A monad for probability and provenance
I don't quite remember how I arrived at this, but it occurred to me last week that probability distributions form a monad. This is the first time I've invented a new monad that I hadn't seen before;...
View ArticleMonads are like burritos
A few months ago Brent Yorgey complained about a certain class of tutorials which present monads by explaining how monads are like burritos. At first I thought the choice of burritos was only a...
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Another short explanation of Gödel's theorem
In yesterday's article, I said: A while back I started writing up an article titled "World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem". But I didn't finish it... I went and had a look to see what was...
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World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem
A while back I started writing up an article titled "World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem". But I didn't finish it, and later I encountered Raymond Smullyan's version, which is much shorter...
View ArticleOn failing open
An axiom of security analysis is that nearly all security mechanisms must fail closed. What this means is that if there is an uncertainty about whether to grant or to deny access, the right choice is...
View ArticleYou think you're All That, but you're not!
I have long been interested in term rewriting systems, and one of my long-term goals is to implement the Knuth-Bendix completion algorithm, described by Knuth and Bendix in their famous paper "Word...
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Dijkstra was not insane
Recently, a reader on the Higher-Order Perl discussion mailing list made a remark about Edsger Dijkstra and his well-known opposition to the break construction (in Perl, last) that escapes prematurely...
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Gray code at the pediatrician's office
Last week we took Katara to the pediatrician for a checkup, during which they weighed, measured, and inoculated her. The measuring device, which I later learned is called a stadiometer, had a bracket...
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A child is bitten by a dog every 0.07 seconds...
I read in the newspaper today that letter carriers were bitten by dogs 3,000 times last year. (Curiously, this is not a round number; it is exact.) The article then continued: "children ... are 900...
View ArticlePeriodicity
The number of crank dissertations dealing with the effects of sunspots on political and economic events peaks every eleven years.
View ArticleNo flimping
Advance disclaimer: I am not a linguist, have never studied linguistics, and am sure to get some of the details wrong in this article. Caveat lector. There is a standard example in linguistics that is...
View ArticleBipartite matching and same-sex marriage
My use of the identifiers husband and wife in Thursday's example code should not be taken as any sort of political statement against same-sex marriage. The function was written as part of a program to...
View Article"Known to Man" and the advent of the space aliens
Last week I wrote about how I was systematically changing the phrase "known to man" to just "known" in Wikipedia articles. Two people so far have written to warn me that I would regret this once the...
View ArticleProduct types in Java
Recently I wanted a Java function that would return two Person objects. Java functions return only a single value. I could, of course, make a class that encapsulates two Persons: class Persons2 {...
View ArticleMost annoying phrase known to man?
I have been wasting time, those precious minutes of my life that will never return, by eliminating the odious phrase "known to man" from Wikipedia articles. It is satisfying, in much the same way as...
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Worst error messages this month
This month's winner is:Line 319 in XML document from class path resource [applicationContext-standalone.xml] is invalid; nested exception is org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: cvc-complex-type.2.3:...
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Second-largest cities
A while back I was in the local coffee shop and mentioned that my wife had been born in Rochester, New York. "Ah," said the server. "The third-largest city in New York." Really? I would not have...
View ArticleMilo of Croton and the sometimes failure of inductive proofs
Ranjit Bhatnagar once told me the following story: A young boy, upon hearing the legend of Milo of Croton, determined to do the same. There was a calf in the barn, born that very morning, and the boy...
View ArticleStupid crap, presented by Plato
Yesterday I posted:"She is not 'your' girlfriend," said this knucklehead. "She does not belong to you." Through pure happenstance, I discovered last night that there is an account of this same bit of...
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