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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 [...]

Posted 10 August 2009 † Porges § code ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

Posted 27 May 2009 † Porges § Default ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , , ,

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 [...]

Posted 27 May 2009 † Porges § code ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , , , , ,

Is it just me?

Posted 07 March 2009 † Porges § commentary ‡ Comments (1) ° Also tagged: , ,