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When I wrote the article First World Problems, maybe I was a bit harsh on all those poor first-worlders. So that got me thinking: what can I do to give them a break? Suddenly I remembered Franz Kafka’s classic novel, The Trial, and I knew exactly what I had to do. The basic question is: [...]

You can save yourself an enormous amount of time by learning to predict the whole contents of a movie, book, video, etc. based entirely on the premise. Once you have this ability, you no longer need to spend time consuming those products: you already know exactly what they’ll contain. You can still consume them as [...]

One of my favorite new memes is the First World Problems meme. The reason I love this one so much is because it really puts my own problems in perspective. Soon as I start feeling down, I remember that all my problems are First World, then I laugh them off. Devious Dilemmas Harrowing Headaches Traumatic [...]

In computability theory, the recursion operation is very narrowly defined. Given a function f:Nk→N and a function g:Nk+2→N, recursion yields a function h:Nk+1→N defined by h(x,0)=f(x) h(x,n+1)=g(x,n,h(x,n)). In short, h(x,n+1) is defined recursively in terms of h(x,n). It is then understood that this operation (together with composition and basic initial functions) suffices to capture all [...]

In computer programming, many tasks can be done more efficiently using appropriate data structures. If we’re going to maintain a bunch of items which we’ll need to frequently do searches on by name, then an alphabetically sorted binary tree might save time, for example. The “paradox” is that none of these structures actually exist in [...]

The Thirteenth Linkfest is here! I have been quite busy lately, so I’m glad other bloggers have been keeping up the slack where I’ve been leaving it off. A lot of the posts in this linkfest are more topical than usual: whether you think it’s a blessing or a curse, we definitely live in interesting [...]

I graduated from the University of Arizona in only two years. But not by doing any kind of double load. I transferred in as a junior after doing all my gen eds in community college. I actually have credits from three different community colleges: Mira Mesa Community College in San Diego, where I grew up; [...]

There’s a famous paradox which is classically called the “uninteresting number paradox”. To make it more topical in today’s world of hipst, I’ll call it the “obscure number paradox” instead. It goes like this: Theorem: There is no obscure counting number. Proof Assume there is an obscure counting number. Then there is a smallest one. [...]

This past half week, I was in Chicago, first to give a speech at the grad student logic seminar at UIC, and then to attend the Reverse Mathematics Workshop at the University of Chicago. Both events were awesome, I got to meet and hang out with lots of great mathematicians. It was a half a [...]

Philosoraptor was one of the great minds of the twentieth century. Although he never published any articles in any rigorous journals, he was a constant presence at conferences and seminars, where his deep and profound utterances revolutionized many areas of modern thought. I recently became interested in the life and times of Philosoraptor; people don’t [...]