Month: June 2010

  • The Truth About the Life of the Mind

    [This piece is a followup to The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind.] Being a professor, like any other job, has its pros and cons. You’d hope that one of the advantages would be that the job encourages a person to live a life of the mind. Otherwise what’s the point, right?  I…

  • The Big Lie About the Life of the Mind

    Earlier this year Thomas Benton wrote an essay The Big Lie About the ‘Life of the Mind, skewering academic humanities in the United States. His thesis is that there is effectively a conspiracy to produce many more PhDs than there are faculty slots, and to keep the carrot of the tenure-track faculty position just out…

  • Why Take an Embedded Systems Course?

    Embedded systems are special-purpose computers that users don’t think of as computers. Examples include cell phones, traffic light controllers, and programmable thermostats. In earlier posts I argued why any computer scientist should take a compilers course and an operating systems course. These were easy arguments to make since these areas are core CS: all graduates…

  • An Epidemic of Rat Farming

    In Hanoi, as the story goes, the French placed a bounty on rat pelts. The locals responded by farming rats. A child who gets candy for cleaning up a big mess is likely to create another mess the next day. These are perverse incentives: incentives that have unintended and often undesirable side effects. As a…

  • Self-Checking Projects

    Matching students up with research projects is entertaining but difficult. The project has to be at the right level of difficulty, has to fit the student’s time frame, and has to interest the student. If grant money is going to be used to pay the student, the work has to fit into the funded project.…

  • White Baldy

    White Baldy, on the ridge between the Red Pine and White Pine drainages of Little Cottonwood Canyon in Utah’s Wasatch Range, is an infrequently visited 11,000′ mountain with no really easy routes: its east, west, and north ridges are all messes of bus-sized boulders. Bill and I decided that if we were ever going to…

  • INT_MIN % -1 = ?

    If you spend much time testing compilers, you’ll run into some strange phenomena even in apparently simple areas like computer arithmetic. For example John Cook wrote a post today explaining why IEEE floats have two different values of zero. Integer arithmetic is generally a lot simpler than floating point math, but it still contains a…

  • Why Take a Compiler Course?

    [Also see why take an OS course and why take an embedded systems course.] All good computer science departments offer a compilers course, but relatively few make it a required part of the undergraduate curriculum. This post answers the question: Why should you take this course, even if you never plan on writing a compiler?…

  • Good Fun and Bad Weather on Mount Baker

    The problem posed by this trip was to find a route that was interesting for my hiking buddy Bill while still being feasible for me. Bill is a seasoned mountaineer and has done some difficult climbs. I’m a strong hiker and feel comfortable on moderate snow slopes, but I haven’t done any technical mountaineering. Technical,…

  • Why Take an Operating Systems Course?

    [Also see why take a compilers course and why take an embedded systems course.] The other day, while having coffee with a colleague, I mentioned that I’ll be teaching OS in the fall. His area is far from computer systems and he asked me what’s the point of this class? What are the students supposed…