Category: Geekdom
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Admit me to the conspiracy
Deltoid takes a look at a piece of code taken from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that apparently has the denialists salivating. Buried therein is the following comment: “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL [sic] correction for decline!!” Are you convinced yet of the global leftist socialist global warming alarmist conspiracy?! I certainly am. I’d also like…
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Old computers
The Linux boot up message of the moment: / has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced. This would place the manufacturing date of the computer in question at around 1872 or earlier; a century before the UNIX epoch (the official Dawn of Time for UNIX-based computers) and at least 86 years prior to…
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Marvelous spam
Normally unseen by the small number of real live humans who visit this blog, I get a steady stream of comment spam. None of it makes it through, most being caught by a set of fairly simple filter rules, and the rest being swiftly cut down by a heartless moderator (i.e. me). Recent comment spammers…
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Artificial intelligence
A thought occurs, spurred on by my use of Bayesian networks. They’re used in AI (so I’m led to believe), though I’m using them to model the comprehension process in humans. However, I do also work in a building filled with other people applying AI techniques. My question is this: how long until Sarah Connor…
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Horrible Java
Apologies to non-geeks. The following Java code determines whether infinity is even or odd. It compiles, runs, finishes immediately, and outputs “false” (meaning that infinity is odd). class Infinity \u007b static \u0062\u006f\u006f\u006c\u0065\u0061\u006e\u0020\u0065\u0076\u0065\u006e\u003b static { // Configure infinite speed System.nanoTime(\u002f\u002a); boolean even = true; double i = 0.0; while(i
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The Bayesian rabbit hole
You may recall previous rants about my theoretical framework. The recent evolution of my thought processes (much like all other times) has been something like this: hurrah, done… except… [ponder]… I should see if I can fix this little problem… [ponder]… How the hell is this supposed to work?… [ponder]… Damn, the library doesn’t have…
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Temporal malfunction
You may have noticed that Dave’s Archives, in a fit of celebratory humour, temporarily reverted to a two-week old version on Good Friday. So did my inbox, and for a while I thought I’d lost all my emails and blog posts since March 26. Email isn’t a problem, because I have a convoluted forwarding scheme…
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The doomsday argument
This has recently been the source of much frustration for some of my friends, as I’ve attempted to casually plow through a probabilistic argument that most people would instinctively recoil at. So, I thought, it might work better when written down. Of course, plenty of others have also written it down, including Brandon Carter –…
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Students
Here’s what diversity means to a university tutor. Student A appears with a deer-in-the-headlights look at the door to the senior tutor room and asks (in a bewildering tone that sounds as if a layer of righteous outrage has been suppressed and petrified beneath another layer of sheer blinding terror) if there is going to…
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Conroy and Bolt on filtering
The ABC’s Q&A programme spent about 30 minutes last night pondering Senator Conroy’s mandatory Internet filtering plan… well, idea, because it’s increasingly clear that “plan” is too strong a word. Conroy was, frankly, an embarrassment. To be honest, most of the questions put to him were not especially articulate, but Conroy made a mockery of…