Over the weekend I finished the homework assignment for the “Theory of Computation” chapter of Computer Science: An Overview, Ninth Edition, by J. Glenn Brookshear. Brookshear defines a very minimal programming language called Bare Bones, in which variables may contain arbitrarily large non-negative integers. The only operations available are:

clear var; — set a [...]

Three friends and I took BART to San Francisco last night to see The Golden Compass at the Metreon.  If I’d gotten around to it sooner, we wouldn’t have had to go 45 miles each way to do it.  Prior to that, the longest trip I’d taken to see a film was 35 miles from [...]

My previous post mentioned a problem with a way to decide how to vote on ballot propositions.  I guess it’s not surprising that they should be a source of confusion to people.  As Marcus Schmidt observes in Institutionalizing Fair Democracy: The Theory of the Minipopulous:
It is highly improbable that a comparable kind of error could [...]

On the De Anza College campus yesterday, I happened onto a pile of leftover Easy Voter Guides.  While in general I think it was a well-prepared and useful guide, I did find one suggestion in it rather funny.  Under “How to Decide Which Way to Vote on a Proposition”, one method they suggest is “Find [...]

Scientists have discovered that there is a genetic basis for some people being early risers and others being night owls. [h/t Technocrat]

I was somewhat surprised that the cover of the mass-market paperback edition of Spin, the 2006 Hugo Award winning novel by Robert Charles Wilson, quoted a review in the Rocky Mountain News as having said that it was “the best science fiction novel so far this year”; that seems like damning it with faint praise, [...]