Yesterday, John McCarthy, one of the fathers of modern computer programming passed away. John McCarthy may not have received as much notoriety among tech people as Steve Jobs did, but he was perhaps more influential. McCarthy developed LISP in 1959, based on Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus, for use in artificial intelligence research. My contact with …
Category Archive: Technology
Oct
24
Oct
02
Excessive Government Regulation
I found this tag on the stroller we push our son around in: First of all, in a state as financially troubled as California, they can still afford their own “Bureau of Home Furnishings“? At first I was terrified that this department of the State of California had at least 117 technical bulletins on Home …
Aug
07
Mark Cuban on Patent Law
Mark Cuban has a very good post recommending improvements to the patent law system. While his reference is clearly the US patent system, this applies to most of the patent laws around the world, including here in Canada. I would add one more thing to Mr. Cuban’s short list of fixes. While he focuses on …
Jun
07
On Computer Simulations and Reality
Today, I was directed to a very good article, But It Worked in the Computer Model, on why complex computer models, of any subject, will usually contain errors and not provide a good analogue to reality without a lot of real world experimentation. It also explains, tangentially, why many students coming out of universities with …
Mar
18
On Fukushima
The Fukushima incident raises a number of questions about the design and operation of nuclear facilities. Most notably: How is it that no one had considered the possibility of a subduction earthquake followed by tsunami in that location? Why were the emergency generators located in the “wash zone”? However, as bad as this incident is, …
Feb
02
On Usage Based Billing
Fundamentally, I don’t disagree with the idea of usage based billing for bandwidth on the internet. In a free market, the consumer of this service should pay an amount that is set my the free market price mechanism. The cost of providing the service includes infrastructure, maintenance, operations and upgrades and expansions. I disagree with …
Jun
22
Expensive Solar from Africa?
Reuters has an interesting story about a project to put solar panels in North Africa, with power lines to transmit this electric to Europe. The story states: The European Union is backing projects to turn the plentiful sunlight in the Sahara desert into electricity for power-hungry Europe, a scheme it hopes will help meet its …
Jun
21
When Failure Should Not Be An Option
In the script for the movie Apollo 13, one of the sayings fundamental views of the people working during the program was distilled into the quote “Failure is Not an Option”, and was spoken by Ed Harris, playing Gene Kranz. Kranz notably used it to title his autobiographical history of the events. But the lesson …
Jun
02
The failure of modern “problem solving”
The failure is not in solving the problem, it is in the rush to judge who is responsible for a problem. Because the finger pointing scares people from wanting to be involved in solving the problem. It scares people from wanting to propose new ideas or try new things out of fear of being blamed …
May
12
The big blow ups?
Margaret Wente, in the Globe and Mail this week, writes that we live in an era of big “blow ups” that cannot be stopped. The problem, as I see it, is not that Wente’s smartest people in the world have no idea how to stop it. It is a combination of: People who think they …