August 24, 2013 by chris on Tidbits

I think I found a new career path, a Cicerones: ht…

I think I found a new career path, a Cicerones: ow.ly/oeMmT

August 23, 2013 by chris on Tidbits

The Future Mundane: giant futuristic objects in ev…

The Future Mundane: giant futuristic objects in everyday landscapes ow.ly/odMq9 Despite the snark, some great stuff!

August 16, 2013 by chris on Tidbits

The Hall Racing 6130 truck is 9 minutes off class lead at the 350 mile mark, I’m pretty sure my brother Sam is behind the wheel. #V2R

August 10, 2013 by chris on Tidbits

President Andrew Jackson taught his parrot to swear. The parrot swore so much at Jackson’s funeral that it had to be removed.

August 4, 2013 by chris on Tidbits

“Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock.” —@bruces medium.com/geek-empire-1/…

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