use the computer - a blog by Derrick Turk

Before the radio operator had even finished saying his call sign, somewhere in the avionics bay an instruction pointer jumped to the object code of a hundred thousand lines of C++ which were to a Kalman filter approximately as Claude was to ELIZA.

As Alan Watts pointed out, if you’ve achieved your desired mystical insight by direct mental communion with transcendental math entities, chaos demons, non-human intelligences, and so forth, it’s best to cash in your chips and exit the conversation before…

Like most of reality, there’s also a surprising amount of complexity to the problem, and a surprising number of small decisions to make along the way.

It's overwrought, hard to type check, confusing to read, and probably doesn't meaningfully catch errors a human would actually make.

Once upon a time, there was a family of data formats called 297 and 298.

Reverse engineering the Petra .GRD grid format.

Let's walk amongst the trees for a bit.

It’s a great time, maybe the best time in the short history of computer technology to date, to learn programming and data science.

Computational notebooks combine literate programming’s interleaving of source text with prose descriptions and multimedia output with image-based development’s interactivity and mutability.

“There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.

Last time, we used a minimalist parser combinator library to build a parser for an oddly familiar language called OBAN.

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.”

SOCRATES: What is “machine learning”?

It’s a nightmare scenario: trapped behind enemy lines with no hope for rescue.

It’s important, as a rule of thumb, when operating or investing in a firm which produces a physical commodity, to have the ability to reliably quantify the expected future production of the commodity given the firm’s assets.

A couple weekends ago, I found myself with the desire to fetch oil and gas production data for a specific county in New Mexico from the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division (OCD).

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

A few weeks ago, chatting with some friends who also occupy the tiny intersection between engineers and programmers, the topic of “group by” came up in the context of in-memory data management with Python.

Many clients, friends, acquaintances, and (in the Before Times) strangers in bars have asked me over the years: what do I think about “business intelligence” (BI) tools?

What is object-oriented programming really about?

Oh, R.

Today’s Paper of the Day continues this week’s theme of “education”; this time, with a research mathematician turned educator’s thoughts on why K-12 math education ends up leaving so many graduates with negative feelings toward math.

We continue our celebration (or perhaps examination) of Computer Science Education Week with today’s POTD.

Today’s POTD continues our theme of Computer Science Education Week.

This week is Computer Science Education Week!

Today’s POTD is a well-known classic in the genre of “social sciences research that confirms what we’ve always suspected: people are terrible”.

The Paper of the Day for today comes to us from the distant past: a time before venture capital firms would seemingly hurl trebuchet-loads of money at anyone with a “.ai” domain name and the ability to spell “deep learning”.

Today’s POTD presents a translation of a great tool from the functional programming community into the more mundane world of 90s-style object-oriented programming languages.

A recent discussion on the SPE discussion board inspired me to jot down some thoughts on how a young (or experienced!)