Archive for February, 2008
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 [...]
The IF thing
In the 1980s, a period whose pop-culture I completely missed owing to the internet being unheard of (there was also this small matter of me not existing through much of that decade), a bunch of programmers at MIT created and sold games- under the guise of a company named Infocom- that functioned as a novel [...]
Markov is as Markov does
“Oddly enough, you’re in the envelope had in the bedside table. The hall was filled. The drum sounded three times, twisting his heels heavily in the business with the hubbub of white gristle.”
-Douglas Adams, on Markov Generators
Alright, so Douglas Adams didn’t actually say as much. But it seems fairly likely that had he been asked, [...]