Xamuel.com

This time around, I’m experimenting with a different format for the linkfests. Besides the format, I made an effort to write a little something about most of the links, rather than just raw links with no editorial value-added. Non-Technical R.J. Lipton: Interdisciplinary Research–Challenges (regarding the language barrier, I think the biggest problem isn’t new words [...]

This article is inspired by Tom Leinster’s reader survey recently published in the n-Category Café. For some bizarre reason, few things give me greater joy than seeing a universally acknowledged, absolutely indisputable fact proven wrong. And that is precisely what the inimitable Leinster has done. He’s discovered a profound error in every calculus book in [...]

“Some of these tricks we use make the games look broken. But we are not breaking the games, we are just breaking your notion of them.” ~From the TASVideos introduction page [1]. Somewhere in the list of dozens of papers I want to write someday when I’m finished with my dissertation, I’d like to try [...]

Abstract: I analyze the algorithm which students are typically taught for evaluating summation notation, and show that it is inefficient. Then I give an alternate algorithm, eliminating the inefficiency. However, the natural question is: how do we know the two algorithms give the same answer? Although it seems intuitively obvious that they do, it is [...]

In computability theory, dovetailing is a method that lets you simulate running multiple programs in parallel, even when there are infinitely many programs to run. This is absolutely crucial because of the non-computability of the Halting Problem. Suppose you have an infinite number of Turing Machines T1, T2, … and you want to check whether [...]

In the Elsevier Boycott discussions, one thing which keeps coming up is: what value do the commercial academic publishers add? The general consensus is “not much”. They do some copy-editing of debatable value (the actual typesetting is now done by the contributing scientists for free), they do some administrative work… none of this should justify [...]

The main theme of this (very belated) Linkfest is the Elsevier Boycott. Conversely, the Boycott has given me a new vision for these Linkfests. No more am I just a blogger posting links to random articles! I am now a guerrilla legitimizer, selectively adding legitimacy to various things published under open access (which includes just [...]

Suppose you’re lying in bed at night, and tomorrow you’re going in to your department, and suddenly you remember you have a package you need to pick up from the front desk. You can’t trust yourself to remember this tomorrow, so you turn to your sweetheart and say: “Remind me to pick up my package [...]

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 [...]