April 2010 Archives

1. Ugly and uncomfortable "business clothing" often worn by non-hackers. Invariably worn with a "tie", a strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the behavior of suit-wearers. Compare droid.
2. A person who habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. See pointy-haired, burble, management, Stupids, SNAFU principle, PHB, and brain-damaged.

Definition of suit from The Jargon File.

... it was the central theme of my artwork that made me curious about, for example, the custom of lots of western men to wear ties around their neck. An extremely weird habit if you think further about it.

From the introduction to Paul Tieman's Saaibestrijding blog.

Introduction

In August 2008, I posted a series of answers to the question "Why should we be interested in category theory?" on the A Categorical Manifesto thread in the n-Category Café blog. Category theory is a mathematical tool often used to elucidate similarities between apparently unrelated pieces of mathematics. I suggested it could do the same for AI and cognitive science, and discussed examples that include neural nets, holographic reduced representations, Prolog-stye unification, analogical reasoning, and understanding metaphors. Here is the same posting, with an informal explanation of category theory added, and the rest made intelligible (I hope) to non-category-theorists.

In last week's posting An Online Budget Questionnaire, JavaCC, and the Three Ways of Putting Together, I mentioned our public online Election questionnaire which polls opinion on how the Government could best cut spending to reduce the UK budget deficit. Coding similar questionnaires for other topics, I have found a useful tool for recording the URLs visited by a browser and hence diagnosing URL-redirection bugs: LiveHTTPHeaders.

After the ash, the papers will again be full of post-Election austerity. Roads or railways, councils or care homes: where will the Chancellor cut to chop the UK's massive deficit? I and a colleague have put up a poll that surveys how people would trade-off these cuts, and how this correlates with voting preference, at www.sharesim.arachsys.com/login/budget10.jsp and Facebook group Balance the Budget. We used a questionnaire-compiler which is a nice application of the parser-builder JavaCC.

This one is personal:

You know I'm in rather a hole,
Since the bankers got out of control.
  My results were the best,
  But the funding went West,
And you can't do research on the dole.

I have been reading This is Paradise: my North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang, who was born in 1986, lived through the famine of the 1990s, and escaped to China in 1998. One thing he writes about is the maths exercises from his school textbooks, with their unique subject matter. Exercises like these:

The people's army, after a battle against the armies of the American imperialist dogs and the South Korean puppets, took 15,130 soldiers prisoner. Among them were 1,130 more American bastards than South Korean puppets. How many American dogs and South Korean puppets were there?

Does anybody not know the series of jokes that compare operating systems to beers? For example:

Mac Beer — At first, came in only a 16-oz. can, but now comes in a 32-oz. can. Considered by many to be a "light" beer. All the cans look identical. When you take one from the fridge, it opens itself. The ingredients list is not on the can. If you call to ask about the ingredients, you are told that "you don't need to know." A notice on the side reminds you to drag your empties to the trashcan.