The Universe of Discourse

( Previously ) In 2003 I visited Barcelona and spent all day wandering around the mighty Basilica de la Sagrada Família , the architectural masterpiece of Antoni Gaudí. It had been under construction since 1882, and at the time only four of its 18 planned spires had been built. In the basement there was a museum with plans, renderings, and so on, and I discovered the plans for what it would look…

The ancient Egyptians had a terrible notation for fractions. They had notations for for each , for , but everything else was written as a sum of these, with repeats forbidden, so that for example had to be written as . ( Wikipedia ) In an older article about Egyptian fractions and the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus , I said: Getting the table of good-quality representations of is not trivial, and …

A quincunx is the X-shaped pattern of pips on the #5 face of a die. It's so-called because the Romans had a common copper coin called an as , and it was divided (monetarily, not physically) into twelve uncia . There was a bronze coin worth five uncia called a quīncunx , which is a contraction of quīnque (“five”) + uncia , and the coin had that pattern of dots on it to indicate its value. Uncia ge…

As I have explained in the past , my typical workflow is to go along commiting stuff that might or might not make sense, then clean it all up at the end, doing multiple passes with git-add and git-rebase to get related changes into the same commit, and then to order the commits in a sensible way. Yesterday I built a new utility that I found helpful. I couldn't think of a name for it, so I called…

Bo Diddley's cover of "Sixteen Tons" sounds very much like one of my favorites, "Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover". It's interesting to compare. Thinking on that it suddenly occured to me that his name might have been a play on “diddley bow”, which is a sort of homemade one-stringed zither. The player uses a bottle as a bridge for the string, and changes the pitch by sliding the bottle up and do…

I recently posted an article about the 2013 Philadelphia Traffic Court fiasco , in which most of the Traffic Court judges were convicted of accepting bribes: According to the indictment, Perri accepted free auto services, towing, landscaping, and even a load of shrimp and crab cakes from Alfano, whose company, Century Motors, ran a towing service. ( The Philadelphia Inquirer , Nine current an…

Buy Artificial Intelligence from Bookshop.org (with kickback) (without kickback) One of the better books I read in college was Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea (1985) by philosopher John Haugeland . One of the sections I found most striking and memorable was about Terry Winograd's SHRDLU . SHRDLU, around 1970, could carry on a discussion in English in which it would manipulate imaginary c…

A long time ago I worked on a debugger program that our company used to debug software that it sold that ran on IBM System 370. We had IBM 3270 CRT terminals that could display (I think) eight colors (if you count black), but the debugger display was only in black and white. I thought I might be able to make it a little more usable by highlighting important items in color. I knew that the debug…

A couple of years back I was discussing the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus (RMP). It includes a table expressing as a sum $$\frac1{a_1}+\frac1{a_2}+\dots+\frac1{a_k} $$ fractions with numerator 1 (“unit fractions”). I said: Getting the table of good-quality representations of is not trivial, and requires searching, number theory, and some trial and error. It's not at all clear that . Today I wo…

Our company is going to a convention later this month, and they will have a booth with big TV screens showing statistics that update in real time. My job is to write the backend server that delivers the statistics. I read over the documents that the product people had written up about what was wanted, asked questions, got answers, and then turned the original two-line ticket into a three-page ti…

In a recent article about John Haugeland's rejection of micro-worlds I claimed: as a “Large Language Model”, Claude necessarily includes a model of the world in general Nobody has objected to this remark, but I would like to expand on it. The claim may or may not be true — it is an empirical question. But as a theory it has been widely entertained since the very earliest days of digital computers…

A number of years ago I wondered how many movies I had seen. The only way I could think of finding out was just to make a list. This I did as best I could. (It turned out to be around 700.) I found, though, that I could not include all the James Bond movies I had seen, because I couldn't tell them apart from the descriptions. I'd read a plot summary for a James Bond movie, and ask myself “Did I…

A couple of days ago I recounted a common complaint : I keep seeing programmers say how angry it makes them that people are willing to write detailed CLAUDE.md and PROJECT.md files for Claude to use, but they weren't willing to write them for their coworkers. For larger projects, I've taken to having Claude maintain a handoff document that I can have the next Claude read, saying what we pla…