Embedded in Academia

Month: March 2017

  • Elk and Arch

    I wanted to share a few pictures from a long, very cold snowshoe/hike I did in January. The goal was to reach a natural arch that I had previously spotted in upper City Creek Canyon. This was fun to find: I hadn’t realized there was an arch large enough to stand inside within walking distance…

  • Do Expressive Programming Languages Always Have Undefined Behavior?

    In the Hacker News comments on one of my previous posts about undefined behavior, someone said this: AFAIK Gödel’s incompleteness theorems imply that _any_ language will have at least some undefined behaviour. Let’s take a quick look at this statement, keeping in mind that incompleteness and undecidability can be remarkably tricky topics. Some years ago…

  • Mapping Mountains on Exoplanets

    Snow in the mountains evolves in predictable ways that are strongly influenced by the terrain. For example, warmish snowstorms leave a characteristic snow line that looks very much like a contour on a topographic map: (source) (source) On the other hand, when snow melts the effect is very different, and is often dominated by aspect.…