Blog Posts
The Broken World
Do not be dismayed by the brokenness of the world.
All things break.
And all things can be mended.
Not with time, as they say, but with intention.
So go.
Love intentionally, extravagantly, unconditionally.
The broken world waits in darkness for the light that is you.
— L. R. Knost
The Illusion of Knowledge
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
— Stephen Hawking
To Change One's Life
To change one’s life:
Start immediately Do it flamboyantly No exceptions — William James
Truth
Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not believed.
— William Blake
What Would Otherwise Be a Beautiful Spring Day
Leaf blowers are a scourge. No philosophy – no ponerology – can be complete without providing an account of leaf blowers.
Charlemagne's Monograph
Say what you will about Charlemagne, but he had a fabulous sense of design. Here’s how he signed his name:
Source: Wikipedia
May 2020 Listening
A few people asked: “What are you listening to while sheltering in place?” Here’s my response (in reverse chron). In case you’re wondering, for most selections I’m using an album shuffle program with Volumio. Sometimes I’ll ask the computer for another selection. Occasionally I’ll hand pick something. Mostly random. This is the result.
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Some Julia Sets
Having taught CS 021 at UVM (Introduction to Programming), I thought that creating model project would be appropriate as an example. All students spend the last two weeks of the semester working on an individual or team project of their choosing. It also happens that I’ve been doing a little self-study in complex analysis. So as a model – to demonstrate a project of suitable complexity and scope – I created a little Julia set rendering program.
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Dijkstra Scores Again
“As a slow-witted human being I have a very small head and I had better learn to live with it and to respect my limitations and give them full credit, rather than try to ignore them, for the latter vain effort will be punished by failure.”
— Edsger W. Dijkstra, in Structured Programming (1972)
Upon reading 'The economy needs agent-based modelling'
A haiku, written after reading Farmer & Foley, The economy needs agent-based modelling (Nature, 460, 6 August 2009) as assigned by Laurent Hébert-Dufresne for CS/CSYS 302 Modeling Complex Systems.
Decision, choice, whim —
Who was it who decided
We are rational?
— For J.