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Review Correlation Again
Not long ago I was surprised to find that there was a (slightly) negative correlation between my review scores and the average of the other reviewers’ scores for a collection of papers submitted to a conference. A few days ago I attended the program committee meeting for SenSys 2011, where I again reviewed around 20…
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Red Baldy Again
With some travel coming up and hot weather rapidly eroding our epic snowpack, I decided to sneak in a quick snow climb on July 1. Since I couldn’t convince anyone else to go along, I made a conservative choice and climbed Red Baldy, whose northwest slopes present one of the easier and safer routes found…
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Does a Simulation Really Need to Be Run?
At some point we’ll be able to run a computer simulation that contains self-aware entities. In this piece I’m not going to worry about little details such as how to tell if a simulated entity is self-aware or whether it’s even possible to run such a simulation. The goal, rather, is to look into some…
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Embrace WTF
Most people who do quantitative work, especially involving computers, mutter “What the fuck?” or something similar pretty often. Lately I’ve been thinking about WTF in more detail. WTF is good because it stems from dawning recognition of one’s own ignorance, and without recognizing ignorance we cannot eliminate it. Here I am only discussing serious WTF,…
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Safe From Compiler Bugs?
A few people have asked me: Does there exist a subset of the C language that is not, in practice, miscompiled? The intuition behind the question is perfectly reasonable. First, it is clear that there exist C features, such as bitfields and volatile variables, whose compiler support is not so reliable. Second, there exist C…