We distinguish between inventions and discoveries. You can own the intellectual property rights to an invention, but not to a discovery (you can’t patent the discovery of mercury or selenium, for instance). Inventions are meant to be created, and discoveries are meant to be sought for. But sometimes, the line between invention and discovery is blurry. […]
I use the tool Evernote on my iPhone and my desktop computers. It’s pretty nice. You can upload “notes” such as PDFs or images from your desk or from the phone, and the software makes them all searchable and syncs all data between all the different places where you use it. It OCRs photos, so […]
Today an oppressive, passivizing heat covers Tokyoites like a massive woollen blanket. Summer is here. In a feeble attempt to defy the heat, I follow up on my previous post on languages and automata. That post ended with the suggestion that we can apply these concepts to interactions in society. But can we? As a […]
Computing is very new as a science. Blaise Pascal devised a mechanical calculator in 1645, but Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, widely considered the first programmable computer, was not conceived of until the mid-19th century. However, it was never constructed (unlike Babbage’s simpler “difference engine”), and even at this time there was almost no theory to […]
A senior manager at a company I used to work at once said that (making) software is a very social activity. I didn’t have much experience, and was very surprised at the time, since I had never thought about the human aspect of software development. But of course this aspect is extremely important. For example, […]