April 2, 2012
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 [...]
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Fifteenth Linkfest Article
March 22, 2012
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 [...]
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General Antiderivatives Article
March 16, 2012
“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 [...]
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Toward the Mathematics of Video Game Glitches Article
February 27, 2012
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 [...]
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Is Summation Notation Ambiguous? Article
February 22, 2012
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 [...]
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Dovetailing Article
February 16, 2012
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 [...]
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How Commercial Journals Could Add Value Article
February 6, 2012
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 [...]
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Fourteenth Linkfest Article
January 30, 2012
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 [...]
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The Reminder Protocol Article
December 28, 2011
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: [...]
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Kafka World Problems Article
December 27, 2011
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 [...]
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Predictable Premises Article