Choose Your Own Adventure: Greatest Achievement in the Genre

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike…
Remember these? Recently they have been reprinted. I saw a bunch in a bookstore two months ago.

I wrote this year’s annual Christmas letter in the format of a CYOA book (actually more like a printed copy of Colossal Cave). After reading it, my friend [...]

The Best Exception Ever

“ERROR: Error out of Range Exception”
Courtesy of Vibhu

Faster and faster

Holographic Storage
Longmont (CO) – Having shipped an apparently small number of holographic storage systems in late 2006 and in the first days of 2007, Inphase today said that it has signed Germany-based DSM as original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of its Tapestry drives.
They’ve achieved a data density of 512 Gb/in^2, roughly double that of perpendicular hard [...]

Intel Pledges 80 Cores in Five Years

Intel has built a prototype of a processor with 80 cores that can perform a trillion floating-point operations per second.
CEO Paul Otellini held up a silicon wafer with the prototype chips before several thousand attendees at the Intel Developer Forum here Tuesday. The chips are capable of exchanging data at a terabyte a second, Otellini [...]

Not Quite Gods

Where else but Stanford can one amble out at twilight for a walk and come across a two-time Pulitzer prize winner giving a talk on the importance of History? Joanna and I were taking a stroll last night and we came across of bunch of high-ranking university people having an event in the quad. The [...]

Passover in LA

I’m afraid I’ve fallen behind on my blog again. It happens from time to time when I am very busy. I was going to post a huge picture bomb of all the things I have done in the past two weeks, but I think instead I will break them up and back post them. My [...]

Burckhardt's Full Stop vs. Chaitin's Omega

I haven’t updated my blog recently, and I have had this post from Spring Break sitting around on my computer unposted for about a week. I went home for Spring Break this year, instead of going to LA with Jo, in the hopes of making it to Delaware :-/
While home, I did get to the [...]

Lamer than Christopher Tolkien

Just finishing up my Susan musings, I was wondering why it is that great authors so often are followed by lame, talentless hacks. The quintessential example is Christopher Tolkien, of course.

On 22 January 1957 C.S. Lewis wrote to a boy named Martin: “The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan. She is left alive [...]

The God Who Loves You

The Problem of Susan Neil Gaiman

She has the dream again that night.
In the dream, she is standing, with her brothers and her sister, on the edge of the battlefield. It is summer, and the grass is a peculiarly vivid shade of green: a wholesome green, like a cricket pitch or the welcoming slope of [...]

"DAMN IT!" – Jack Bauer

I’ve been back in California for almost two days now (though it doesn’t seem like it has been that long). It’s been a great 48 hours, and a good start to the quarter.
Highlights have included:

Playing poker with Doougle’s frosh

Addictedly watching 24 with Doug, Emily, and Ralf

Classy dinner with Jo at Spalti’s

Coffee and pastries at the [...]