E. W. Djisktra Diskjtra Diskra Dijkstra
According to Dijkstra, he was the first professional Computer Programmer in Holland (PDF), although at the time of his marriage he wasn’t allowed to call himself a programmer, and hence his marriage certificate read “Theoretical Physicist”.
In programming circles - particularly among geeky, pretentious programmers like me - Dijkstra is almost - but not quite - as well quoted as Knuth. In this blog, I will share some of my favourite and not so favourite Dijkstra quotes, and offer my own interpretation of them. I don’t know if this will be boring for anyone who isn’t a programmer, or even for those who are, but hey - you run it up the flagpole in the hope that someone salutes, right?
On the off-chance that there are some people reading who aren’t turned off by it, I’d welcome any comments - positive and negative - of my interpretation of the Great Man’s words. Ok, here goes.
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… and lays the blame for the MMR/Autism hoax where it belongs - on the shoulders of the British Press.
http://www.badscience.net/2008/08/the-medias-mmr-hoax/
“Dr Andrew Wakefield is in front of the General Medical Council on charges of serious professional misconduct, his paper on 12 children with autism and bowel problems is described as “debunked” - although it never supported the conclusions ascribed to it - and journalists have convinced themselves that his £435,643 fee from legal aid proves that his research was flawed.”
Well worth a read.
This blog might save your life
No, I’m not joking. The information in this blog really might save your life, or the life of someone you know.
What you are about to read is fairly old news, but surprisingly - to me, at least - not many people seem to know about it. It’s important people know this, so please take a few minutes to read it. I know it’s long, unfortunately there’s a lot of information to convey and there’s no easy way to make it shorter.
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Time for the skeptics to eat - nay, *choke on* - their words. It seems the qua homoeopaths have been right all along.
This paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v434/n7030/full/nature03383.html describes some recent scientific research which indicate that water does indeed have a memory. They’ve even managed to measure it pretty accurately.
It’s a bit of a long read, so I’ll summarise:
“Our results highlight the efficiency of energy redistribution within the hydrogen-bonded network, and that liquid water essentially loses the memory of persistent correlations in its structure within 50 fs.”
I guess that about wraps things up for the critics of homoeopathy, huh?
Oh, by the way, “50 fs” is 50 femto seconds. A femto second is 0.000,000,000,000,001 seconds. It seems that homoeopathic remedies might have a very short shelf life.
Isn’t it frustrating when you copy and paste someone else’s writing into your blog, only to have some interfering busybody point out that you aren’t the original author. They might even go so far as to email the *real* author to tell them you have copied their work. And all you were doing was quite innocently trying to pretend you had some knowledge you didn’t have. How unsporting of them. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
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I hold some conflicting opinions about GM. On the one hand, I can see that GM has the potential to offer much that is good to humanity. On the other, I think it’s a dangerous technology which needs extreme care, and I’m not convinced that enough care is being taken now that it’s become such big business.
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Ok, I decided I’d had enough of spammers and so have finally got around to adding a Captcha to the comment form. It should work just fine, but if you have problems posting please let me know at the email address on this page.
Ta muchly.
If, like me, you are old enough to remember the book “Logarithms and Other Mathematical Tables” from your schooldays, but you hanker for something with a little more substance - something that will take a bit longer to read - then this might be the book you have been yearning for. It’s just too bad the “search inside” facility for this book only goes as far as page 6 … there’s another 594 pages before you get to the end - although to be fair the first 6 pages give a very good flavour of what’s to come.
Make sure you take a look at the customer reviews too.
In the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz we discover at the end that the events of the story are a dream from which Dorothy eventually wakes (this is different from the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum upon which the film was based.) We can empathise with Dorothy - when we look back on our dreams in the minutes after waking we are often amused at how ridiculous they are in retrospect but during the dream it all seemed perfectly logical.
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I don’t normally set a lot of store by petitions, but this I believe to be worth supporting.
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Immediately ban NHS funding of homoeopathy [sic] and redirect the resources to proven medicine.
So what’s this all about? In recent years homeopathy has begun making an entry into the NHS, so much so that recently £10 million of NHS funds was used to refurbish the Royal London Homeopathic hospital. This is only a good use of NHS funds if you approve of state-sponsorship of quackery.