My 5 year old son writes proofs for very basic algebraic expressions at the ghci (Glasgow Haskell) prompt – with my assistance of course. He will not be introduced to imperative programming until he is “ready” – much like you wouldn’t introduce the concept of war or politics to a small child.
— From a comment on an article comparing Scheme and Haskell as teaching languages.
My final year project initial document is due in tomorrow, and I've finally got round to doing it.
...
Okay, I've done some of it. A front page, an abstract, an introduction with a slew of references to papers I haven't read, a skeleton structure and table of contents, and a bibliography. All in the loveliness that is LaTeX which thankfully makes these things effortless.
I might manage to get a draft done tomorrow. Then again, I might not. In either case I'll be asking Dr Berger for advice since I certainly need some help to get things into the right form!
Makes me wish I'd picked a project that I knew something about before my first meeting with my supervisor :) (Though I have some comfort from Sean in that I'm not the only one who doesn't quite understand the obscure, advanced, abstract mathematics my supervisor is spewing at me in meetings.)
As a final note, I'm writing this from the SUCS room at half past midnight because due to the usual bureaucratic incompetence of large businesses, the ISP my live-in landlady has picked didn't send us our ADSL modem until yesterday (which of course nobody was in/awake to collect from the postman, so we had to wait another 24 hours to go and get it, assuming that is really what it is). If an internet connection existed at home now, I would be using it instead. (Because my bed is much more comfortable than the worn out desk chairs here :)
By way of a followup to a previous blog entry, I’d like to point out a dissenting opinion. Maciej Cegłowski writes some very interesting stuff about his travels; in recent months he’s been in China. And he says:
The year 2000 was supposed to bring us flying cars, flying robots, moon cities, undersea bases, bionic medicine, artificial brains, orbiting lasers, monoliths, domes, hypersonic airliners, cyborg bodies and giant space stations. Instead, when the big odometer finally rolled over, we were told to accept as the acme of Western technological achievement the autonomous vacuum cleaner and animated smiley.