There are many like it But this one is mine.
Jul 06
Jul 05
“ [America] is a land of opportunity and yet there are more seventeen year old black youths in prison than in college. It is a land of freedom where in many states you can’t buy fireworks or alcohol or cross the street as a pedestrian where you please and where children’s books are banned and educational material suppressed if they do not square with some religious dogma or other. It is a land of church-going traditionalists and a land of freaks and fancies. A nation founded in revolution where radicalism is next to Satanism.
“ For some reason, giving a 5-hour lecture series in which you describe the motivations, applications, and work out the mathematical details is acceptable; but writing a text of the same level of detail, which might take only 2 hours to read, is not.
Jul 04
“ Or, put another way: asking how many worlds there are is like asking how many experiences you had yesterday, or how many regrets a repentant criminal has had. It makes perfect sense to say that you had many experiences or that he had many regrets; it makes perfect sense to list the most important categories of either; but it is a non-question to ask how many.
“ What makes it true that a given lump of organic matter has intentions and desires is not something derivable algorithmically from that lump’s microscopic constituents; it is the fact that, when it occurs to us to try interpreting its behaviour in terms of beliefs and desires, that strategy turns out to be highly effective.
“ We must not suppose that science teaches us that every thing anyone would want to take seriously is identifiable as a collection of particles moving about in space and time.
“
if the mark of a serious scientific theory is its breadth of application, its explanatory power, its quantitative accuracy, and its ability to make novel predictions, then it is hard to think of a theory more “worth taking seriously” than quantum mechanics. So it seems entirely apposite to ask what ontological claims quantum mechanics makes, if taken literally, and to take those claims seriously in turn.
And quantum mechanics, taken literally, claims that we are living in a multiverse: that the world we observe around us is only one of countless quasi-classical universes (“branches”) all coexisting… if the theory is worth taking seriously, we should take the branches seriously too.
“ One could even construct a computer program to automate the translation from standard into working parser code. In fact, using a computer program to translate the standard would be best, as it would minimize work and minimize the chance of errors. Except… except that ISO/Ansi standards are copyrighted and a translation would make your implementation a derivative work, at least as I read the law US Code Title 17… So what is the point of having a technology standard, if implementors cannot use it, because it is copyrighted?
Jul 03
“ What I saw as I went through my education was a very clear winnowing out — not between really smart people and not smart people — but between people who had an aesthetic sense for the kinds of problems that they found interesting and useful.
“ Komanoff calculates… that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.
“ For every polynomial algorithm you have, I have an exponential algorithm that I would rather run.
— Alan Perlis
“ I claim that our problem P=NP is different than the RH, since there is no “one bad apple” behavior. My point is simple: There is a huge variance in the potential answers to the question: Does P equal NP? It’s not simple. Equal, not equal, Equal, not equal. There are an infinite number of possibilities.
— Is P=NP an Ill Posed Problem? - Dick Lipton
If you’re acquainted at all with the P=NP problem, this is an amazingly read. A shame I couldn’t find a great quote to summarize it.
“ At one point Michael [Jackson] was angry at one of the producers on the project because he was treating everyone terribly. Rather than create a scene or fire the guy, Michael called him to his office/lounge and one of the security guys threw a pie in his face. No further action was needed…
“ A serious high-speed rail project would forget about Texas and focus on saving hours in the Northeast Corridor. A rational transportation program would target money to the areas that have the most congestion. A smart transportation policy would recognize the wisdom of using our existing infrastructure more efficiently, with the help of congestion pricing, rather than building more roads. Unfortunately, wisdom seems to take wing whenever politicians start envisioning the shining splendor of fast trains.
