Ramanujan...

Today is the 125th anniversary of the birth of Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Some 20 years ago, an Indian colleague and friend told me about Ramanujan, whom I'd never heard of.  He recommended The Man Who Knew Infinity, and I will likewise recommend that book to you.  It's an amazing story of a man whose mathematical talents approached magic...

What Does Randomness Look Like?

Excellent article exploring (and explaining) something that is counter-intuitive to almost everyone: truly random data doesn't look random (well, at least not to most people).

Something the article doesn't touch on, but is closely related: people are very good at visually identifying certain kinds of non-random data, by picking graphical patterns out of images similar to the ones shown in the article...

Real World Code Sucks...

Dave Mandl writes (intro):

There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.

To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in school — it’s outright terrible by any number of measures.

Due to bad design, sloppy or opaque coding practices, non-scalability, and layers of ugly “temporary” patches, it’s often difficult to maintain, harder still to modify or upgrade, painful or impossible for a new person joining the dev team to understand, or (a different kind of problem) slow and inefficient. In short, a mess.

His experience matches my own, at least for any body of code that wasn't written by a single individual (that's nearly everything these days, as software keeps getting bigger and more complex).

But for the most part, it works anyway – which some might consider to be an inexplicable miracle...

A Gun Control Roundup...

Courtesy of the incomparable Rachel Lucas.  Read it, and send the links to your favorite believers in the efficacy of gun control...

Inspiration...

Wow:

A Measured Response the Sandy Hook Shootings...

Excerpt from Mark Steyn's piece:

It would not be imprudent to expect that an ever-broker America, with more divorce, fewer fathers, the abolition of almost all social restraints and a revoltingly desensitized culture, will produce more young men who fall through the cracks. But, in the face of murder as extraordinarily wicked as that of Newtown, we should know enough to pause before reaching for our usual tired tropes. So I will save my own personal theories, no doubt as ignorant and irrelevant as everybody else's, until after Christmas – except to note that the media's stampede for meaning in massacre this past week overlooks the obvious: that the central meaning of these acts is that they are without meaning. Herod and the Pennsylvania Indians murdered children in pursuit of crude political goals; the infanticidal maniac of Sandy Hook was merely conscripting grade-school extras for a hollow act of public suicide. Like most mass shootings, his was an exercise in hyper-narcissism – 19th century technology in the service of a very contemporary sensibility.

Read the whole thing...

An Opinion on Gun Control...

Best piece on gun control I've read in a while...