The Sokal Affair

Merry Christmas! The holidays aren't a big deal to me, but time off from work is always nice. The holidays make me miss my sister, though.

But depressing thoughts aside, I stumbled across this interesting incident where a physicist got a joke article published as an experiment to see if the journal would do it. It makes me feel a bit better than those pretentious, convoluted articles really are what they seem to be sometimes.

On top of that, recently, some folks used a computer science paper generator called SCIgen to get a paper into the IEEE database.

Cold

Why does my typing get so much worse when it's cold???

But yeah, I like the cold weather even though I'm a wimp to cold weather. It's just nice to have some rain and col for a change once in a while. ;)

Edsger Dijkstra

I recently stumbled across this archive of Edsger Dijkstra's work. This guy is a legend* of computer science. He was so adamant that computer science should be taught as something independent of actual computers that he himself never owned a computer (the site contains a number of pdf manuscripts... literally hand written). This is one of his works in which he discusses why the common approach to teaching computer science is bad. It might not be an appealing read for non computer scientists, but as someone who is interested in teaching (possibly computer science), I found it to be very interesting.

*Dijkstra's Algorithm (a core approach to finding the shortest route between two points on a graph), and a letter condemning GOTO statements are known to the vast majority of current computer scientists.