“Throughout my life I have known people who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. You know the ones: grew up in a strong community, went to good public or private schools, were able to attend a top undergraduate school like Harvard or Caltech, and then were admitted to the best graduate schools. Their […]
From Richard Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law: “It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region […]
It appears that orthogonal persistence, or the elimination of the need for users and programmers to explicitly juggle data between RAM and disk for it to survive plug-pulling, is easy. We are all running operating systems written with the limitations of 1960s hardware in mind. Not even talking about the future – even the present […]
Anyone who has read CS papers from ~1960-1980 and compared the original-idea-density to those of today might think forbidden thoughts. While meandering through stories of unorthodox computational architectures, I was overcome with a sharp feeling of “where are they now?” Who stole the original thinkers of that era, and planted type-theoretical bureaucrats in their place? […]
Many of us have not forgotten the joy of playing with toys which let your mind run free: Lego blocks, Erector, etc. On the other hand, it appears that the larval programmers of today are skipping the stage of development involving the digital equivalents of such toys. Specifically I am talking about Logo, BASIC, and […]
The temptation to implement a modernized Lisp architecture in a high-end FPGA never ceases to tug at me. It has recently re-asserted itself after my discovery that one can buy reasonably priced and fully assembled boards containing the latter, complete with SDRAM, DVI, SATA, etc. sockets. Verilog guides have silently crept into my browser tabs […]
The moment came about two years ago, in the middle of a lecture on biologically-inspired algorithms (EC, ant-colony optimization, etc.) My attention had strayed so very briefly – and yet the material immediately ceased to make sense. It seemed obvious that continuing to follow the proof on the board was futile – the house of […]
