jQuery Kid

Pretty cool for a kid. Even I was able to understand everything, and it's a little bad I already knew this.

This proves how easy it is to taught someone programming and stuff (As I once said, one can teach even a primate or a smart dog). Google obviously benefits from spending all that crazy money for the "get the brain" approach. What they do should be done in any educational model of a progressive institution, especially in math or natural. One should really enjoy the process and have fun.

Q: What is eduction (of a brain)?

A: Education is a constant dialog with your brain (or technically, I think, a specialist will say between both of head brain's hemispheres). If your brain is interested in something that means it is ready to learn this something, that means there are enough connections in your neural network, that are active enough, to make the final conclusion - the final connection. So if you are about to study something, do it with passion and understanding, thus building and exploding a better network for a
better understanding. And finally, the proper understanding is actually a conclusion that is often your own discovery of a particular small fact, that you have just come up with and you are able to see it very clearly by repeatedly accessing a result from the same neural circuit which allows you to compute that fact. So, if you are about to grade results of your own eduction, then grade it by measuring not applicative skills of knowledge, but the discovering skills with help of that knowledge as well as all the small discoveries themselves.

counting automaton problem

As I've promised, here is the problem inspired by the riddle from the Sophus book. I don't want to cite the text from the page. Briefly, speaking it may be a very simple problem with a simple solution or a problem without solution at all.

Mathesis.ru

Again, quite a remarkable set of old and rare mathematical and natural science books, published in Russian, mostly before and after the revolution of 1917. The period is exactly form 1904 till 1925.

"Games with matches" is the book that had actually driven my attention to the site http://mathesis.ru/book/tromgolt2

I think I will put some of the problems from the book online.

php mamba fun

I'm not sure for how long this site will be up, but anyway here is a (305 points) test results button for php developing:



I hope that i will manage to write some bruteforce after all. I'm putting this crack thought into my blog just to remember... This should be a lot of fun.

A good book about GDI+ in C#

Because of all msdn and "code at a thumb" stuff one could easily give up an idea of trying to read a good book with explanations. After looking through a dozen books like User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls by Matthew MacDonald I've started to think that it would be hard to find a more horrible one.. :-(

Anyway I was lucky to find this wonderful article Graphics with GDI+ from Professional C# by Ollie Cornes, Jay Glynn, Burton Harvey, Craig McQueen, Jerod Moemeka, Christian Nagel, Simon Robinson, Morgan Skinner, Karli Watson. So if you will ever try to write any book about programming, please do at least as good as this last one.

Compression in "faces"

An absolutely spectacular link to follow the data compression theory's genealogy in photos of inventors:

Compression in "faces".

recursive lambda factorial in lisp

Following a "stupid" question I've asked my students: "how to write a recursive lambda function in common lisp without using any assignment statement?", I've written the following example of such lambda function:

(funcall (lambda (lfact n) (funcall lfact n lfact)) (lambda (n lfact) (cond ((> n 0) (* n (funcall lfact (- n 1) lfact))) (t 1) ) ) 4)


Apparently, to do the trick in pure functional style one needs to use two lambda functions, and symbol assignment operation is replaced with a function call, that receives another lambda as an argument which will be already evaluated inside the first lambda as a functional. The next step to do is just to call it and to send itself, again, as an argument.

I must admit, that I'm very surprised that Common Lisp has such a "poor" support for lambda, because it would be better to perform the same trick in a more shorter code sequence.

"Stories" by V.I. Arnold and math link http://ega-math.narod.ru/

V. I. Arnold is one of the interesting mathematicians of our time. I like to read his talks when I'm looking for inspiration.

Recently, following the link http://ega-math.narod.ru/ that was given to me by one of my students and a friend Vlad Yanum, I have immediately discovered a book by V.I. called "Old and recent stories" ("Истории давние и недавние" ). While much of statements and thoughts in this reading should be proved and analyzed from original sources (as always by careful reading), reading of the book brings a lot of fun and positive ideas to work on.

PS the link itself is a collection of references worth of review and devouring.

And by the way, I was surprised to know that V.I. has a "chat" with pope in 1998
http://nauka.relis.ru/01/0012/01012002.htm (of course, on the conference of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences)