Archive for the ‘Karthik's’ Category
The Illegal Prime
Hello, reader. An offering, for your perusal:
It’s unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. Get that? We used to have illegal math in this country.
The National Security Agency were the real movers [...]
Scaling (I)
There are presumably many clever, interesting and useful tools and ideas in science and math modeling. The concept of scaling, though, is the most powerful one I’ve seen in that it makes very nontrivial predictions with just small helpings of information.
Let’s start at the top. To scale an object means to multiply its every linear [...]
Format:Text
The following is an essay I wrote elaborating upon the power of plain text as a digital medium. I love text based data formats; I work with plain text for nearly everything. I love working at a shell- GUIs frustrate me. I am not an authority on the subjects of GUIs and data [...]
Blink, Morse
In the novel *Cryptonomicon*, one of the lead characters finds himself implicated in a (comical) drug bust, and is placed in a jail cell under the watchful (electronic) eyes of hi-tech eavesdroppers. It’s a scene out of a spy novel (although *Cryptonomicon* isn’t quite that), minus the secret agents, plus one savvy Unix sysadmin. He’s [...]
“Why are you producing so few red blood cells today?”
An interesting note from six months ago that I never got around to posting. ’tis a bit vague, but then so is the source. Besides, I like to think that nebulousness has its share of merits- trickster makes this world, after all.
***
A while ago, it was thought that the trick to making a machine play [...]
CUDA
I have two primary uses for personal computers.
By uses, I don’t refer to tasks that involve using a hammer where an orthopaedists’ tongs will suffice; Most modern desktops are far too overpowered for (relative to those below) simple tasks like web surfing and listening to music. (With two primary exceptions: The PC must not run [...]
“Have Game?”
[Scroll to the bottom if the references are, um, alien]
It was three in the afternoon, and I was embroiled in an interstellar conflict of epic magnitude. No, really. Mengsk had ordered me to protect the Zerg from the Protoss expeditionary force so he could let them loose against the confederacy. (Why, of all the nerve!) [...]
Who do you know?
So my college batch embarks on a most distressing adventure, one of creating an yearbook with expository information on everyone in the two hundred thirty strong ensemble. The venture is distressing because the few volunteers who’re organizing the data collection, formatting and printing process have had little time to sleep in the past few [...]
The IF thing: resources
This is a short addendum to the post I wrote earlier detailing why you should play Interactive Fiction. (Humour the evangelist, go read!)
So how do you go about playing experiencing IF?
Pick up the phone booth and die is a starkly minimalist (even by IF standards) foot-in-mouth piece of non-sequitur that takes about a minute to [...]
Quine’s letter
Willard Van Orman Quine was a mathematician and philosopher at Harvard known, apparently, for his wit, charm, and openness of mind. In Quine’s obituary, Morton White (a Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton) tells of the time when he (White) moved from Cambridge to Princeton, and his son Steve was missing multiplication [...]