An absolutely stunning feature of the lambda calculus is that it allows us to define functional recursion without using recursion. That is, the concept of recursion is fundamentally a by-product of being able to reproduce multiple copies of a function’s input in its output.

In other words, the “essence …

Article moved here.

Article moved here.

There’s this guy I know, and this guy, and this guy

Most published scientific articles display two or more authors. This does not necessarily mean that more than one person was involved in writing the article. The “author list” of scientific articles, like marriage in traditional cultures, is usually decided by unwritten political rules rather than love and the personal preferences …

A recent XKCD post makes fun of frequentist statisticians and hails Bayesian statisticians for their superior skill at predicting trivial outcomes. This comic makes it look like only Bayesian approaches are sane and reality-compatible when predicting outcomes. This annoys me. There is no need to invoke Bayes’ theorem and Bayesian …

We have in our office this awesome networked multi-function laser color printer able to churn out hundreds of pages in a few minutes. It’s also our coffee corner at work. Which means I spend time quite often next to it. And therefore that I see stuff coming out of …

In 2011 Alan Kay gave a talk/lecture on Programming and Scaling at the Hasso-Platner-Institute Potsdam. The take away is that you have to be creative and step out of the box to design new software that is both very simple and very powerful. The Cairo compositing system is his …

So there’s this bunch of friends who wanted me to play Scrabble with them. I’d like to play with them. Unfortunately, my relationship with words does not involve decomposing them into individual letters: I learn and use them as a whole, not an assembly of their parts. So …