Boxer

 

At Lambda the Ultimate, Sean McDirmid points to the intriguing paper Twenty Reasons You Should User Boxer (Instead of Logo), by Andrea di Sessa (co-author of Turtle Geometry).   What happened to Boxer? Is it available to try out? The Boxer website appears inactive, and only lists a Macintosh version. How hard is it to simulate a Mac on current hardware?

Ineffective Sorts

 

From XKCD.  Reminds me too much of some of my students.

Organising Everyday Disarray

Arthur responded to a previous comment by pointing me to an article on the remarkable work of Ursus Wehrli.

Ellsberg salutes Manning

Daniel Ellsberg argues that Bradley Manning is a classic whistleblower, and deserves not life in prison but the Nobel Peace Prize.

Things Organised Neatly

A tumblr, curated by Austin Radcliffe, spotted via Boing Boing.  Does what it says on the tin.  Bound to come in as useful to supply an illustration for a talk, someday.

Informatics 1: Functional Programming

Videos of my 2009 lectures on functional programming in Haskell are available online from the University of Edinburgh.  There seems to be a cottage industry in videos explaining monads, see Lectures 18 and 19 (and 16 and 17) for my version, or see How to Declare an Imperative and Monads for Functional Programming if you prefer text to video.

Newtown vs. Drones

George Monbiot compares sympathy for the victims of Newtown to indifference for civilian victims of drone strikes in Pakistan.  He draws on a detailed report from Stanford and NYU.

From June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562–3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474–881 were civilians, including 176 children. — The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Mustard Watches

Another paper by J.-Y. Girard that I will recommend to my students. Reveals deep insight into the techniques used by theoreticians—the payoff is in the final line.  Via Franck FS and Conor McBride.

Siteswap

Siteswap is a notation for describing juggling patterns.  This video from the BBC features Colin Wright, Siteswap's inventor, explaining how between the patterns 4,4,0 and 4,4,2 they spotted the pattern 4,4,1, and thus notation enabled them to discover a way to juggle that no one had seen before. What better story to illustrate the power of programming languages?

Planet Haskell

Planet Haskell republishes the RSS feed of my blog. As some readers have noted, not all my posts relate to Haskell.  Planet Haskell approached me to ask if they could republish my blog. If you feel my ratio of interesting entries is inadequate, request the Planet Haskell administrators to remove me from syndication. I'm happy with whatever readers of Planet Haskell prefer.