finin

for some people.

They may be trying to communicate with a starman waiting in the sky, who'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds.

Netflix steaming is the new Blockbuster. I disliked Blockbuster because their stores had many copies of currently popular movies and not much else. I liked Netflix because it had an enormous catalog that let me work on seeing all of the great films that had been made in the last 100 years that I'd missed. Netflix streaming is like Blockbuster. At any given time it lets me access only a fraction of its catalog and that fraction is biased toward what is popular. Netflix steaming is the new Blockbuster. :-(

Trailers make every movie look good, even the ones that turn out to be truly awful. :-/

... 580 people ...

from the S&P rationale section of their press release:

"Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act."

LOGO, a programming language for teaching computing to young children, uses recursion as its fundamental control structure. My kids studied it successfully in a Philadelphia public school on C64s in the 1980s.

what about public sector employees?

Obvously, the science is not settled™.

It's not so surprising given that his initial idea for the Web was proposed in 1989.

In the fall of 1980 I taught my first class (AI) as a professor. The TA, Jeff Shrager, suggested this word problem, which he called dog-cat, as a good homework exercise for implementing the A* search algorithm. The students had to do it for three letter words in Lisp and on a Univac computer that the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School had at the time. I’ve been using the problem on and off for 30 years now in homework assignments.

This is a good statement from an accomplished, successful and apparently happy person who gives some credit to her parents for exposing her to computer programming and computer systems starting at the age of seven. What's not to like about this message?

If the iPad had LOGO on it, that 10 week old baby could be learning how to program and understand the real power of computing devices.

I suppose so, but for human languages it's much more difficult, since it assigning a type to a token is context dependent.

I seem like it's just a part of speech tagger, rather than a parser.

I didn't mean "knockoff" to be disparaging, just that the design and functionality are very similar.

I believed that I would always have hair.

I already knew that many 'smart people' were in fact dense, but it's useful to know where they congregate.

Get a laptop and fun unix on it -- linux or mac os x.

I've been convinced that range voting it the best -- better than IRV and approval voting. It's intuitive also. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting

Great article because (1) scrapple is great, and (2) the article shows human nature to be a constant: "[a] steampunk prototype for online food discussion. It’s all there: the pseudonymous “usernames,” the off-topic ranting, the preoccupation with pork fat. In short, it’s a modern-day food thread in very slow motion."

I remember seeing papers and presentations on go! from eight or so years ago. Fujitsu Labs of America used it to build some multiagent systems. It drew on many years of previous work by Clark and McCabe, which I first came to know of in the mid 1980s.

Back in 1987 i wrote a toy interpreter for Scheme in Prolog. Well, a Scheme-like language with a Prolog-like syntax. I kept the files, which are at http://umbc.edu/~finin/sip/.

This may be irrelevant, but maybe not. In addition to being the most significant linguist of the 20th century, Chomsky made many key contributions to mathematical linguistics, a field that is important to Computer Science. So in some sense, he is "one of us".

I love 'Basic of the future' as a slur/compliment for a programming language.

This reminds me of the W3C's annotea project -- http://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/