At Scala Matsuri a few weeks ago (incidentally, an excellent conference), I was fortunate to be able to attend Jonas Bonér’s impassioned talk about resilience and reactive software. His theme: “without resilience, nothing else mattersâ€. At the core of it is a certain way of thinking about the ways that complex systems fail. Importantly, complex […]
When perceiving an object, for example a chair, the statement “this is X” (this is a chair) is almost entirely uninteresting. The concept by which we identify the object is a mere word, and in a sense entirely devoid of meaning. That concept does help us align this object with other entities in space and […]
Scientific method can be understood as the following steps: formulating a hypothesis, designing an experiment, carrying out experiments, and drawing conclusions. Conclusions can feed into hypothesis formulation again, in order for a different (related or unrelated) hypothesis to be tested, and we have a cycle. This feedback can also take place via a general theory that […]
Until about five years ago, I would hesitate to buy books if I had other, unfinished books that I was currently reading. It seemed irresponsible to “start on something new†without finishing things that were in progress. This is the kind of attitude that leads you to visit every single room and see every single […]
Scientists and engineers around the world are, with varying degrees of success, racing to replicate biology and intelligence in computers. Computational biology is already simulating the nervous systems of entire organisms. Artificial intelligence seems to be able to replicate more tasks formerly thought to be the sole preserve of man each year. Many of the results […]