Good news today: a paper I co-authored was accepted to a conference in China. The “acceptance” part of that sentence was the good news, but I’m also looking forward to the opportunity to go east, young man. If I go. Finances will, as always be a problem. Even when the entire trip is paid, I’m [...]
It is still a couple of months before the 60′th anniversary of the start of WW2 (or the commonly held start, according to Wikipedia). But I have started to read Emmanuel Guibert’s graphic novel “Alan’s War” about the experience of one soldier. This has made me think about the impact of the war. Again according [...]
First, a disclaimer: what follows is not thought through or based on any deep (or shallow) knowledge about what others, experts and amateurs alike, have written about the subject. Property is not easy to define. At a physical level there is nothing that ties me to my possessions, or them to me. So, the idea [...]
Despite the fact that I work relatively hard during the day, I noticed that I’m still feeling a sense of guilt when I’m working at home. I do not quite understand why. I suppose that I have grown up with the idea that one goes out to “work” every morning and comes back home to [...]
The “youngest” search engine is Microsoft’s bing. Just a couple of weeks before it was released, we saw the introduction of Wolfram Alpha. I’m not sure about the former, but the latter is supposed to provide answers, not just pointers to answers. This is what I wrote about a couple of months ago. I haven’t [...]
And now I will perform a little song. This is something I learned in 1991 when I studied Xhosa 1: Imvula, imvula Capa capa ca Imanz’ ilokhwe yam Imvula, imvula Capa capa ca Imanz’ ibulukhwe yam Kuyaduduma, kuyaduduma I hope I remember this right. Here is a rough translation: It’s raining, it’s raining (sound of [...]
On Saturday Telkom is installing my new phone line. I am, frankly, astounded at how quickly they are coming, but Telkom has often surprised me pleasantly in the past. In preparation I bought a handset today (while I also picked up my new Standard Bank credit card — it only took them 1.5 months to [...]
Despite the danger of alienating some of you, I have an interesting graph problem I want to present to you. Suppose we are given a directed graph with n vertices. We are asked to number the vertices 1, 2, 3, …, n so that the “sum of distances” is minimized. The distance of an edge [...]
I do not really want to admit it, but it seems that our Honours students (4th years) do not know much about sorting. Or algorithmic complexity. I disagree somewhat with the philosophy of the current Data Structures and Algorithms course, although it is easy to critisize. I’m not sure I’d be able to do much [...]
Two topics. First: yesterday I posted a complaint about Python’s refusal to hash lists. This is unfortunately unavoidable because lists are mutable. Suppose a list x = [1,2,3] is inserted into a dictionary. The latter is implemented as a hash table, which is quite reasonable. Unfortunately, the dictionary must either store a reference or must [...]