Category: commentaries

Today’s news concerning web security made me think about a 1964 school desegregation decision from the Supreme Court of the United States; the title of this blog post is taken from Justice Black’s opinion.  But before I can explain the connection, I need to provide some security background.

This summer, I had the pleasure of seeing a remarkable dramatization of the Internet, including both its technical and social dimensions, focusing on the difficult problem of cyber-bullying. While I can’t give my professional endorsement to every last detail of the show, I will say that I found it be both very enjoyable and very…

I had originally been planning to blog about the ownership of copyrights for the Unix operating system. But maybe no one else cares about that. Everyone’s minds are on more important topics, like sex. So imagine my pleasure in seeing that sex and math have had a rare convergence in the pages of The New…

While it’s anything but consistent (randomness abounds from comic to comic) you may want to check out XKCD – a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language by Randall Munroe, a CNU Physics Graduate who has been through the trenches of sorting algorithms, number theory, and more. He varies from very funny to bizarre to…

Jon-David Schlough (GAC ’00) is one of the many GAC alums who I know that, while not a CS major, has gone on to work in the internet communications industry here in the Twin Cities. His latest work for the Al Franken campaign’s online presence is at last connecting his knowledge of web technologies with…

Back at the start of the semester, I linked to Betsy in Budapest, a blog maintained by one of our students while studying in the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics (a very well-reputed program). I hope you took my advice and followed that blog. If not, I hope you’ll catch up on it now. But in…

For those mcs students who have ever struggled with the idea of n-dimensional spaces, Edwin Abbot Abbot wrote an interesting novel regarding the evolution of dimension. In Flatland, he explores the notion of 2-dimensional civilizations being brought into contact with 3-dimensional civilization. Since the book’s been around since 1884, you can read Flatland it in…

Any of you familiar with musician Jonathon Coulton may know that he’s got a flair for tongue in cheek, obscure errata, and a prodigious amount of work (in one project, he released a song a week for over a year). At any rate, I wanted to start by not so much to glorify Jonathon Coulton…