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ntownsend | 14 years ago | on: Cooking For Engineers: Step by Step Recipes and Food for the Analytically Minded

Alton Brown is the reason I started caring about food preparation. Good Eats is unlike most food shows in that its primary motivation is teaching the audience about food and the hows and whys of its preparation. I find that most food shows are about demonstrating individual, usually either uninteresting or impractical, recipes, or stroking the ego of the presenter. Throwdown With Bobby Flay, I'm looking at you.

ntownsend | 15 years ago | on: What's really wrong with BlackBerry

RIM has extremely talented engineers and developers, but it does not have a culture where engineers can say "We are doing the wrong thing" and have any decision-makers take notice. This is the fundamental problem with RIM. They have completely failed to effectively use the talent they have. If I were another technology company, I would definitely be trying to poach talent from them.

(Disclaimer: I'm a former RIM employee.)

ntownsend | 15 years ago | on: Scale of the Universe

And on that note, the creator has made the common mistake of performing the calculation speed_of_light * age_of_universe to determine the radius of the observable universe.

Space has expanded during the lifetime of the universe so the objects that emitted light at the edge of the observable universe have moved further away since emitting the light. The estimated distance to the edge of the observable universe is more like 47 billion light-years: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#DN

The visible universe, however, is a bit smaller since we can only see as far as the surface of last scattering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_rad...

ntownsend | 15 years ago | on: Brave New World banned from High School curriculum

I had very similar thoughts when I read the book. It seems to me that if there is no desire for class mobility then strata are not evil.

However, humans being what they are, it seems impossible to guarantee that lack of desire. This is (kind of) demonstrated by Bernard's discontent and by John the Savage's inability to cope with the society. Both were weak cases. Bernard because he was privileged, and John because he was a total outsider that was not acclimated to the culture.

ntownsend | 15 years ago | on: Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain

...we'd need an impossible computer that could simulate years worth of exact quantum-level physics in a cubic meter of space...

...it might take a little more than the ten years to come up with any sensible code with hope of growing into an AI though...

Dude, you are all over the map.

... he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain.

At best, you could say it's a measure of the amount of irreducible complexity for an encoding of the required proteins. We don't seem to have a measure of the system, by which I mean the thing that models the relationships and interactions of the proteins (and their components) with each other and their environment.

ntownsend | 16 years ago | on: JavaScript Tips

In JavaScript, Arrays are not actually arrays. They're not a contiguous block of memory. They're just Objects (i.e. hash tables) that key on integers.

If you look at the indices it will look like you have a bunch of undefined elements in the array, but no memory has actually been consumed for those indices in the array so nothing is wasted.

ntownsend | 16 years ago | on: Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax business

The argument that XML can have various different structures for storing a person's name, while JSON provides one simple solution, doesn't fly. You could run into something like { "Person": { "property": { "type": "first-name", "value": "John" }, "property": { "type": "last-name", "value": "Smith" } } }

This begs the question, "Why would you do something that convoluted?" Well, you can ask the same of the XML examples, and the answer probably boils down to requirements (or incompetence?).

ntownsend | 16 years ago | on: Will there be an iPad App gold rush?

I've just thought of the first app I'll make for the iPad. It will be a version of top. Seeing as the thing only runs one process at a time, it should practically be a one-liner.

ntownsend | 16 years ago | on: The "Soft Maximum" function

In the case of real-valued functions of one variable (which is the case at hand), if the function has a minimum and is convex then the minimum is global. If the function is strictly convex (also this case) then it will have at most one global minimum.

ntownsend | 16 years ago | on: The "Soft Maximum" function

No, in this case, a convex function is one where you can draw a straight line between any two points on its graph and not have the line intersect the graph at a third point.
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