Archive for the ‘computer science’ Category
Translation Party
August 13th, 2009
Translation Party translates a phrase between English and Japanese until it stops changing. By the end it’s often something pretty different.
Protip: Try Monty Python quotes.
The Chomskybot
August 9th, 2009
The Chomskybot generates random text in the style of linguist Noam Chomsky. Here’s a sample:
Note that the speaker-hearer’s linguistic intuition is unspecified with respect to the strong generative capacity of the theory. Analogously, the notion of level of grammaticalness suffices to account for the requirement that branching is not tolerated within the dominance scope of a complex symbol. Let us continue to suppose that relational information raises serious doubts about the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. Summarizing, then, we assume that an important property of these three types of EC is not to be considered in determining irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. It must be emphasized, once again, that this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features is to be regarded as a parasitic gap construction.
It’s got a wikipedia entry.
Quines
July 21st, 2009
Named after the American philosopher and logician W.V.O. Quine, a quine is a program whose only output is its own code. Here’s a neat example in Lisp/Scheme, taken from the wikipedia article:
((lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x)))
'(lambda (x) (list x (list 'quote x))))
computer science, language, math, old dead white guys | No Comments »
Fab@Home
July 19th, 2009
Fab@Home is the closest thing I’ve yet found to a von Neumann machine. Want.
Anaglyph Webcam
July 16th, 2009
Apparently the picture in this article are miscalibrated, but I’d still like to play around with this 3D webcam.
Apart from anaglyphs, it can also be used to film stereoscopic video:
SolarNetOne
July 7th, 2009
SolarNetOne is a solar-powered, satellite-connected wireless hotspot that can be deployed anywhere in the world. It’s designed to make the tubes available to developing countries. The full system costs just $15,000 to set up. Maintenance is trivial, and the whole thing runs on open source software.
Unfortunately, the project will ultimately prove to be a fiasco as developing economies learn just how many otherwise productive man-hours can be wasted on the internet.
Wikirank
July 2nd, 2009
Wikirank lists the most popular articles on Wikipedia over the past 30 days. At the time of this writing, Igor Stravinsky occupies the top spot. His birthday was June 17, which I imagine accounts for his almost 1.4 million views that day. Is Stravinsky’s birthday a big deal on the internet? That would be incongruous and wonderful.
Speaking of internet holidays, did Randall Munroe ever decide on the date of Linksys Day? I need to know when to bake my router-shaped cake.
Google Wave
June 11th, 2009
You’ve probably heard about Google Wave already, but in case you haven’t, it’s basically Google’s conception of what email would be like if it was invented today. Collaboration and Ajax abound.
The full 80-minute preview on the main page exceeds my attention span, so I’d recommend taking a look at the collection of clips on Lifehacker.
This thing should be released in a few months!
Listening to the Printer
June 9th, 2009
A research team at Saarland University in Germany has developed a program that can translate the squeaking and grinding sounds of dot-matrix printers into text. Read a quick summary, or the group’s more complete explanation.
MIT GEB Lectures
June 4th, 2009
For the last few years, MIT has been putting the course materials for many (about 1,900) of its classes online for free as part of its OpenCourseWare project. Most of them are really fantastic, and the site is worth browsing through. Of particular interest to me is the series of lectures for a course devoted to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. Which, if you haven’t read, you should; these lectures might help you along if you’ve found it a bit difficult.
Incidentally, the course is taught by an undergrad math major! The guy’s teaching style is a little rough, but he’s actually laudably competent.
books, computer science, language, math, science, video, web | No Comments »