatosa East, my alma mater, for winning the…
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Music To My Ears, and Eyes
I’m telling you, Julie Rehmeyer is fast becoming one of my favorite science writers. Her Science News Math Trek piece this week follows up on a paper by music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko that represents musical chords in hyperdimensional geometries. Even cooler than Rehmeyer’s very accessible written description of the work, though, are the accompanying videos…