Making it happen
Archive for May, 2008
Towards Universal Semantic Communication
May 30th
Via Mihai Patrascu, a paper that was accepted at STOC about communicating with aliens … here.
Excerpt:
Consider the following scenario: Alice, an extraterrestrial, decides to initiate contact with a terrestrial
named Bob by means of a radio wave transmission. How should he respond to her? Will he
ever be able to understand her message? In this paper we explore such scenarios by framing the
underlying questions computationally.
Today’s puzzle
May 29th
You are on the roof of a 400 meters high building, isolated, with a 300-meters long rope. There is something on the side of the roof where you can tie the rope. At half the height, that is 200 meters high above the ground, there is a platform where you can stay and where you can also tie the rope to continue descending. How do you get off the building ?
(new!) puzzles
May 28th
Two new logic puzzle from Danet, here’s the today one:
You are on a strict medical regimen that requires you to take two
types of pills each day. You must take exactly one A pill and exactly
one B pill at the same time. The pills are very expensive, and you
don’t want to waste any. So you open the bottle of A pills, and tap one
out into your hand. Then you open the bottle of B pills and do the same
thing — but you make a mistake, and two B pills come out into your
hand with the A pill. But the pills are all exactly identical. There is
no way to tell A pills apart from B pills. How can you satisfy your
regimen and take exactly one of each pill at the same time, without
wasting any pills?
The Entity SQL Parser
May 28th
seems based on Bison:
[EntitySqlException: The query syntax is not valid., near term '*', line 1, column 9.]
System.Data.Common.EntitySql.CqlParser.yyerror(String s) +519
System.Data.Common.EntitySql.CqlParser.yyparse() +709
Nokia Betalabs
May 28th
Some interesting new apps from Nokia here. Oh and for a very user-friendly sms API to your Nokia, download TextMessenger and use the SMSSender.ocx from
C:\Users\…\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\TextMessenger.gadget\
.NET 3.5 SP1
May 26th
Beware, don’t install it on production servers, I’ve found an weird issue with ListView editing.
