catechu

While I do not know whether or not Watson actually does this, the paper doesn't mention anything about parallelism -- I suspect that the exploitation of structured parallelism is another handy benefit to using Prolog on as many machines as Watson was using.

(For example: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1867.)

Brings new meaning to the field of computer science.

From article: "The mass of Earth dimples this fabric, much like a heavy person sitting in the middle of a trampoline."

I will never imagine general relativity the same way again.

Or he could have pulled a Ludwig Wittgenstein and given it to the "already-corrupted" rich.

Hmm...

The Wired article (linked within under "can control the universe") seemed to suggest that he solved the problem by "channeling Jesus"...which seems to misrepresent that he was talking about his childhood training, rather than how he actually solved the conjecture.

"...couldn't really put his finger on what it was that he really wanted but couldn't just do."

As an amusing literal interpretation of your metaphor, IIRC Leonardo actually painted the shadows around the Mona Lisa's mouth using his finger, which enabled his style of sfumato shading. So I suppose he was putting his finger on it...

I speak for myself here, but I don't think something needs to be the "Future of the World" for it to be an immensely fulfilling way to lead one's life, degree or not.

For those who enjoyed the author's story, there's plenty more in his well-written autobiography: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Odds-Autobiography-James-Dyson....

Seconded. Link to pdf for the lazy: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf.

And to other incarnations: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html.

While I agree that it can be unstable (inference can get stuck in local maxima), latent variable models like LDA can be used to rigorously evaluate textual categories (e.g. journal articles). We take for granted that the categories we set are "useful", in some sense, so it's interesting to see that quantitatively questioned.

e.g.: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/11/12/1013452107.abst...

Also, for the curious, original paper on LDA: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~blei/papers/BleiNgJordan2003.pd....

In case you're wondering whose annotations those are, IIRC, the marginalia are from Vinod Khosla.

Independent of the elegant typesetting it produces, TeX contains well-designed notation for mathematics, reflecting the algorithmic bent of its author, Don Knuth.

Mathematics doesn't change as frequently as desktop publishing, so it's a good bet that the TeX (e.g. $\int_0^1 \tau \, d\tau$) is going to be around as long as people talk math online.

That said, I think there are much easier-to-use and less error-prone desktop publishing tools (e.g. Scribus) for less math-heavy domains, like magazine layout.

"It is only when thermal energy is not equal to gravitational work that the cloud either expands and cools or contracts and warms, a process that continues until equilibrium is reached."

Gosh, I want pants like that!

Biggest impact I've found which is not directly discussed in the OP: A great package repository (e.g. CPAN) can outweigh quirks in language design (e.g. Perl spaghetti code).

It seems to me that TeX did the best job of winning at both -- over three decades, at that!

At any rate, whatever people might tell you about your lack of credentials, you've already set your pitching skills apart by putting this out here in front of everyone. It's surprising just how much of presentation skill is about taking one's own ideas seriously.

So congratulations on that!

I use the basic version of PayPal for subscriptions, but I've had issues with canceling customers' subscriptions without their explicit request, and the PayPal support is horrendous.

The fees are a little higher than some of the other services, but it integrates fine, so if you're okay with a clunky but easy to set up service, you might find it useful as well.

I think product sales is a game of incomplete information in which sellers don't know what each buyer wants and buyers don't necessarily know what they want either. It seems to me that advertising, which is effectively gambling on consumers' unknown desires, is the only way for either party to discover that hidden knowledge of what buyers want -- a commercial Monte Carlo simulation of sorts.

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted," Henry Ford once said, "they would have said a faster horse."

Not to divert attention from the point he's making, but is that a MacBook he's using in the article picture?

Wonder if the old NN/g results for eye tracking still hold up: http://www.useit.com/eyetracking/.

That said, impatience also prevents feature creep.

While anything that brings more talent into the programming world is a good thing, I find it disappointing when I see such lists encourage cursory understanding like this. While it does have a section on "Becoming the Master", I think that prefacing the section with "[i]f you're still yearning for more" doesn't have the normative force I find in similar but more inspiring works such as Raymond's "How to Become a Hacker."

Personally, reading the following in Raymond's essay many years ago impressed me with the importance of mastery and motivated much of my attitude toward programming:

"Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models."

The focus on mastery is critical to any hacker's path, in my opinion -- it is not an option.

That said, kudos on encouraging more hackery. :)

How can you check if nothing happened?

I wondered why this is legal and my doubts were resolved in the FAQ.

"Having the winnings become philanthropic gifts solves the legal problem and also introduces an appropriate element of service and generosity to the whole process."

Useful presentation, though I don't know how reliant Google still is on MapReduce for search.

There's a slide in there "Numbers Everyone Should Know" that deserves its title -- things like 10,000,000ns for a disk seek.

I would say the same, but I think its absence has reduced me to tears enough in the past, so I'll pass. :)

I don't think Jobs is concerned about retrospectively predicting the successes he had. Rather, I think he wants to emphasize their inherent unpredictability, together with the assertion that such unpredictability doesn't matter. So it's not quite hindsight bias.

Would the magnetic field required be detectable by other means, offsetting the stealth?

If not, that's pretty neat. Now to make an iPhone app for it...

There's certainly an air to having your dot sketch in the WSJ from what I hear, though I imagine that's faded after its years of remodeling itself and its time under new ownership. That said, the difficulties with using an algorithmic filter for creating this stipple effect are, based on my past attempts:

(1) robustness to lighting conditions

(2) recognition of continuous shapes, such as hats (captured well in [1])

(3) avoiding stipple effect on facial features (e.g. lips, eyes)

I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I haven't been clever enough to encode it correctly. :)

[1] http://gazeandstare.com/pic/nolinovak_01.gif

Her portfolio seems to be here: http://www.ecargnfx.com/grace_portfolio.pdf.