Tag Archives: silly

Debugging Turing: An excursion with Scheme

So, I thought it would be a fun idea for my first ever Lisp/Scheme program to implement Alan Turing’s original a-machines from his paper, On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (paper available to public). Fun? Oh, I hadn’t any idea…

Preamble; choice of implementation
I decided to go with the latest and greatest version [...]

Pearls Before Piglets

While Googling my way through the interwebs, I came across the 2008 Western Australian Certificate of Education sample examination for Stage 2 Biological Sciences. It contains this diagram:

If you’re wondering, the entire hierarchy is drawn from Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino.

What can we fit in 140 characters?

This is in reference to the current ‘Twitter image encoding challenge’ running on StackOverflow.
If we want to restrict ourselves to assigned, non-control, non-private Unicode characters, then by my reckoning that gives us 129,775 available characters.

wget http://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt
awk -F ‘;’ UnicodeData.txt -f countUnichars.awk | bc

countUnichars.awk source:

BEGIN { print "ibase=16" } # set bc to hex mode
 
$2 ~ [...]

Is it just me?