Love Actually is, like Scott Pilgrim, a movie I couldn’t find interesting enough to finish watching. Never seen the whole thing. But I gather that it ends with the kid slipping through airport security because they’re distracted by Bill Nighy being killed by Snape.
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Monthly Archives: December 2013
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It’s Cyber Monday. The skies over Boston are the colour of a DOS prompt and I’ve a 30% discount coupon for some sizzling hot RAM for your Hitachi.
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Time Capsule
While looking through old physics books for alternate takes on my quals problems, I found a copy of Sir James Jeans’ Electricity and Magnetism (5th edition, 1925). It’s a fascinating time capsule of early views on relativity and what we know call the “old quantum theory,” that is, the attempt to understand atomic and molecular phenomena by adding some constraints to fundamentally classical physics. Jeans builds up Maxwellian electromagnetism starting from the assumption of the aether. Then, in chapter 20, which was added in the fourth edition (1919), he goes into special relativity, beginning with the Michelson–Morley experiment. Only after discussing many examples in detail does he, near the end of the chapter, say
If, then, we continue to believe in the existence of an ether we are compelled to believe not only that all electromagnetic phenomena are in a conspiracy to conceal from us the speed of our motion through the ether, but also that gravitational phenomena, which so far as is known have nothing to do with the ether, are parties to the same conspiracy. The simpler view seems to be that there is no ether. If we accept this view, there is no conspiracy of concealment for the simple reason that there is no longer anything to conceal.
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“I’d thought my own interlibrary loan requests were odd enough, until I realized the book Jenkins held was bound in human skin.”
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Wolfram Language…
…because nothing says “stable platform for mission-critical applications” like “from the makers of Mathematica!”
Carl Zimmer linked to this VentureBeat piece on Wolfram Language with the remark, “Always interesting to hear what Stephen Wolfram is up to. But this single-source style of tech reporting? Ugh.” I’d go further: the software may well eventually provide an advance in some respect, but the reporting is so bad, we’d never know.
We’re told “a developer can use some natural language.” What, like the GOTO command? That’s English. Shakespearean, even. (“Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath made me mad.” Hamlet, act 3, scene 1.) We’re told that “literally anything” will be “usable and malleable as a symbolic expression”—wasn’t that the idea behind LISP? We’re told, awkwardly, that “Questions in a search engine have many answers,” with the implication that this is a bad thing (and that Wolfram Alpha solved that problem). We are informed that “instead of programs being tens of thousands of lines of code, they’re 20 or 200.” Visual Basic could claim much the same. We don’t push functionality “out to libraries and modules”; we use the Wolfram Cloud. It’s very different!
(Mark Chu-Carroll points out, “What’s scary is that he thinks that not pushing things to libraries is good!”)
The “wink, wink, we’re not not comparing Wolfram to Einstein” got old within a sentence, too.
I have actual footage of Wolfram from the Q&A session of that presentation:
“I am my own reality check.” — Stephen Wolfram (1997)