-
Future Humans
In the unlikely case that people find Future Humans on Amazon, they do not buy it. Exactly one has so far. Now, I don’t know if it is the description that is the problem, or that it simply does not show up in searches, but it is easier to change the former than the latter (and the text honestly was a little boring).
Read more… -
Joys of Hashing
I forgot to post about it when The Joys of Hashing came out, but it is never too late to blow my own horn. It is out and you should get it.
Read more… -
Generators in C
Now that I am almost done with The Joys of Hashing, I am looking at the material I made last year for our Genome-scale Algorithms class. I implemented a toy read mapper as an example for the final project.
Read more… -
Elegant Scipy
I was a little disappointed about this. I had hoped it would give a good overview of Scipy, but instead, it is a bunch of examples that use it. It is not that the examples aren’t interesting.
Read more… -
Lazy queues
The purpose of the lazy lists I implemented in my previous post was to build lazy queues. Lazy lists give you constant time concatenation, which can be useful in itself, but I needed it to implement persistent functional queues.
Read more… -
Lazy lists
I wanted to write about lazy lists and lazy queues today, but I spent most of the day struggling with getting lazy evaluation to work. Finally, I convinced myself that something was broken in R, and I was justified in thinking that; upgrading to the most recent version resolved the issue.
Read more… -
Promises, their environments, and how we evaluate them
Have you ever wondered how functions are evaluated? How you can have arguments that would raise errors, but do not, or how default arguments can be expressions that depend on function arguments that you haven’t seen yet when you define a function?
Read more… -
Functional lists and queues
I wanted to write something about function parameters, how these are passed as so-called “promises”, how these have associated scopes (and the consequences of that), and how they give us lazy evaluation.
Read more… -
Seeing Further
I also finished Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery, and the Genius of the Royal Society yesterday. I found this a mixed back. When I bought it I thought it was a Bill Bryson book—I like those—but if I had checked the description just a little bit I would have seen that it is only edited by Bryson.
Read more… -
The Power of Habit
In the weekend I finished The Power of Habit. This is a very interesting book. Duhigg writes about how we are run by habit to a degree I had not imagined.
Read more…