Content from 2019-01
Review: God's Philosophers
posted on 2019-01-28
For the past two years, I've been on the lookout for a good book on medieval scholarship. For one, I find the Middle Ages a strange and intriguing period; for another, I always enjoy reading about the history of science. “Standing on the shoulders of giants” is what we do as scientists – but who were these giants? And who were their giants? How did they think, argue, communicate? Well, I finally found what I was looking for. The book in question is James Hannam's “God's Philosophers – How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science”. Here is a summary of the volume, with a few of my own thoughts attached.
more...Silicon Valley Syndrome
posted on 2019-01-14
“Silicon Valley Syndrome” is the name I give to a wide-spread myth that is frequently found in affluent, tech-savvy circles. It is the belief that “Every social problem can be solved if you just throw enough technology at it”. This belief lies at the heart of many, many attempts to make the world a better place. Their proponents will say things like: “We can save democracy by combating fake news with algorithms”, or “We can solve Third World hunger using satellite imagery”, or “We can improve education in poor areas by giving every kid an iPad”. These are all laudable attempts, and yet their fundamental assumption is all too often sadly misguided. Why is that?
more...ASCII Art Animations in Lisp
posted on 2019-01-07
ASCII art may have fallen out of popular favour a couple of decades ago with the rise of “proper” computer graphics, but they are still fun to create. Having made a few myself, I always had the itch to not just create a static ASCII image, but to try my hand at an ASCII animation. Well, I finally did it. In this post I will show you how to create a very simple animation using Common Lisp and the classic Unix text-user-interface library, ncurses.
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