Cultural and Linguistic Sexism
I was working on a paper today, and noticed some very peculiar about linguistic gender-neutrality. I know that we are all encouraged to use female character in our examples to combat the inherent chauvinism of the English language. Despite following…
The Bible and Homosexuality
It has been an extraordinarily long time since I have written a post. This one was supposed to be written after visiting St. Luke’s Episcopal in Long Beach for a session about “The Bible Revealed: God’s Love For the LGBT…
Fully Homomorphic Encryption
I didn’t know it at the time I posted my idea on secure computing, but others have been working on the idea for quite some time. It turns out that Craig Gentry recently published Fully homomorphic encryption using ideal lattices….
Episcopals and Homosexuality
I have been, for a very long time now, quite fascinated with how certain organizations and people respond to the idea of homosexuality. I am also quite interested in religious belief. So when the two intersect (with the usual fireworks)…
Building Linguistic Structure
Yesterday, I had an interesting thought. My advisor once made the cultural observation that many people in Computer Science invent their own language and then immediately write a self-hosting compiler. I agree that a compiler is quite a feat of…
Computer Language Comparison
Guillaume Marceau has used data from the Computer Language Benchmark Game to provide a graphical comparison of many different languages. If you drew the benchmark results on an XY chart you could name the four corners. The fast but verbose…
Decentralized Garbage Collection
When I visited Washington D.C. for ASPLOS/VEE, I was working on my paper about cascade failure, and had distributed systems on my mind. Some of the papers at the joint conference were about garbage collection. One of the more interestring…
An Atheist Goes to Church
I, together with a group from AAR, went to Voyager’s Church today. I was reminded, in many ways, of why I don’t like Church. The service opened with a song, All Because of Jesus by Casting Crowns (lyrics) I was…
Automatic Thesaurus
Last week, I landed on another PhD worthy research project. Given a very large corpus of sentences, such as a digitized version of the Library of Congress, or a less noisy version of the Internet, how can you automatically generate…
Philosophy of Computer Science: Naming
For a very long time, western culture has had a strong undercurrent about naming. Conceptually, it starts with the recognition that the ability to name a thing gives you power over it. This is reflected in many deep and ancient…