January 26, 2005
Fifty Years of Hacks
I'm sorry I missed this talk by Edward Fredkin this afternoon at the Stanford CS dept.
By "Hack" we mean a modest effort that yields a surprisingly big result, the "hacker" is known to very few and the result is hopefully amusing. In this case the hacker always meant well, but...
Posted by tplambeck at 10:08 PM
The Thinking Carpet
It may be thoughtful, but still, it's a bit wordy:
On the one hand, the uniqueness of the 'Thinking Carpet' is going to lie in the invisible, simple and space-saving placement of sensors for the widest variety of functions, functions for which optically visible devices are still being utilised today. In addition, microchips that have been integrated into the flooring, networked with each other and are computer-controlled can register several, even different sensory signals at the same time, and then analyse them correspondingly.
Let the record show that carpets learned to think before they learned to fly.
Posted by tplambeck at 07:50 PM
String Theory better left to mathematicians?
Kenneth Lane, a theoretical high-energy physicist at BU, said [string theory] research is better left to mathematicians.
"String theory is not physics," Lane said. "It's lovely mathematics, but it makes no physics predictions. We're interested in the outcomes of experiments. If all we did was string theory, our experimentalists wouldn't know what to do. That's why it's not popular at BU."
Not surprisingly, some debate has risen among string theorists for what they view as BU's snubbing of a vital discipline.
Cumrun Vafa, a string theorist at Harvard University, said that for a particular faculty member to feel that string theory should be relegated to the mathematics department is wrong.
"To try to categorically deny the existence of a subject is just childish," Vafa said.
more (via Not Even Wrong)
Posted by tplambeck at 09:07 AM
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