the arc of software bends towards understanding
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you really want a change put into an open source project, you submit a patch along with the bug report. Sure, you might complain that the average user doesn't have any programming experience and that it's unreasonable to expect them to learn some complex system and then […]
I was in rehearsal today, doodling away second oboe for Saint Saens' Organ Symphony for the nth time, and it occurred to me: I've listened to and played this piece of music enough times to know the full overall flow as well as a good chunk of the orchestral parts, not just mine. So when […]
Conductor and violinist Gustavo Dudamel will be visiting MIT today to accept the Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. Part of the awards ceremony will include a session with Dudamel conducting the MIT Symphony Orchestra; I'll be on stage playing Oboe and English Horn on Rimsky Korsakov and Mozart. Our regular conductor (Adam Boyles) has […]
I'm happy to report that I'll be interning at Galois over the summer. I'm not quite sure how the name of the company passed into my consciousness, but at some point in January I decided it would be really cool to work at an all-Haskell shop, and began pestering Don Stewart (and Galois's HR) for […]
Hello from Montreal! I'm writing this from a wireless connection up on the thirty-ninth floor of La Cité. Unfortunately, when we reading the lease, the only thing we checked was that it had "Internet"... not "Wireless." So what's a troop of MIT students with an arsenal of laptops and no wireless router to do? Set […]
Last week, I was talking with Alexey Radul to figure out some interesting research problems that I can cut my teeth on. His PhD thesis discusses "propagation networks", which he argues is a more general substrate for computation than traditional methods. It's a long work, and it leaves open many questions, both theoretical and practical. […]
I was having a discussion a few nights ago about attention, and someone mentioned the fact that contiguous blocks of time are precious. It's obvious once it's been pointed out to you, and with it in mind I've noticed my tendency to bucket useful activities into various categories: checking email, reading news feeds and simple […]
I love listening to music, especially new and interesting pieces that I've never heard before. Unfortunately, being a somewhat frugal spender my own personal collection of music grows very slowly; perhaps a bit too slowly for my own tastes. When I need new music, where do I turn? MixApp is a collaborative music listening application. […]
And so classes begin this Spring Term of 2010. The classes that I am currently signed up to take are: 6.005: Software Construction 6.02: Intro to EECS II 6.045: Automata, Computing and Complexity 6.945: Large-scale Symbolic Systems 21M.283: Musicals of Stage and Screen 6.945 is the "fun" class of the semester; I expect to have […]
As treasurer for the Assassins' Guild, I often have to beg and plead GMs to get posters for their respective games, since the UA Finboard has a requirement that, to get funding for events, you need to supply posters. So I was quite surprised, amazed and impressed by Lauren Gust's work on posters for Arcadia. […]