Friedrich Nietzsche famously said that “what does not kill me, makes me stronger.” While true in some ways, this statement appears to be a generalisation masking a more complex truth. For instance, cutting off one’s hand does not kill one, but hardly makes one stronger, unless one specifically desired greatly improved dexterity of the other […]
Last year I made some attempts at free association around formal languages and state machines. But at that time, not much was said about the idea of a state itself; an idea which I think holds a lot of interesting uncharted territory. To begin with, what is state really? Intuitively the word distinguishes states of […]
After 13 months and 51 posts, my experiments in blogging continue, although they are perhaps better described as polymorphic than monomorphic. Maybe it’s time for some reflections. On the whole blogging in this format and at this frequency has been a pretty fun and fulfilling process. I get to practice writing free-form, nonscientific texts, and […]
The architecture of the Internet is fundamentally decentralized, a fact that continues to impress to this day. The breadth and depth of the sea of applications and uses we have made of it, and its resilience, impress perhaps all the more, because many of our experiences from everyday life tell us that some of the […]
Here’s a general method for synthesising solutions to complex problems, intended for use by people. 1. Enumerate the constraints 2. Find an initial solution that feels right but doesn’t quite work, based on previous knowledge of the domain 3. Use the information contained in the constraints to adjust the solution, so that it works 4. […]
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Posted 25 May 2010
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