Twenty plus years ago, back when I was in graduate school, I got my first copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. At the time, it was a revelation: a book about computer science that actually taught you deep topics in computer science. Every few years, I go back and read this book and learn something new. It’s quite simply the finest computer science textbook that I’ve ever read.

Somewhat interestingly, MIT is now engaged in revamping the introductory course that used Abelson and Sussman’s text, and replacing it with a curriculum that uses Python. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this: while the exercises in SICP do not include topics which might be of interest, such as web programming, realtime programming, or programming window systems, I feel the information presented is essential to a well rounded education. But I’m not going to be dogmatic about this: I’ll wait to see what they come up with. It should be interesting.

Well, my silly cat is at it again. A couple of days ago, I came home and called out the back door for our partially tame, partially feral cat Scrappy. I’ve chronicled his misadventures before. When he didn’t show, I tried the garage, and found him in there. He slowly came in and seemed to be unhappy, so I bent down to pick him up, and found that his fur was covered in saliva (yuck) and he had obviously been in a scuffle again. To make an already long story less long, I took him to the vet, and he got shaved in four places (top of his head, under his chin, and both front legs). Two dozen bites, only one which looked troublesome, but he’s on antibiotics AGAIN. Silly cat.

The stripes on his head are acually scratches, you can see his left front paw has been shaved, he’s got thirteen bites on that leg. His other paw is shaved too.

I’m gonna have to work harder at converting him into an indoor kitty. Anybody have any hints? Success stories they’d like to share?

Loren sent this around our mailing list at work. The original was a huge gif, I converted it into a reasonably small SWF file.

Here is a link to the original, if you have the bandwidth and/or couldn’t view the SWF file above.

[tags]Astronomy, Mercury Transit[/tags]

Mark Chu Carroll over at the Good Math, Bad Math blogs has a fascination with bizarre bits of math as I do. Today, he had a post about something which I investigated quite a bit a number of years ago: so-called Egyptian Fractions. The ancient Egyptians had a peculiar way of representing fractional numbers. They always represented values as the sum of fractions with 1 in the numerator. Hence, if you were trying to represent 3/4, you’d instead write that as 1/2 + 1/4. Well, that doesn’t seem so hard. Let’s try to represent 2/3. A moment’s worth of thought might give you the expansion 1/2 + 1/6. How about 3/7?

It might take you a bit longer to come up with the expansion 1/3 + 1/14 + 1/42. Or maybe you got a different expansion, like 1/3 + 1/11 + 1/231. The fact is, these Egyptian fractions are a good deal more subtle than you might have imagined. There are numerous algorithms to try to generate interesting (mostly short) representations for arbitrary fractions: the best online reference that I’ve found (with plenty of code and information to chew through) is David Eppstein’s terrific page on Egyptian Fraction Algorithms.

[tags]Egyptian Fractions,Mathematics[/tags]

ESPN is reporting that Athletic slugger Frank Thomas could be about to sign an agreement with the Toronto Blue Jays. Sniff. I really hoped that the A’s might cough up the big bucks to resign Thomas, who was really the only bat in the lineup for the Athletics that any team took seriously. But the Jays are reportedly offering a two year deal potentially worth $30 million, so you can hardly blame the Big Hurt for looking toward greener pastures. Well, if you are on the way to Toronto, take my best wishes Frank. It was great to see a sure Hall of Famer swing the bat, you made a great impact on our season, and I’ll be sad to see you missing from the Oakland lineup.

[tags]Oakland Athletics,MLB,Baseball[/tags]

Apparently Engadget wasn’t overwhelmed with the out of the box experience. To be honest, I pretty much hate iTunes too, but it wasn’t as grossly annoying as this appeared to be.

Apparently Apple has little to fear from Microsoft’s foray into mp3 players.

Lycos News
Computer server and software maker Sun Microsystems Inc. said Monday that it had begun to make its Java technology an open-source software project available for free on the Internet.

Brainwagon quotes from the Movie Quote Generator

Gort! Klaatu barada brainwagon!

Too cool.

Apparently the weather was pretty bad up in Hillsboro, Oregon. Josh had just got a nifty little UMPC, and despite having his power go out, managed to get an update to his blog. Pretty cool!

Power out. Still online. » TinyScreenfuls.com

Neat!

Check out Kumoon, a first person shooter starring a chick with a grenade launcher. It has versions for both Windows and the Mac.

Click here to get the joke. Gameplay could use some refinement, but the physics engine is pretty snazzy.

Thanks to Dan for the pointer.

YouTube – Flying Spaghetti Monster spotted in Germany

As an individual with varying degrees of inner security, I can’t help but consider the idea from time to time that I’m frightfully boring. I suppose that most people with an ounce of introspection consider this possibility from time to time, but as a blogger you have quantitative evidence about just how interesting you are. You can look at the number of people who come to your site, who post comments, who spend less than thirty seconds at your site, or any of a number of quantitative measures. It’s a bit humbling at time. In moments of deeper insecurity, I consider the idea that I could do more to be of greater interest to a larger collection of people.

Such feelings usually last about a day, and then my insecurity passes, and I continue on in precisely the way that I have, doing what I always wanted to do.

That being said, Russell Davies had a nice article with some ways to increase the likelihood that someone will find you interesting. Given that I think that the majority of them are less about tricking people into believing you are interesting and more about actually developing interesting traits, I recommend it as reading.

russell davies: how to be interesting

Check out the NIH’s Historical Anatomies on the Web for lots of, well, admittedly gruesome art from important historical works on anatomy.

[tags]Public Domain,Anatomy[/tags]

Addendum: Apologies for linking to a huge version of the above image.

Well, today was the transit of Mercury (actually, it’s still going on at the moment, but I have work to do, so I’ve folded my tents.) I took my new solar filter and my Meade ETX 90, and brought it to work to show off this relatively infrequent solar event. Lots of people took a look during lunch, which was kind of fun. Fellow Pixarian Bena Currin brought in her image stabilized Canon binoculars and a nice little Sun Spotter gadget (pictures later) and we had some fun. During some of the slower moments, I decided to try to grab some pictures of the scene through my little Panasonic point-n-shoot camera. Below is the best of the pretty mediocre batch…

The larger blob to the top is actually a sunspot. The rounder dot toward the bottom right is actually Mercury.

Okay, it looks more impressive and sharper through the scope. Consider this the equivalent of photos you take with your cell phone.

[tags]Astrophotography,Mercury Transit[/tags]

Work has been picking up a bit.

[tags]Pixar,Ratatouille,Movies[/tags]