Peter Graham, Wandering Shadows

I only recently discovered the Scottish National Gallery, wandering in after visiting the Warhol show at the neighboring Scottish Academy. I was blown away by two pictures. One is listed above.

The other was John Knox, View from Ben Lomond. (Thanks to Anonymous for the correct link!)

Blog Action Day

A simple idea: ask every blogger to post on the same topic on one day, a powerful illustration of how the web can enable democracy. On Monday 15 October 2007, the topic is the environment. Watch this space!

Google, IBM expand program to teach 'Internet-scale' computing

Sounds like a great idea, I'd love to get Edinburgh on the list of participating institutions.

Why you can't cite Wikipedia in my class

A reasoned argument about some of the limitations of Wikipedia. Spotted by my colleague Mahesh Marina.

O'Reilly History of Programming Languages Poster

What it says on the tin. Haskell is the green line near the bottom, just above SML and Caml, and just below Scheme.

Galois

Another play from the festival. They began with a brilliant pocket history of the French revolution (including mime and puppets). They made a valiant run at the mathematics involved, writing quadratic, cubic, quartic, and quintic equations on the blackboard. But not even a straightedge and compass. If King Louis can get a puppet, can't field theory get one too?

The play puts forward the theory that Galois sacrificed himself to foment revolution, ignoring his own reference to a duel over a woman in his last letter. But it did inspire me to reread the history.

The scene where Cauchy dismisses Galois's work as incomprehensible reminded me of too many reviews I had written. But one of my students took the story to heart, saying that it drove home how it is not enough to have an idea, it is just as vital to communicate it!

Ravenhill for Breakfast

One of the joys of living in Edinburgh is the annual festival. My favorite play this year was Ravenhill for Breakfast at the Traverse Theatre. This was part of a series of seventeen short plays written for the festival, I saw number fourteen, which is linked to above.

Haskell Coffin

On the walls at Jane Street, I spotted this work by an artist I had not heard of before, Haskell Coffin.

Jane Street

I visited Jane Street Capital 15--17 August to see the reports from their OCaml Summer Project. Olin Shivers was there too. An excellent time was had by all. I enjoyed speaking in a room filled by clever people interested in FP not in order to write an academic paper, but because they have a large pile of money that they want to make larger.

Four vacancies

Julian Bradfield, head of LFCS, writes:

We have just advertised the first four of what will, it is hoped,
ultimately be ten posts funded via SICSA (a.k.a. "pooling").

Three of the four are areas in which LFCS has an interest, so please
communicate the existence of these posts to anyone or any community
you know where good candidates may be found.

The announced topics are:

• Software Engineering
  
• Modelling/Concurrency
  
• Security
  
• Large Scale and Robust Natural Language Processing
  

and each post may be at Lecturer or Reader level, depending on the
applications.

The official ad is at the link above.

Note that there is a single vacancy reference, so applicants should
make clear the post(s) they wish to apply for.