Why mathematics is not fun (when it should be!)

One man’s lament.
(thanks jfm)
Addendum: 8/6/8
On vacation, I re-read this, and wanted to share some interesting bits:

  • p5. Mathematics is the art of explanation.
  • p6. Math is not about following directions, it is about making new ones.
  • p7. It isn’t doing anyone any good having vague memories of formulas and clear memories of hating them.
  • p11. Teaching is not about information. It’s about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students. Teaching means openness and honesty, an ability to share excitement, and a love of learning.
  • p21. Mathematics is about removing obstacles to our intuition, and keeping things simple.

Scheme in the Real-time CG Content Production

If you try to pin down Schemers to a particular stereotype, you will fail; they are just too diverse a bunch.

Take Shiro Kawai’s website. He’s got some great resources on that page. Dig in deeper and have a look at his paper Gluing Things Together – Scheme in the Real-time CG Content Production.

The short story is that

Square USA R&D Team had been developing an in-house real-time rendering engine in a project called Dancer, and we adopted Scheme as an embedded scripting language.

Here is how they used it:

  1. As a File Format
  2. As a Debugging tool
  3. For Rapid Prototyping
  4. For Authoring

There are a lot, and I mean a lot of really interesting bits about how the tackled the problems they were facing.

The best part: you don’t have to be a computer graphics buff to have a heck of a good time reading this paper. Enjoy!

Naughty Dogs use Scheme in Video Games

Once again Naughty Dog Software has used Lisp to write their video games.

Here are the two blurbs where I heard about it:

I had held off posting this for a while in hopes that presentations materials would show up. They haven’t set; so I’m going to have to do some digging!

Ur-Scheme: Compiling a Subset of R5RS Scheme to Asm

The home page for Ur-Scheme tells the tale of one mans journey implementing a compiler from a subset of Scheme to Assembly on Linux.

For folks interested in almost totally pure functional programs, here is a teaser:

It contains relatively little mutation. Although almost every line of the compiler has “side effects” like outputting lines of assembly code, there are fairly few locations where the compiler’s internal state is mutated. I count 25 calls to set! and string-set! in the 1600 lines of code, including the standard library.

Switching Caps Lock with Control on Windows

Getting the control key “back into the right spot” on PC keyboards is a goal shared between Emacs and UNIX folks. The following are a collection of links on how to do so (this list is sure to grow):

Addendum: 10/01/08
The Sysinternals solution is excellent, but it throws away caps lock. This was fine for me for a while, but believe it or not, now I need it back. As such, I now employ the solution found here.

Addendum: 1/11/11
This approach does not work on Windows 7 (I just started using Win7 this week).
KeyMapper works brilliantly though.
(via emacswiki)
Addendum: 2014-12-10

Coming back to Windows I found that KeyMapper quit working for me.

AutoHotkey seems to be doing the job of swapping:

  • caps lock with left control
  • left control with caps lock
  • enter with right control
  • right shift with enter
    • Seems to be the best way to use any keyboard out there
  • scroll up and down on the wheel mouse

Alt (Meta) - Enter doesn’t seem to work.

I’ll keep at it. Here is the config. 

WheelUp::
Send {WheelDown}
Return
WheelDown::
Send {WheelUp}
Return
Capslock::Ctrl
LCtrl::CapsLock
Enter::RCtrl
RShift::Enter

On Python and Lisp

The last time I spoke to a friend of mine who knows both Scheme and Common Lisp (among many other programming languages), his current language of choice was Python. More or less, he said that it just “feels right” (I need to pick his brain more on this).
Is Lisp the future of Python? Do Lispers gravitate towards Python? I’m not sure yet, but this paper aims to shed some light on both of those questions.