Month: May 2009
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Abbott’s nightmare world
Tony Abbott – Mr People Skills himself – is on-message, describing the Rudd government’s use of the phrase “temporary deficit” as “Orwellian”, on Insiders this morning and elsewhere. One may surmise that Abbott, being entirely honest and reasonable, fears the rise of absolute tyranny and the end of all forms of freedom, with human dignity…
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Science fail
Apparently one of the world’s foremost experts on global warming – as far as the denialist camp is concerned – is Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. The sum total of his qualifications appear to be his propensity to comment on the subject. A google search turned up the Heartland Institute’s take on Monckton. Observe the ad…
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Artificial intelligence
A thought occurs, spurred on by my use of Bayesian networks. They’re used in AI (so I’m led to believe), though I’m using them to model the comprehension process in humans. However, I do also work in a building filled with other people applying AI techniques. My question is this: how long until Sarah Connor…
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Yes and no
I came home from a dinner with the rellies to find that the daylight savings referendum had been defeated, which was mildly disappointing but hardly surprising. There’ll be another referendum in a while. At least I remembered to vote this time. However, I am surprised and intrigued that the Greens candidate Adele Carles managed to…
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Horrible Java
Apologies to non-geeks. The following Java code determines whether infinity is even or odd. It compiles, runs, finishes immediately, and outputs “false” (meaning that infinity is odd). class Infinity \u007b static \u0062\u006f\u006f\u006c\u0065\u0061\u006e\u0020\u0065\u0076\u0065\u006e\u003b static { // Configure infinite speed System.nanoTime(\u002f\u002a); boolean even = true; double i = 0.0; while(i
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The Bayesian rabbit hole
You may recall previous rants about my theoretical framework. The recent evolution of my thought processes (much like all other times) has been something like this: hurrah, done… except… [ponder]… I should see if I can fix this little problem… [ponder]… How the hell is this supposed to work?… [ponder]… Damn, the library doesn’t have…