Quote by Marcel Proust

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”

dennett on ideas

extremely interesting interview on philosophy and "verbal ballet":

Dennett Interview

Beauty

1. The quality that gives pleasure to the mind or senses and is associated with such properties as harmony of form or color, excellence of artistry, truthfulness, and originality.

Compilers and patterns

I was just reading another interesting "philosophical" piece on the difference between functional and procedural languages here

It is true that from functional viewpoint patterns can be easily described with recursion and thus easily reduced to simpler structures. It is not necessary to first define and create classes, and then let them call theirselves recursively as demonstrated here:

new Mul(
          new Sub(new Num(6), new Num(2)),
          new Add(new Num(2), new Num(3))).calc()));

Again recursion can make the translatation between structures a transparent process.

The pattern here is

group thinking

a very interesting talk by jonathan haidt about 5 forces that cause "values" within a group:

The moral mind

You can take a quiz at YourMorals DOT org

to learn more on your personal political viewpoint.

More on recursive descent

My program to parse that complicated set of measurement data is slowly progressing. It teaches myself a lot about the nature of recursion, the Backus-Naur-Form (BNF) and how to make a parse tree. On a side-note recursion teaches to break a cyclical structure into a short description, on each level of the description something is added (or removed depending on the direction) and the description gets more abstract. Of course with every abstraction layer where parts of a description are removed we lose information but that information can be re-constructed from the parse tree.

recursion

our brain is certainly able to do recursion. i am just realizing this fascinating concept in sequenntial abstractions, by wondering how to parse a complicated logfile for some weeks already. parsing assumes to build an abstract structure that gives an overview or a map of the structures below. Parsing is about selecting, organizing and modifying pieces of code or data. the abstract structure needed by parser is a tree. a tree can have branches or leaves (the branches can be seen as smaller trees which shows again the usefulness of the concept of recursion)

the future of computing

Cloud Computing: Navigating the next frontier

"The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet (based on how it is depicted in computer network diagrams) and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals.[1] It is a style of computing in which IT-related capabilities are provided “as a service”,[2] allowing users to access technology-enabled services from the Internet ("in the cloud")[3] without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them." (C) Wikipedia

see also a video here:
Google Talks

PS more of Google talks:



"You can learn to like problems, like you can learn to like ice cream." (= also separation between problems and interpretation of problems, advanced Eastern psychology....)

patterns in software

interesting interview with Kent Beck

Inventing computers

Interesting views on what makes computers tick are described in Woz biography on how he invented the Apple computer, the first personal computer, or home computer. I find important on how he was able to think about signals, components that process signals, and software as flexible ways of combining components. Also, one of the breakthroughs that made computers possible was the invention of dynamic memories. On wikipedia and google picture search, it is possible to see some of Woz' hand written tables on 0's and 1's and pictures on what components need to be combined to get some magical effects.

Furthermore an interesting list of readings on how computer concepts shape our ways of how we perceive the world around us:

science, computers, reading list

changing minds

An interesting list of words - all beginning with "re-" and involved in changing minds as explained in a book by Howard Gardner:

* research

* resistances

* representations

* resonance

Furthermore an interview with Howard Gardner about education: edge.org

They're questions which kids ask all the time: who am I, where do I come from, what's this made out of, what's going to happen to me, why do people fight, why do they hate? Is there a higher power?
These are also the questions that historically have been looked at in religion, philosophy, science. While it's great for people to ask these questions on their own, and to make use of their own experience, it's crazy for people not to take advantage of the other attempts to answer those questions over the millennia.
And the disciplines represent to me the most concerted efforts to provide answers to those questions. History tells us where we come from. Biology talks about what it means to be alive. Physics talks about the world of objects, alive or not.
...
there's a joke in my field which is ÷ in elementary school we love the kids, in high school we love the disciplines, in college we love ourselves. I don't think disciplines ought to be loved for their own sake; they ought to be seen as the best way to answer questions that human beings are interested in. Therefore I see the purpose of education as helping people understand the best answers that cultures and societies have come up with to basic questions, what I would call essential questions. So at the end we can form our own personal answers to those questions, which will be based to a significant extent on how other people have approached them, and will at the same time allow us to make our own syntheses.

data mining

Prof. Higgs, inventor of the particle concept that might raise gravity, explains in an interview in the new scientist that the particle might have been found already with Fermilab or the former cyclotron at CERN, but the main difficulty is and will be the data mining problem. Searching traces in a lot of data is always a challenge as the Google business models succesfully shows. Equally, finding the effect of genes on a phenotype, or the effect of signals in the brain is a domain where better data mining techniques might be needed.

mindset

As hint from an interview in "The New Scientist" I am reading a great book on Mindsets by Stanford psychologist C. Dweck. The book explains how we can have two forms of mindsets: a static mindset and a growing mindset. The static mindset deals with difficulties and frustrations by avoiding them, whereas the growing mindset sees difficulties as challenges and chances for development and growth. The book mainly deals with achievements of kids, but also with other personalities from sports, science and business, and It's great to learn how effort was rewarded in many paths of lifes.

culture-change and software

an interesting blogpost on what makes a company succeed in business:

Our culture shifts its relationship to technology.

Google allows to access information easy... semantic networks might provide the next steps to provide better acces to information.

software as business

Eric Schmidt interview

balance of ideas

an interview with physicist Georg Smoot: Cosmic Explorer

Why did you come to the Lindau meeting of Nobel laureates and young researchers?

When you're young, you think Nobel laureates are gods, that you're never going to be like them. But when I went to the University of California, Berkeley in the 1970s and met seven of them, I found that they were smart and worked hard but were not so different from anyone else. So part of coming to Lindau is to encourage students, to show that all you have done is to work hard and have good ideas. I get a lot out of it too. The students are idealistic and hopeful, which is refreshing. Decades of university life can make you a little cynical.

What advice can you offer on how to win a Nobel?

You've got to know how long to hold on to an idea before you should throw it away. Knowing that balance is the hardest thing. I once told the team working on COBE that I would give away two aeroplane tickets to anyone who could find a mistake in the data, to keep people focused on checking things.

(Copyright New Scientist 2008)

computer and art

very fascinating to show how algorithms can interact with you in art:

atari art

ben fry

nobel prizes

wow.... i am just back from a great weekend in alpine europe, starting
in lindau on friday evening where we were staying in the same hotel as
the nobel prize winners who attend the lindau meeting. actually we had
dinner opposite to peter gruenberg
http://www.lindau-nobel.de/LaureateDetails.AxCMS?UserID=8621

then, the next day, breakfast among a lot of americans who were talking about harvard and why europeans would escape europe in 1930ies, afterwards we took a bath
with americans who were enjoying the sun for less than 30 minutes before they were heading to take the train back to zuerich.

today we have spend the day in solothurn a small swiss city that was
influencing heavily the french-swiss connection in 17th century, later
influencing the french revolution by providing generals and strategies, and a family that build the swiss
ambassy in paris.

studying

hm... I am studying at the Open University for computer science and object oriented programming. no updates regarding the psychology of algorithms. only that conflicts can be used productively in creative acts. I will need to send an update later....

san francisco dreaming

a former economist journalist, Wired editor and network dreamer from silicon valley:


the long tail

how life can be seen as software

very fascinating, Craig Venter:

transforming software into hardware = DNA

When in the ocean museum of Lisbon it was great to see a bath of medusa's swimming. Maybe one of the simplest life forms on earth so fascinating how simple structures create more complex structures.

passion for physics

very interesting writing style, views:

What is your relationship with time?

human are just story tellers

about interesting new technologies:

World telescope

about software technologies:

Alan Kay 1

Alan Kay 2

Playing chess = composing music

Interesting interview about the recognition of patterns in chess, that it is similar to recognize patterns in words, phrases in music, etc.:

How chess can sharpen your mind

Memories and joy

Children can play and play and play. Here in Europe prominent toys are coming from Lego or Playmobil that help us to explore space, time, social interactions. Probably the feeling that helps us fuelling our desire for play is joy. It is great to let our memories wander for a while and re-experience the joy that was acting like a friend helping us to learn more.

Objects and intentions

As I am learning more on object-oriented programming, I come again to the conclusion that in the design of algorithms it is helpful to take the intentional stance, i.e. what would the algorithm like to do, what believes do we assume the algorithm has, etc.

See more on this at: wikipedia on intentional stance

And when we mix objects, intentions and nature we maybe arrive at paintings like these

Bach as computer

there was a very interesting interview recently in the FAZ newspaper on Bach as a computer composing music. somehow it must be inspired by goedel, bach, eschenbach the mysteries behind algorithms. bach as taking the hand of the listener, guiding him in the universe of logic, to show the subtleties of our existence. bach computes incredible forms like einstein did with the laws of mechanics.

parallelity in computation - is the opposite of looping sequences. most programs today are looping sequences of some kind. parallel programs would be based on more different forms of symbols in time-space,

space, ambiguity, contradiction....

great isn't it?