Interesting Miscellany

Here are some of the links I've found interesting enough to tweet or retweet in that past several weeks.

Math
Planck found in "Euler Identity" Crop Circle?!
Ten of the greatest: Math Puzzles
Russian math genius ignores $1 million Millennium Prize
A mathematician's clock...
werewolves and star wars: two exam questions

Science & Technology
Eyeborg bionic eye camera shows winks and all
Update on the diagnosis of the Voyager 2 data system - If you're in IT, this is the ultimate "Turn it off then back on again."

Programming
You don't need anyone's permission to get work experience in software.
Podcast interview with Donald Knuth. - This is a phone interview between Knuth and Larry Felton Johnson. They talk mostly about Literate Programming, but they also touch on TAOCP and a few other topics.


Random Statistics of the week
The LA Times reports that California welfare debit cards are accepted in over half of casinos in the state. Welfare recipients withdrew $1.8 million from casino ATMs between October 2009 and May 2010.


Finally, what I've been working on lately...
StackWrap4J, a Java wrapper for the recently released Stack Exchange API, has finally reached a semi-stable state. I teamed up with another prominent member of the Stack Overflow community, Justin 'jjnguy' Nelson, to work on this over the past couple of months and we've just released version 0.9. You can download it from the StackWrap4J project page on SourceForge. Please give us some feedback.

Now that the API is near stability, I should have more time soon to get back to SICP and my (ir)regular blogging schedule.

Bylaws of Programming and Technology

Amara's Law - "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run."

Amdahl's Law - "The speed-up of a program using multiple processors in parallel computing is limited by the time needed for the sequential fraction of the program."

Brooks's Law - "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."

Clarke's Three Laws

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

(See So Quoted: Any sufficiently... for many corollaries to Clarke's Three Laws.)

Classen's Law - "In order to achieve a linear improvement in usefulness over time it's necessary to have an exponential increase in technology over time." Or more succinctly:

Usefulness = log(Technology)

Conway's Law - "Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it."

Gall's Law - "A complex system that works is invariably found to have derived from a simple system that worked."

Gates's Law - "The speed of commercial software generally slows by fifty percent every 18 months thereby negating all the benefits of Moore's Law."

Gilder's Law - "Bandwidth grows at least three times faster than computer power."

Goodheart's Law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming - "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

Gustafson's Law - "Any sufficiently large problem can be efficiently parallelized."

Hofstadter's Law - "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

Kerckhoffs' Principle - "A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge."

Knuth's Law - "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil."

Kranzberg's Six Laws of Technology

1. Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
2. Invention is the mother of necessity.
3. Technology comes in packages, big and small.
4. Although technology might be a prime element in many public issues, nontechnical factors take precedence in technology-policy decisions.
5. All history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant.
6. Technology is a very human activity - and so is the history of technology.

Linus's Law - "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Metcalfe's Law - "The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system."

Moore's Law - "The number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years."

Norvig's Law - "Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again (in any number of months)."

Parkinson's Laws

• Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
• Data expands to fill the space available for storage.
• Programs expand to fill all available memory.

Parkinson's Law of Triviality - "Organizations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues."

Proebsting's Law - "Compiler advances double computing power every 18 years."

Reed's Law - "The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, can scale exponentially with the size of the network.

Schneier's Law - "Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it."

Sturgeon's Law - "90% of everything is crap."

Wirth's Law - "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster."

Zawinski's Law - "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."