New Horizons

Software programming and design is an amazingly complex task. Specially when it concerns numerical applications, that generally require optimization to get results in a reasonable time. For that purpose the basic pattern is usually to write the code as simple as possible, debug it and when it works to begin the optimization process. This asks for some nerves, and patience, two things I usually don't have in real life , but for programming yes. This design pattern makes sense because we are doing things really sequentially. You first wrote some c++ class and then add some feature progressively, and when you come up with essentially different concept (I mean a concept that should be well separated from the first one), you write an other class and so on... Usually the class-writing process follows the solving process you have in mind. For instance you have to make some initialization on your model first, then you declare some variables for the computation, the computation then f...

When you do informatics codes, sooner or later you are concerned with data containers and their associated complexities for inserting, getting, sorting or whatsoever. Some of them are lists, vectors, map, set etc... Sometimes you use a container for some stuff and you get unexpected low behavior. Then you go into your manager's office and ask for complexity of what you are doing. By the way, he convinces you that you are the last of the idiots of computer scientists (thing I take as an honor), and you just change your container. But the people who are working on containers (have you ever looked to the STL (standard template library) to see how containers are implemented ? Not sure those people are human...) should try to investigate how my desk is working. It is very messy, there is a lot of stuff on it (even food sometimes) but I always find my items in a constant time . Well, almost always. Notably when someone put it in order (presumably the housekeeper or some terribly i...

Bertrand Russel used humour to show that whatever is logical is not necessary true. He was saying the following Do you pretend that if 2+2=5, then Bertrand Russel is the pope ? Suppose that 2+2=5 Let's substract 2 from each side, then 2=3 By symmetry we have 3=2 If you substract 1 on both sides, 2=1 Now the pope and I are two distinct people, since 2=1 the Pope and Russel are one.