A rosetta stone for visitors to Britain

My first year in Oxford I fell foul of the fourth-from-last entry, if you replace 'dinner' by 'tea'.

Big Brother is watching

London government poster from 2002, according to Wired.  My reaction is the same as that of Simon Davies:

"I thought it was a powerful piece of political satire from a disruptive citizen's group, but then it dawned on me that they were real," Davies said. "It's acutely disturbing."

Why is a monad like a writing desk?

A presentation by Carin Meier at Clojure/West.  Only time I've been accused of writing poetry.  Spotted by Mitch Wand.

Programming Language Tag Clouds

 

Bernard Lambeau created the Programming Language Tag Cloud, reminiscent of Wordle.  It is based on texts submitted by the public; contribute today!  Above, languages currently covered, below Haskell, C, Clojure.  Random juxtaposition endows Haskell with a 'wonderful experimental semantics' and a 'sophisticated ecosystem of monads'.

Good luck

From fail.nl.

Kohei Honda, 1959—2012

Kohei Honda died of a stroke on Monday 3 December 2012.  It was sudden, and many of us still have not taken it in.  My recent paper is a direct descendant of Kohei's work on session types, and I had been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with him on a grant proposal in the last few months.  I spent some time liaising with the W3C on XML and Sun on Java, so I can appreciate the far greater effort involved in Kohei's work liasing with the W3C on WS-CDL, with Cognizant, Red Hat, and VMWare on Scribble and Savara, and with the OOI, all on applications of session types.  Few academics both make deep technical contributions and successfully communicate these to practitioners.  I am sure the theoretical computing community will continue to build on his work, and I hope more computer scientists will emulate his efforts to liaise with practitioners, which should serve as a role model for us all.

Tech Mesh 2012

Tech Mesh was my second developer conference this year, the first being QCon.  While QCon had a track devoted to functional programming, Tech Mesh was devoted to 'alternative programming', meaning FP, in its entirety, with keynotes on Haskell, Clojure, and Erlang, and other talks covering Scala and F#.  A highlight for me was meeting Rich Hickey.  I am impressed that in five years he has taken Clojure to the same place it has taken Haskell twenty years to reach.  Another highlight was seeing Joe Armstrong, Robert Virding, and Mike Williams deliver a joint keynote.  Slides for the Haskell keynote (Peyton Jones, Hughes, and Wadler) are here, and for my other talk are here.

Another pleasure was meeting Clojure developer Bodil Stokke, who was wearing a shirt reading `A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors. What's the problem?'  I'm grateful to Pelotom for an answer on StackOverflow with a definitive explanation of this statement and its spurious connection to myself. 

Avnery: The correct name for this war is "Operation Short Memory"

From Gush Shalom:

The name chosen for the new war in Gaza is "operation Cloud Pillar". A far more appropriate name would have been "Operation Short Memory" Said former Knesset member Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom activist. "Prime Minister Netanyahu is counting on the public's short memory. Netanyahu counts upon people forgetting that dozens and even hundreds of "liquidations" had been carried out and they did not solve any problem - always there was somebody replacing those who were killed, and more than once the new one was more capable and more radical. Netanyahu counts on people not remembering that four years ago Israel went to war in Gaza, killing 1300 civilians in three weeks – which otherwise did not make any significant change in the situation. Netanyahu counts on people failing to remember that just yesterday morning the media reported on people in the communities of the South heaving a sigh of relief at the complete cessation of missiles from Gaza.

"Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have taken the decision - for the second time in a row the State of Israel will conduct general elections under the shadow of war in the Gaza Strip. The cease-fire which already started to stabilize had been broken and shattered to pieces. The inhabitants of te communities of southern Israel, who just started to breathe freely, are sent right back to air raid alarms and the running to shelters.

At the price of great suffering on both sides of the border, the government's aim had been accomplished: the social issues, which threatened to assume prominence in these elections, have been pushed aside and removed from the agenda of the elections campaign. Forgotten, too, is the brave attempt of Mahmud Abbas to address the Israeli public opinion. In the coming weeks, the headlines will be filled with constant war and death, destruction and bloodshed. When it ends at last, it will be revealed that no goal has been achieved and that the problems remain the same, or perhaps got worse."

Hurricane Sandy's Fibonacci Golden Spiral

By JIMWICh, via Boing Boing.

Animated Factorisation Diagrams

From Brent Yorgey's Factorisation Diagrams comes Stephen von Worley's (Data Pointed) beautiful and hypnotic Animated Factorisation Diagrams.  Via Conor McBride (@pigworker).  Virgin wanted me to confirm I was over 18 before it would display the animation on my phone.  Number porn?