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Rust Hashers October 20, 2018

A (very bad) hash function in the wild. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

A hash function, for our purposes here, is a function that takes as input another, general, value, and returns a number that is ideally unique to that value. This number can be used to store the value in an array and then locate it again later without searching the array; in other words, in O(1) time. More or less: there are a lot of other details. For more information, see Rust’s HashMap and various information sources online.

Quote o' the day: Advertising flowers July 28, 2018

How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer July 25, 2018

Male-pattern baldness and a big mustache.

Ok, so a biography of Michel de Montaigne, a man who invented the essay and examined his own thoughts and reactions, seems a bit like duct-taping a ten-foot pole to another ten-foot pole, but How to Live, or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer, by Sarah Bakewell, is not bad. It has its moments, anyway.

The benefits of rain June 26, 2018

The Darker Side May 28, 2018

“The Darker Side of the ‘Original Affluent Society’”, by David Kaplan…

Tutu: an Egyptian god who is more metal than you May 27, 2018

Reading: Why the West Rules---For Now May 26, 2018

From Why the West Rules—For Now: The patterns of history, and what they reveal about the future, by Ian Morris:

Software Foundations, Volume 1: Logical Foundations December 8, 2017

There is a certain amount of celebration going on at Maniagnosis’ underground lair at the moment. (Underground lair? There’s nothing underground or lair-ish about this place. It’s not even spectacularly office-like. –Ed) I have (Insert lame drum-roll here.) completed all of the exercises in Software Foundations, Vol. 1: Logical Foundations by Benjamin Pierce, et al. (Very much al.)

(Cue fireworks!) Pop!

Quote o' the day: Picking acronyms September 25, 2017

Link o' the day: UTF-8 August 24, 2017