Posts Tagged “academia”

26 Apr: Unknown Environments

Here’s Knuth in an inter­view:
As to your real ques­tion, the idea of imme­di­ate com­pi­la­tion and “unit tests” appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feel­ing my way in a totally unknown envi­ron­ment and need feed­back about what works and what doesn’t…
Hmm, peo­ple who are “feel­ing their way in a totally unknown envi­ron­ment”… Like new contributors […]

Tags: , , , , , , , 2008-04-26 19:23 2 Comments

31 Dec: Style and Substance

Point
Counter-point

Tags: , , , , , 2007-12-31 18:33 No Comments

25 Nov: The Bad Cop

via Chuck0.

Tags: , , , , 2006-11-25 18:30 No Comments

25 Sep: *Ding*

The second-biggest Shia spir­i­tual leader (who, per­fectly enough, I’ve never heard of) was quoted on NPR today from some­thing he said last Friday (2006−09−22) as say­ing that there is no “con­flict of civ­i­liza­tions”, only a “con­flict of igno­rance”.
Which is as near to cor­rect as any state­ment yet on the cur­rent West vs. Mid-East “blow each […]

Tags: , , , , , 2006-09-25 11:03 No Comments

16 Jun: Hope and Fear

The other night I was think­ing about fear (in case you’re won­der­ing, I do that instead of sleep­ing). See, I have these Socratic debates in my head, wherein I deter­mine which side of the debate sounds  —  on the whole  —  less mind-fuckingly insane to me, and then I refine it, and blend in the less crazy parts of […]

Tags: , , , , 2006-06-16 20:59 No Comments

14 Jan: Finding Spivak

I recently IM’d some­one who sounded inter­est­ing on an unnamed quiz/dating site, and was pleas­antly sur­prised to find some­one who made me feel dumb. Not that feel­ing dumb is good, just that it’s eas­ier to see the next plateau when there’s some­one there wav­ing at you.
Unfortunately, reach­ing that plateau involves track­ing down a par­tic­u­lar essay by […]

Tags: , , , 2006-01-14 18:53 No Comments