It’s called Go.

I never liked the “New Jersey” school of software engineering too much, but there’s something very charming about the kind of thing they make. For example, in this document, Rob Pike says that one of the design principles of the Go language is “no stuttering”. Things like “foo.Foo *myFoo = new foo.Foo(foo.FOO_INIT)” are avoided.

I think he is spot on. Stuttering is exactly the right term for this type of Smalltalk-flavored syntax.

This is from one of the Zork books, Conquest at Quendor.

From this short piece published in ScienceNow:

Lévi-Strauss introduced “structuralism” to anthropology–the concept that all societies follow certain universal patterns of thought and behavior, as exemplified in their myths. Anthropologists say his way of looking at human culture did away with conceptions of indigenous groups as having “savage” or “primitive” minds–as well as the corollary view that Western civilization is uniquely advanced. Lévi-Strauss’s way of re-conceptualizing anthropology–informed by what he called the “three mistresses” of geology, psychoanalysis, and Marxism–helped shape trends in social sciences and literary theory, and influenced intellectuals such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

Psychoanalysis and Marxism?? Are you kidding me? I was nodding along and I was all “ok ok…did away with primitive minds… that’s cool… western civilization not unique, sure I can see that” and then BANG! Psychoanalysis, and Marxism. You can record some humongous N400 brainwave from my scalp if you put electrodes on me. Totally unexpected from the context.

You can’t be a scientist if you pledge allegiance to a certain ideology, even if you call them your intellectual mistresses. I don’t think I am too interested in this dude.

What was I thinking when I recommended Massimo Pigliucci’s blog a few weeks ago? He immediately posted something stupid and annoying. In an entry titled “On the scope of skeptical inquiry“, Pigliucci said that

Consider again the example of a creationist who maintains in the face of evidence that the universe really is 6,000 years old, and that it only looks older because god arranged things in a way to test our faith. There is absolutely no empirical evidence that could contradict that sort of statement, but a philosopher can easily point out why it is unreasonable, and that furthermore it creates very serious theological quandaries.

Yes, a philosopher can easily point out why last-thursdayism is unreasonable, but a scientist can’t? Scientific theories with no empirical evidence are proposed all the time and scientists seem to have no problem making decisions about which direction to pursue. Pigliucci insists that Richard Dawkins is “doing a disservice both to science and to intellectual inquiry” by making atheism a scientific position. Why? We rejected ether. We rejected phlogiston. We rejected ESP. We rejected soul. Why is it any different when it comes to god?

Furthermore, what really annoys me is the undertone of Pigliucci’s piece: scientists should restrict themselves playing with their test tubes and leave all the deep thinking to the philosophers, the professional thinkers. You see, philosophers are really good at thinking, because that’s all that they do. They think. Thinking is apparently the one thing that scientists can’t do properly.

The problem is that philosophers really don’t have a good track record. When was the last time a scientist said “look, I think we are stepping outside our epistemological boundary here. Why don’t we knock on the doors of our smarter colleagues in the philosophy department and see if they can sort this out for us?” Three hundred years ago? Scientists are faced with deep mysteries all the time. For example, cognitive scientists are faced with the “problem” with consciousness. We don’t know what it is. We don’t have a framework to work with when it comes to consciousness. Philosophers are supposed to be experts on this kind of thing. Maybe they can help? Nope. We checked and it turns out that they are clueless too. They have tons of arguments, thought experiments and endless streams of bickering and nitpicking. But nothing concrete. Nothing useful.

When theoretical physicists are faced with deep problems, they very often discover that mathematicians already developed all the tools for describing the problem, and sometimes for solving the problem. It is famously called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences”. Philosophy, on the other hand, is almost the opposite. They miraculously managed to contribute nothing to science for a few hundred of years. I call this “the unreasonable useless of philosophy in natural sciences”. I have no idea why this is the case but it is.

Becker and Fagen got the name Steely Dan from this passage in Naked Lunch:

Mary is strapping on a rubber penis. “Steely Dan III from Yokohama,” she says, caressing the shaft. Milk spurts across the room. “Be sure that milk is pasteurized. Don’t go giving me some kinda awful cow disease like anthrax or glanders or aftosa….”

I recently found myself in a situation in which I had to write a program to determine if a 2D point is inside a simple polygon. The solution is fairly well-know. Wikipedia has a short article on it. See here. Essentially, you can choose from two popular algorithms: one based on crossing number and the other on winding number.

What is fascinating to me is that both are discrete cases of much more powerful theorems in topology. The former is related to the Jordan Curve Theorem, and the later to Gauss integral (in complex analysis). I learned these things in college but it never occurred to me that they are closely related.

In “A short history of nearly everything”, Bill Bryson claimed that some members of the Glass family in J. D. Salinger’s short stories were inspired by James “Avoid Boring People” Watson. Is it true?

The problem with Bill Bryson is that I can never really trust him. Yes I know that he is amazingly good at researching his materials, but he seems to be very willing to exaggerate things.

This is one of my favorite stories in “A short history of nearly everything”:

In the late summer or early autumn of 1859, Whitwell Elwin, editor of the respected British journal the Quarterly Review, was sent an advance copy of a new book by the naturalist Charles Darwin. Elwin read the book with interest and agreed that it had merit, but feared that the subject matter was too narrow to attract a wide audience. He urged Darwin to write a book about pigeons instead. ““Everyone is interested in pigeons,”” he observed helpfully.

Interesting story about the so-called orphan genes.

This result is really intriguing. Evolutionary psychology scores. Even I am starting to be convinced.

From wikipedia’s entry about the Apple // game Labyrinth:

[Douglas Adams] really liked the word “adumbrate”, a rather obscure verb meaning “To prefigure indistinctly; foreshadow”. So it ended up on the verb list. This obscure word was used in an even more obscure puzzle at one point in the game — you had to “adumbrate the elephant” when you were stuck in a prison, and an elephant would come and break a hole in the wall, freeing you.