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Jonathan Mugan (occasional commenter on this blog, newly minted doctor, all around great guy) won for best educational video at this years AAAI video competition. Enjoy!

This is an interesting read. I can’t pretend to have parsed the entire argument. I will note that the author subtly assumes a kind of elevated status for psychological explanations. Unless you accept some kind of divine influence, say a soul, the psychology of a situation is merely a computational relationship we simply don’t understand [...]

I’ve heard rumors that Blu-ray DRM is now broken as well. I don’t know much about the specifics of the crack except for the typical colloquial explanation that the keys for decrypting the data were pulled out of memory. I can only surmise that since decrypting such massive amounts of video data in real time [...]

Tupper’s Self-Referential Formula. [via GeekPress] Yes, but how many self-referential formulas are there?

Perhaps my least favorite task is putting together my resume. This most recent iteration of pain is directed towards finding a summer internship. That’s one of the few problems with the Ph.D. program here at UT. It promotes a kind of journeyman mentality, a regular migration of the minds. Summer money is in short supply [...]

While walking under rows of trees that were hazardously emitting chunks of ice yesterday I thought of the following problem: What is the likelihood of my being hit in the head by ice as I travel under the trees?

I’ve had the equivalent of three coffees and I still can’t unpack the multiple implications of this. It’s like taking parody and making it recursive.

Some fatherly advice for getting back into the swing of things after the holidays: Start slow then taper. Also, The Prime Directive is Stupid. While the ethics of obligations is a very tricky thing, it is often through our inaction that we cause the most harm. Injunctions against playing God begs the question: if we [...]