Patch Tuesday Browsing
It's Patch Tuesday, which means that if I don't want my servers to get hax0red, I have to stay up tonight to patch and reboot them. It's just swell how I have to sacrifice the second Tuesday of each month to Microsoft. JLG calls it "the guaranteed employment act," but I call it just inexplicably bad software. And my feelings are especially hostile tonight, since the downtime is scheduled for midnight, and I'm particularly beat after fighting my Veritas battle this morning.
While I wait for the servers to reboot, here is some (useless?) content that I've been browsing to pass the time and curb my frustration:
- Do you remember "all your base are belong to us"? Ah, sweet nostalgia. I am not a big fan of poetry, but this one just gets me every time: "Roses are red, Violets are blue, All my base are belong to you."
- Here is an interesting letter written by Thomas Jefferson on the topic of patents. Some have suggested that this very idea was somewhat echoed in the Chumbawamba song "Pass It Along."
- A very good and thorough article about the education of math majors. It comes by way of UC Berkeley, so you know that it's going to be good. Just read it.
- This has been a top-50 hit on reddit for a while, so I'm sure that most of you have seen it already. For the rest, here is a nice visual representation of how our tax dollars are being spent by the government. It's a bit dated (just a bit, though) but I really like the format and display. I hope that somebody updates it each year, because it's a great depiction of important data.
- Richard Kaye explains how Minesweeper is NP-Complete! And a pretty good "in a nutshell" explanation of the P=NP question, too.
- Chessbase interviews Vladimir Kramnik, who is about to make a huge comeback (I predict). It's somewhat inspiring, even.
- Are you the kind of person who gets excited by index out of bounds exceptions? Someone once told me that the size of the number doesn't matter (it's how you use it, you see). He was wrong, of course. Big numbers are good, and bigger numbers are better. So, go read this article by Scott Aaronson, and learn about the glory of the bigger number. (It also has a nice list of references at the end).
Anyway, I am on AIM now (for the first time in a while) if anyone wants to chat.
9 Comments:
I really like the big numbers article. Do you read that guy's blog? He writes a good stuff. He wrote this article when he was an undergrad at Cornell!
p.s. glad you turned on comments finally :)
Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
chown -R you ~/base
I think in its original form somewhere on slashdot.
anyhoo thanks for the math links, good reading for one who last escaped math in 1992. Woo, yet still an engineer working on a PhD. excellent, eh?
A mathmatician, a physicist, and an engineer were all given a red rubber ball and told to find the volume.
The mathmatician carefully measured the diameter and evaluated a triple integral.
The physicist filled a beaker with water, put the ball in the water, and measured the total displacement.
The engineer looked up the model and serial numbers in his red-rubber-ball table.
Elad, glad to see that you are still checking in from the neutral zone. Or is it not so neutral lately?
I read Scott Aaranson's blog all the time. It's actually my favorite mathematics blog. He is an excellent writer, and I love it when he goes on and on about Turing.
Tarik, I could never hold my own in pure math. I figured things out pretty well when it came to statistics, and engineering just made sense. I like the closure of being able to solve a problem (in polynomial time).
I see somebody already started with the "a blah, a blah, and an engineer" jokes. Those are always fun, so keep them coming.
Mathematician: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, and by induction - every odd integer higher than 2 is a prime.
Physicist: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is a prime,...
Engineer: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is a prime, 11 is a prime,...
Computer Programmer: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 7 is a prime...
Computer Programmer at Microsoft: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 will be prime in the next release of Windows.
Irina, things are ok. I have a few more months to serve, before I am released, and it's not so bad. I am not on the frontlines or anything likethat. I do a lot of computer work, lots of stuff that youd find interesting, and i'll write you in email later about the stuff that's not classified. But generally things in Israel are very tense politically. Almost as tense as they are in the US right now!
I finished applying to MIT and to Columbia for graduate school. I really want to go to MIT but I hate boston. I'll call when I hear from any of the schools. but here is a continuation of the prime joke for you:
My math professor at the Technion: 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, and the rest are left as an exercise for the student. :)
i've been following kramnik's story and i'm looking forward to his comeback. now that kasparov is retired, kramnik is the strongest contender. next year should be intersting to watch and i cant wait for him to play against israel's top GMs.
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