Politics, Programming and Possibilities
19 Jun
I found out about the help Iran’s election website through collecta.com, a real-time search engine. It’s kinda cool to have the very latest tweets and blogs updated on the website as they come in.
18 Jun
My classes at BYU are officially over! The graduation ceremony comes in a month and a half.
I took my last final exams yesterday… and it was actually kind of funny. Kelty and I had visited her brother and sister-in-law in Mesquite, NV on my Tuesday Reading Day and since we left very early in the morning I hadn’t yet shaved. Kelty and I drove straight through until noon when she dropped me off at the BYU-Provo campus for my Artificial Intelligence final exam. I went in without any problems and took the exam.
Next, I raced to the BYU-Salt Lake campus where I was to take my American Heritage final. But oh! They are square there. I think they get a monthly recognition award for catching wayward students. Anyway, the exam proctor young lady told me that I had to be clean shaven to take the exam. She wouldn’t hand out the exam, so I went to the bathroom to shave. I finished the exam without any fuss and laughed my way through the rain to the parking lot.
I loved my Computer Science education there, but it sure feels great to be free from 7 years of BYU community rules!
12 Jun
The research … shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.
Moore said that following the advice of the most confident person often makes sense, as there is evidence that precision and expertise do tend to go hand in hand. For example, people give a narrower range of answers when asked about subjects with which they are more familiarThere are times, however, when this link breaks down. With complex but politicised subjects such as global warming, for example, scientific experts who stress uncertainties lose out to activists or lobbyists with a more emphatic message.
24 May
Your mind has four purposes: to make you like the world, and to make the world like you.
21 May
I was reading the following synopsis of a science article today:
Integrative FGFR1 Signaling (INFS), a new mechanism that plays a central role in adult brain stem cell development and prompts brain stem cells to differentiate into neurons, has been identified by University at Buffalo researchers.
11 May
7 May
As I’ve worked in Haskell over the past several months, I’ve noticed that my mind has kind of implicitly modeled functional programming as a visual/mechanical representation of concepts. I’d like to make the ideas more explicit, however, so I’m writing this post and cooking up some graphics. I wonder if others have similar “internal representations” of functions, and if perhaps others might suggest improvements over my model.
2 May
The semester is over, my final project was a success (at least in that I passed the class) and it’s time now to release the game I made for Graphics 455: Silkworm!
22 Apr
Class is now done. My last final exam was yesterday. More than any previous semester, I used a wide variety of computing tools to finish my work in class. Here are a few of the ones I put to use:
19 Apr
I really don’t like blogging about this kind of thing, but the battle between my stomach and my conscience often leads to a win for the conscience. The United States should be a world leader in moral capacity and ethical treatment of even the vilest of characters. Somehow, we failed at that role between 2002 and 2007. FireDogLake reports:
According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.
The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM.That doesn’t sound very effective to me.