Category: commentaries

I turn 25 tomorrow—not 25 years on this planet, but 25 years on the net. It was on August 27th, 1981, that I first used a computer connected to the Arpanet, which was just then morphing into the Internet, a process completed 16 months later. That transition from Arpanet to Internet was the first of…

For my first book of summer, I fell into one of my usual genres: analysis of the relationship between information technology and social, political, and legal issues. As a result, I can warmly recommend Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu (Oxford University Press, 2006). Anyone who…

The security expert Bruce Schneier published a Commentary in today’s Star Tribune claiming to show why the NSA’s gathering large amounts of phone call records is useless, rather than merely spooky. (This op-ed is largely self-plagiarized from an earlier publication in Wired News.) The thrust of the commentary is to imagine one possible use for…

Late yesterday afternoon, US District Judge James Ware denied the Department of Justice’s request to compel Google to turn over a sample of its users’ search queries. Privacy advocates have been quick to celebrate a victory. However, although there are several very enouraging signs, a close reading of the reasoning in the judge’s opinion shows…

As you may or may not know, one of the first calculators (abacus excluded) was a giant gear-laden monstrosity conceived of computing pioneer Charles Babbage back in the early 1800’s. His “difference engine” used gears to calculate 7th order polynomials to 31 digits of accuracy. here are a few modern attempts at using his logic…

Joel Spolsky recently posted some interesting musings about computer science education under the heading The Perils of JavaSchools. They make particularly interesting reading given the current configuration of our introductory computer science courses at Gustavus (now about 15 years old) and given that we’re slowly warming up for a discussion of whether we want to…

In their basic level, video games are comprised of math to drive the display of every image and interaction. This is true from today’s 3D polygon-rich games as well as ones as simple as a ball bouncing off a paddle. As someone who has grown up with the rise & fall of the “video game…

If you’ve seen these before it may be old news, but I only just stumbled across the seeming impossibility of two identical sets of shapes having a different combined area. Click here to view a particularly amazing Missing Square Puzzle (aka “Curry’s Paradox”). Why does #5 fit on the top configuration but not the bottom?…

A.I. may be the topic of many a sci-fi book/film/graphic novel. However, as many of you may already know, Alan Turing and some of his fellow early computer scientists put some serious philosophical and mathematical brain-power into working out how to invent intelligence through technology, and just what sorts of tests would be needed to…