Recent posts (page 9)
"Is science fiction coming to Africa?"
Despite the weird title, this is a pretty interesting show from the BBC, presented by Lauren Beukes.
The BBC sometimes randomly removes its programs from online, so I’ll also post it here. (Apologies for any random interface sounds. Soundflower is the new radio-casette player.)
Goods and services
Read this old, unsurprising report in New Scientist. From the article:
Automated trading ...has come to account for more than half of trades in many markets around the globe. ...Because of the finite speed of light, trading speed depends on where you are sitting. ...“The basic insight,” says Wissner-Gross, “is that the optimal location lets the trader exploit fluctuations equally on both exchanges.” ...“This shows that the technological arms race to extract every penny from high-frequency mechanical arbitrage will soon reach its ultimate limits,” says physicist and hedge-fund manager Jean-Philippe Bouchaud
If this is how money and the free markets work now, I’m pretty sure we no longer know what words mean.
MFPS 28
Here’s what I’m doing this week: the 28th annual Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics conference. I am presenting a paper there, “A graphical foundation for schedules”, joint work with my PhD supervisors Guy McCusker and John Power. There’s a preliminary version of the paper which will eventually appear in ENTCS. The talk had slides, though they contained unnecessary illustrative animations which are not there on the pdf.
Gendered Tea
Tea is more complicated than I thought...
Interview with Kenyan filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu
Michael Meacher's letter
I saw this letter on Twitter this morning:
The annual Sunday Times Rich List yields four very important conclusions for the governance of Britain (Report, Weekend, 28 April). It shows that the richest 1,000 persons, just 0.003% of the adult population, increased their wealth over the last three years by £155bn. That is enough for themselves alone to pay off the entire current UK budget deficit and still leave them with £30bn to spare.
Maths how does it work
Is that even legal?
Creeeeepy!
Stalker is dead. Long live Vostok Games.
GSC Game World, the recently closed-then-reformed Ukrainian development team behind the first-class Stalker series, has announced that they won’t be continuing development on Stalker 2.
Oh, good idea
Wait, what?