Story Title
10/12/18 04:45 PM
In Georgia, Even The Dog Sneezes
This idea for a story title came to me this morning after a particular bout by my dog, Titan. Harlan Ellison could have produce an award-winning story just from this title. Too bad he's no longer with us.
Comments
Star Trek Memorabilia
09/03/18 04:30 PM Filed in: Star Trek
[Warning -- links to large files!]
In late July, or early August, 1967 I received an envelope in the mail from Bill Theiss. The envelope contained seven black and white pictures. One of the U. S. S. Enterprise, and six personally autographed pictures from the cast of Star Trek: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, and Nichelle Nichols.
My grandmother was a neighbor of (or knew -- I wasn't ever really sure) the mother of Susanne Wasson, who played Lethe in the episode Dagger of the Mind from Season 1, Episode 10.
In late July, or early August, 1967 I received an envelope in the mail from Bill Theiss. The envelope contained seven black and white pictures. One of the U. S. S. Enterprise, and six personally autographed pictures from the cast of Star Trek: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, and Nichelle Nichols.
My grandmother was a neighbor of (or knew -- I wasn't ever really sure) the mother of Susanne Wasson, who played Lethe in the episode Dagger of the Mind from Season 1, Episode 10.
Plato, Church, and Turing
07/07/18 08:53 PM Filed in: Computing | Philosophy
The lambda calculus is the "platonic form" of a Turing machine
— wrf3
I wrote this in a comment over at Edward Feser's blog in a comment to Gödel and the mechanization of thought. Google doesn't find it anywhere in this exact form, but this post appears to express the same idea. The components of this idea can be found elsewhere, but it isn't stated as directly as here.
Ancient Publication
The text of the article and the source code is below the fold. I wish I had my original work to show how it was edited for publication.
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Round to Nearest
I recently had to write some code to round a value to something other than the nearest integer, e.g. rounding a measurement to the nearest 0.5 or 0.1 unit.
To figure out how to do it, suppose we want to round to the nearest multiple of, say, 5.
Scale the number line from 0, 5, 10, ... to 0, 1, 2, ...
Round.
Then scale from 0, 1, 2... back to 0, 5, 10...
Extension to values other than 5 is straightforward.
The Lisp code:
Scale the number line from 0, 5, 10, ... to 0, 1, 2, ...
Round.
Then scale from 0, 1, 2... back to 0, 5, 10...
Extension to values other than 5 is straightforward.
The Lisp code:
(defun round-to (n m)
(if (or (null m) (zerop m))
n
(* (round (/ n (float m))) (float m))))