June 28, 2014 by chris on Tidbits

TIL the gut has more neurons than the spinal cord:…

TIL the gut has more neurons than the spinal cord: scientificamerican.com/article/gut-se…

June 27, 2014 by chris on Tidbits

In which I correct a detail in an article about th…

In which I correct a detail in an article about the use of cell phone locations as circumstantial evidence in solvi… fyre.it/JdjOLn.5

June 27, 2014 by chris on Tidbits

Decent article on earthquake warning systems and what to do when you get that warning:

June 18, 2014 by chris on Tidbits

RT @mlkshk: much they were going to miss it. So we are not closing on September 1. We are going to see if these changes (to pricing as well) make it

May 26, 2014 by chris on Tidbits

Great NPR headline: Organic Cat Litter Chief Suspect In Nuclear Waste Accident ow.ly/xgZhr even I know Bentonite is important

These are my links for July 20th through July 24th:

Ask HN: Best-architected open-source business applications worth studying? | Hacker News -
Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures | Hacker News -
The language of choice - Propositional logic was discovered by Stoics around 300 B.C., only to be abandoned in later antiquity and rebuilt in the 19th century by George Boole’s successors. One of them, Charles Peirce, saw its significance for what we now call logic circuits, yet that discovery too was forgotten until the 1930s. In the ’50s John McCarthy invented conditional expressions, casting the logic into the form we’ll study here; then in 1986 Randal Bryant repeated one of McCarthy’s constructions with a crucial tweak that made his report “for many years the most cited paper in all of computer science, because it revolutionized the data structures used to represent Boolean functions” (Knuth).1 Let’s explore and code up some of this heritage of millennia, and bring it to bear on a suitable challenge: playing tic-tac-toe.
Then we’ll tackle a task that’s a little more practical: verifying a carry-lookahead adder circuit. Supposedly logic gets used all the time for all kinds of serious work, but for such you’ll have to consult the serious authors; what I can say myself, from working out the code to follow, is that the subject offers a fun playground plus the most primitive form of the pun between meaning and mechanism.

You’re encouraged to read with this article’s code cloned and ready