So in this post I talked a little bit about number bases and how they’re used in floating-point expansions. I thought I’d go a little bit more into them, since I didn’t really explain how they work.
Archive for June, 2007
26 Jun
Piano for the Non-Musician
This post will be a bit more elementary, though it’ll be about something that I love to do, and that’s play the piano.
A lot of people don’t play instruments because they say they’re not “musical”. Well, I have one word for you. Okay, it’s a name really. Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven is arguably the [...]
17 Jun
Oh How I Love Bash.org
jeebus> the “bishop” came to our church today
jeebus> he was a fucken impostor
jeebus> never once moved diagonally
WallJam7> roses are red
WallJam7> violets are blue
WallJam7> all of my base
WallJam7> are belong to you
Terror> “It’s easy to forget what a sin is in the middle of a battlefield.”
cky> opposite over hypotenuse
cky> dipshit
Bash.org
15 Jun
I’m in Your Mainframe, Calculating Your Mantissas; (Floating-point Numbers!!)
Okay, so that’s a Nintendo DS. Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain! Anyways…
This time we’re going to talk about floating-point numbers, what they are, how they’re calculated, why they’re used, etcetera. There seems to be a lot of confusion about and fear of floating-point numbers, especially from non-computer scientists (like me).
12 Jun
Secret.. Aaaaagent Man..
Suppose the country of Matristan has a network of secret agents. These agents may only contact certain other agents directly, according to the following rules:
* Each agent may contact himself or herself directly.
* Agent A may contact agents B and C directly.
* Agent [...]
11 Jun
Godel’s Incompl-ten-ss Th–rems
Last time we talked about the Halting Problem, and we came away with the conclusion that it was undecidable.
So what’s the big deal?
Let’s consider a slightly different problem. Consider the sentence “This sentence is false”. This is a slightly different formulation of the liar’s paradox in which the sentence makes claims about its [...]
10 Jun
The Halting Problemmmmmm(HALT)
Last time we talked about Turing machines (and the madman who dreamt of them). This time we’re going to discuss one seemingly trivial thought experiment about Turing machines that turns out to have tremendous significance for both computing and for mathematics. It is called “the Halting Problem”.
The Halting Problem asks one rather simple question: Does [...]
9 Jun
A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines
I’ve recently been reading Janna Levin’s latest book about Turing, Godel, and the men and women in their lives. Though it’s fiction, it paints an excellent portrait of just what geniuses these men were. Oh, and how really really weird they were too. Maybe weird is cutting them a little too much slack. Godel was [...]
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