Viewing profile — camccann

The number of witnesses may be exaggerated, how much of the attack any given witness saw is probably exaggerated, and the extent to which any of those witnesses could have plausibl…

Not that they don't have standards--I'm sure they're very careful not to release anything that would reveal private information about specific, identifiable users. Other than that,…

The author argues that males have a wider intelligence distribution, and so though they are equally as intelligent as females on average, there are more of them at the far right en…

While it would be nice to imagine something like this catching on, somehow I suspect that any language whose reference manual gives a specification of semantics using sequent calcu…

You don't get infinite acceleration from one velocity difference. End of story. Given a steady source of energy, you can accelerate as much as you like, up to the limit of losses d…

Arbitrary magic acceleration ...in other words, either you didn't actually read the explanations or you didn't understand them. The energy is being extracted from a velocity differ…

"...this is a vehicle that, in still air, would go uphill under its own lack of power..." No, it wouldn't. The vehicle extracts energy from the velocity difference between the air …

Hmm. A solid idea, but it's important to contrast it with a less desirable, but superficially similar methodology, namely "Development Driven Development": 1. First, develop some c…

Glorifying "hard work" as more important than intelligence is a common mistake made by intelligent people when they finally realize that sitting around being intelligent is not, in…

In my experience, writing simple code often requires more cleverness from the programmer than does writing clever code.

I disagree--we should instead continue what appears to be the current trend, namely, putting 4chan in charge of the national political discourse. This seems likely to substantially…

Hey, environmental destruction isn't something to take lightly. Spewing huge amounts of corrosive chemical pollution into the air as a byproduct of energy generation, irrevocably a…

Gotta love a page that has a tutorial on "realistic shading" for drawings of 4-D objects.

Well, there's not much to the basic idea--the λ-calculus just is the structure of a cartesian closed category. Exponential objects represent morphisms by objects, a.k.a. first-clas…

I'm not sure if what you're looking for exists--it depends on what angle you're looking to approach it from, for one thing. TAOCP is a classic for certain kinds of rigorous, formal…

It's a well known principle that, given a brief problem description, the less a software engineer knows about the problem domain, the easier they will judge the solution to be.

Actually, mkramlich specifically said the Republican party's message , which I think most people would agree in regards to. What the Republican party actually does in office, never…

Computer Science--as opposed to software engineering, or day-to-day programming in general--is nothing but an odd flavor of applied abstract math. Chances are, you know more CS tha…

C's "types" are just interchangeable methods of interpreting a pile of bits. That's not a strong type system, that's types on the honor system.

Apologies, don't have time to do a proper job of it right now, so here's a quick summary: Complex addition is basic Cartesian vector addition in the complex plane; complex multipli…

There's a well-known quote that says "computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes". Often attributed to Dijkstra, but I don't know if there's a r…

Perhaps it is bad form to pick nits in an amusing bit of April Foolery, but as an interesting aside, with a better technique it would take nowhere near nine years to produce manual…

It's such a shame that people think that way, after all, it couldn't possibly be the case that a straight man thought that treating a gay man badly was the wrong thing to do. Or ev…

Also significant is that cicadas, while numerous, aren't very large. Predator body size tends to be roughly proportional to their prey's body size, and larger animals tend to live …