Following the recent discussion of anthropology and religion, I dug out one of my old anthropology essays which I did at the end of my first year at university – now almost 5 years ago. It was called “The Meaning of Life – A critical essay” and as I reread it, with some vague memory [...]
In all computer programs, all decision making can eventually be reduced to a question of true or false. And because of this, Boolean expressions – truth values – play a central role in programming. Boolean expressions use relational operators and take primitive types (integers, decimal numbers and single characters) as arguments. The result of boolean [...]
Apparently, what used to be known as Ubiquitous Computing, as defined by the late Mark Weiser, has hit a major semantic blizzard. The technology to make Ubiquitous Computing happen is finally getting somewhere, with RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) chips that look set to replace barcodes, and generally make objects carry information in a completely new [...]
There are a lot of specialized operators in a programming language. A lot more than I’m familiar with. Some of these are called ??Syntactical Sugar? as they combine two or more the functions of two or more operators in a single statement. For instance, instead of writing a = a * (b / PI); you [...]
You probably have to read the Economist to understand all of it.