Shannon worked for Bell Labs (now owned by Alcatel-Lucent).
Guess who just shut down “fundamental research” in physics?
Not quite sic transit gloria mundi, but definitely a chunk of the glory of American research.
Year: 2008
I Just Don’t Get It.
In some ways I’m a classic information theory junkie–Claude Shannon changed the way I think about the universe just as much as any golden book. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is something that I keep thinking I’ve finally had my “kick from the knee” moment with, and then something comes along to make it clear to me that I… Read more →
Golden Books 1: The Sun, The Moon, And The Stars
If you’re just here for the “kick from the knee” explanation, jump down to here. Over at the blog Steven Brust shares with his roommates, the question was posed about the “golden books“—those ones that because you hit them at just the right time, and they were just the right thing, made a lasting change in you, and how you… Read more →
Aside
If you’re reading this in an RSS reader, you probably haven’t noticed that Homo Sum now has “asides”–certain short posts that display differently from the larger more detailed posts.
At the moment they only display differently on the front page–not when you’re looking at them in single pages, or in any kind of archive, or from RSS.
These are implemented with the help of the AsideShop plugin for WordPress.
Aside
I’ve been holding this link, brought to my attention by Jeff Ford, to a story on the Dancing Plague (and some other odd afflictions). I find the theorizing quite interesting, although I suspect the truth, when it is discovered, will end up being something to do with parasitism.
A Linkpost Before Sleeping
I think I’m going to soon look at setting up the site with “asides”, so that instead of gathering up large buckets of links that I have only a few comments on, I can just drop them in as “asides” between my longer and more content-y posts. In the meantime, another (possibly final) agglomeration of miscellaneous links. This might be… Read more →
Browser Neepery 2008 Style
So, like all the other serious geeks, I’ve been playing with Google Chrome for a the last couple of days. In general, I like it–it’s fast, and there are lots of nice little UI bits that I quite like, plus the deep nerd in me likes the multi-process architecture and the built-in memory profiling, etc. However there is absolutely no… Read more →
Why I Will Soon Have To Get A New Job
I work every day with people all over the world. Consequently, it is often hard to set a meeting time that is useful to everyone who needs to be in a meeting. I am quite prepared to work in the evenings, and often do, but I really, really, want to keep that narrow window of time between “Sarah gets home… Read more →
Missing The Joke: Or How I Learned To Bind The Spirits
You know what I hate? When I can tell that something in what I’m reading (or seeing) is a reference to something, and I don’t know what that something is. Sometimes it’s an inside joke, but more often it’s a literary reference, or an allusion to some knowledge I don’t have. Most of the time I can spot the reference,… Read more →
Labour Day Gallimaufry
I note that unlike most North Americans, I understand the roots of Labour Day. And while what I do has no relationship to organized labour, I do find something bitterly ironic about taking a day off to celebrate the standard work week (among other things) when I am regularly working some hours almost every week night to accommodate Australian coworkers,… Read more →
Picking At Religion Again
And now for your intermittently recurring muttering about the extremely religious. Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was… Read more →
Sometimes you have these thoughts…
So, about that whole mind-body divide thing. What if we go with the assumption that it’s a kind of hardware/software situation: that the chemistry and the organics are a machine that manipulates a something else–a pattern of energy, an emergent system. The changes in this pattern result in what we perceive as consciousness. Hell, maybe the pattern can even exert… Read more →
I’ve been waiting to hear exactly that
“Our mission is to restore America’s influence and position in the world. We must use all the weapons in our arsenal, above all, our values. President Obama and Vice President Biden will shut down Guantanamo, respect the Constitution, and make clear once and for all, the United States of America does not torture, not now, not ever.” —Senator John Kerry,… Read more →
Things I Did Not Know Last Month
The reason I didn’t know what a rowan tree looks like is, apparently, that I’ve always seen them labelled as either “European Mountain Ash” or “Dogberry” trees. So, rather than being some esoteric European tree, they’re all over the place. This will make my offensive against the malevolent beings much simpler. The oldest joke in the world is a fart… Read more →
Old John Paul is keepin’ a tab
My musical crush on Montreal blueswoman Dawn Tyler Watson continues. While “Hey Hey” is still the top of my playlist, some of the covers from the recent En Duo album are climbing up. For instance the cover of Patty Griffin‘s tune “Wiggley Fingers” (lyrics) on the album is pretty amazing. Something about Dawn’s voice, especially when she gets to the… Read more →
