Thinking Complete

I've just finished the bulk of a personal project, a C++ program which stores and manipulates regular expressions and finite automata. Clocking in at over 1000 lines of code in total, it was a bit more work than I thought it'd be, but I'm pretty happy with it overall (modulo a bit more debugging and refactoring). The biggest problem has been finding a way to explain the project to non-computer-scientists. If you're reading this blog, you've probably heard of Turing Machines, and the idea that they can do any calculation possible in this universe (as far as we know). What about simpler versions of Turing Machines? It turns out that you can define a number of different machines which are strictly less powerful. Near the bottom of this hierarchy are finite automata, which consist only of a finite number of states, with transitions between them. A finite automaton - they come in two varieties, deterministic (DFA) and non-deterministic (NFA) - "accepts" a str

It’s difficult to write an accurate review of The Female Eunuch . It was an enormously influential book, but even immediately after reading it, I remembered the tone and mood Greer created much better than the content. Partly that’s due to her style: her prose is energetic and impassioned, though at times verging on bombastic. Greer's arguments are stories - first a sweeping claim, followed by a more detailed and vitriolic assessment of the psychology of her chosen targets, and swelling to some iconoclastic conclusion, phrased in a deliberately outré manner. Between these she weaves personal anecdotes, quotations, literary references and enough obscure words to have me continually reaching for a dictionary. The book is far from a modern sociological study, teeming with facts and statistics. Rather, it is equal parts continental-style philosophy and call to arms. To what purpose, exactly? It’s very easy to tell what Greer stands against - most things, it seems - but more dif

To blog or not to blog, that is the question. And, increasingly, the former has seemed like the better option. Every so often, I get the itch to write, and it seems a waste to ignore it. I try to have interesting conversations with interesting people, and it seems a waste if they're not recorded. I also have fairly disparate interests, and I'm hoping a blog will funnel me into exploring them on a more systematic basis. To start off with, I've put up a number of projects of mine in the Programming and Learning & Teaching tabs. I'll be making posts with some commentary on these later. They cover quite an eclectic range of subjects. Some were motivated by my own curiosity, essentially me taking notes as I learned about a topic. Some were intended as presents for my siblings, to help them explore areas they were interested in (living overseas, I've started coming around to my dad's view that "the best presents are virtual ones"). The programming proj