The Weekly Weird - 2015-10-02

"One test result is worth one thousand expert opinions" --Wernher "that's not my department" von Braun

• Poll for the audience: post-increment (i++) or pre-increment (++i) in languages that allow/distinguish the two.
• Too often we simplify problems to a nice, clean binary of up/down, working/broken. Even without bringing us into the realm of Byzantine failures it's important to look at how broadly a simple performance issue can affect a distributed system
• Continuing my "the real world is far too implausible to not be fiction" series.
• perl: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perlsecret/lib/perlsecret.pod
• I like the idea that, since light is an electromagnetic wave, you can just convert it to electricity like you would with microwaves. Efficiency is low right now but the math seems to say it could get to \~85%.
• Colors are surprisingly sophisticated
• King - Man + Woman - Queen (I haven't actually read it but it sounds interesting)

• I really need someone to explain to me, using short words, the following two papers:

  • Semantics, Representations and Grammars for Deep Learning
  • An architecture for encoding sentence meaning in left mid-superior temporal cortex

• I love this. I don't know what these silly directed ISOs are so let's just delete them. Half the audience is now screaming in terror while the other half is vaguely confused.

Man, short list this week. Go forth and cause weirdness in the world so I have more to write about.