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…

Linguistics and Computer Languages

Of course, I would never think that I was the only one to have the idea of studying computer languages from a linguistics point of view. Well, I found an interesting character, by the name of Chris Barker that gave…

Neologisms

Yesterday at the pub I was involved in a very extended (civil and remarkable productive) dialog about morality and society. We touch on many topics in the course of discussion, one of them being the difference between reason and faith….

Probability Programming

Yesterday a very interesting speaker, Eric Hehner, gave a talk at the graduate seminar: TITLE A Probability Perspective ABSTRACT This talk could be called “probability meets programming”. It draws together four perspectives that contribute to a new understanding of probability…

Function calling notation.

I was reading Yegge’s rant Rhinos and Tigers, and he mentioned that: So it’s kind of unfortunate when you have to use functions, because if you have to say, you know, HTMLElement.getChildren.whatever, it gets inverted with functions: whatever(getChildren(HTMLElement)). You have…

Heterogenous Lists

I’m used to C’s version of unions and structs. In C a union is simply a spot of memory into which various types of things can be stored. C doesn’t do all that much checking on the data types though….

First week at UCI

My first week has been rather nice and relaxing. I’ve got much of my paperwork covered with respect to RAship, ID card, finding shops and stuff around the area. My roomates are cool and mellow (and have similar philosophical/religious views)….

Some Wisdom from Minsky

I was briefly reading Minsky’s Society of Mind and found these passages memorable. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. That’s why it’s almost always wrong…

Markov Coincidence

I was chatting with one of my friends recently. He was telling me about a Markov chain program (I think 5th order) that he had just finished. This gave me an interesting idea. Suppose that you were to measure the…