A historical collection of our writing.
This has been a strange month with several of the giants of computing passing away within weeks of each other. I have already written about Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie. Now John McCarthy, the father of Lisp and early AI pioneer has died. It is not just that these three had a huge impact on […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
When I taught my Skillshare class on Bayesian Probability, I wound up spending a fair bit of time sharing my fascination with the foundations of probability. Why is there uncertainty in the world to begin with? How do we measure it? I have therefore decided to break that material out into its own […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
I attended an interesting lunch yesterday on something called the B Corporation. It is an effort to formally write the idea of triple bottom line businesses into corporate law and provide the standards to go along with that. Today’s common form of organization is the C Corporation which has as its […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Before we can go on and explore the building blocks in more detail, we need to learn a little bit about the fundamental underlying language used in computers: the binary number system. Based on my kids’ school, this appears to be a 6th grade math topic that’s apparently taught without any context. […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
So I was wrong when I wrote that Occupy Wall Street would at best help draw media attention to inequality. I had suggested that instead folks should spend their time building startups that disrupt existing institutions. It now seems that the Occupy Together movement has the potential to disrupt one […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
Dennis M. Ritchie passed away yesterday. Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language and the co-creator of the Unix operating system (together with Ken Thompson) starting in the late 60s and early 70s. Both C and Unix have provided the underpinnings for many of the systems we still use […] Read more (opens Continuations in a new tab)
