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Re: [ProgSoc] Programming! Code!



On Tuesday 17 October 2006 03:00, Roland Turner wrote:
> In retrospect, I probably started both of these books too young;
> perhaps I should start them again sometime soon. 

Just the other day I swung by citeseer and had a look over the popular 
papers for 2006 [1]. I just started flicking through them... I've been 
doing that for ages, but I hardly ever understand a word that I read.

I eventually got down to this one [2], On Field Constraint Analysis 
(2006), and in it I read the paragraph:

	"Our field constraint analysis permists non-deterministic field 
constraints on cross-cutting fields, which allows [us] to verify 
invariants of data structures such as skip lists. Non-deterministic 
field constraints also enable the verification of invariants between 
data structures, yielding an expressive generalization of static type 
declarations."

I was rather pleased to discover that for the first time I'd read a 
paragraph which I felt I almost entirely understood. :)

I'm reminded of this poem, Persistence, by Calvin Coolidge:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with 
talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination are omnipotent.
The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of 
the human race.

> Einstein/Bohr arguing the signifigance of the wave equations (actual
> description of reality versus some mathematics which happens to allow
> us to make some predictions).

I was recently reading Newton's Principia (thanks Jedd! :) and was 
frustrated almost immediately by his first definition, that of matter.

The problem with these models is that they don't point to 
the 'essential' nature of... 'nature'.

I'm still hung up on 'zero' and 'unity'. That's got to be a mistake, 
doesn't it? Sounds to me like that's what Grgin thinks too...

> > p.s. For extra credit, what does this [2] code do? :)
>
> Puzzles me.

It cleans up those ghastly amazon book URLs. Add a shortcut to your 
browser called 'Clean-up Amazon Book URLs' and add this as the 'link' 
(watch for wrapping):

 javascript:window.location=((m=/(.
+\.com\/).*(dp\/\d+\/).*/ig.exec(window.location))[1]+m[2]);void(0);

I thought Myles might get a kick out of my arcane one-liner... ;)

[1] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/source-2006.html
[2] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/wies06field.html







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