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Finding the fun in good math; Shredding bad math and squashing the crackpots who espouse it.
Mark Chu-Carroll (aka MarkCC) is a PhD Computer Scientist, who works for Google as a Software Engineer. My professional interests center on programming languages and tools, and how to improve the languages and tools that are used for building complex software systems.
July 31, 2006
Category: Debunking Creationism
While taking a break from some puzzling debugging, I decided to hit one of my favorite comedy sites, Answers in Genesis. I can pretty much always find something sufficiently stupid to amuse me on their site. Today, I came across...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 4:03 PM • 77 Comments •
Category: category theory
Today we'll finally get to building the categories that provide the model for the multiplicative linear logic. Before we jump into that, I want to explain why it is that we separate out the multiplicative part. Remember from the simply...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 2:25 PM • 0 Comments •
July 29, 2006
Category: bad physics
I was reading an article on Slashdot the other day about a recent discovery of what might be a MECO. A MECO is a "magnetospheric eternally collapsing object"; if this were true, it would be a big deal because according...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 5:49 PM • 46 Comments •
July 28, 2006
Category: pathological programming
I was hoping for a bit of a vanity post for todays pathological programming language in honor of my 40th birthday (tomorrow), but I didn't have time to finish implementing my own little piece of insanity. So it'll have to...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 8:30 AM • 21 Comments •
July 27, 2006
Category: bad math
I've been taking a look at William Dembski's paper, "Information as a Measure of Variation". It was recommended to me as a paper demonstrating Demsbki's skill as a mathematician that isn't aimed at evolution-bashing. I'm not going to go into...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 11:50 AM • 8 Comments •
July 26, 2006
Category: goodmath
In the comments on my post mocking Granville Sewell's dreadful article, one of the commenters asked me to write something about why evolution is frequently modeled as a search process: since there is no goal or objective in evolution, search...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:28 PM • 26 Comments •
Category: category theory
Things are a bit busy at work on my real job lately, and I don't have time to put together as detailed a post for today as I'd like. Frankly, looking at it, my cat theory post yesterday was half-baked...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 1:57 PM • 3 Comments •
July 25, 2006
Category: category theory
So, we're still working towards showing the relationship between linear logic and category theory. As I've already hinted, linear logic has something to do with certain monoidal categories. So today, we'll get one step closer, by talking about just what...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 3:42 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: bad math
A reader sent me a link to yet another purported Bayesian argument for the existence of god, this time by a physicist named Stephen Unwin. It's actually very similar to Swinburne's argument, which I discussed back at the old home...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 10:16 AM • 81 Comments •
July 24, 2006
Category: bad math
This weekend, I came across Granville Sewell's article "A Mathematicians View of Evolution". My goodness, but what a wretched piece of dreck! I thought I'd take a moment to point out just how bad it is. This article, as described...
Posted by Mark C. Chu-Carroll at 9:45 AM • 75 Comments •
