Alan Turing centennial

It could be a weird contraption made of scrap metal and wood:



It could be a "2-state 3-symbol" whatchamacallit:

Or it could be a few lines of Python code.

A Universal Turing Machine, one of the most powerful concepts ever.

Elevator wisdom

One of those elevator screens that show snippets of news has made me aware that there's a Generation Z now. The Generation Naming Committee is not showing great foresight here. Can't wait to see what they're going to name the next one.

Congratulations Kuba

I saw an entertaining soccer game today: one in which Poland, co-hosts of the Euro 2012 tournament, tied Russia 1-1 coming from behind. What this means is that the Polish team is one win away (in a game against Czech Republic this Saturday) from advancing to the quarterfinals of the European Championship for the very first time.

Despite the fact that Poland looked slightly the better team and could just as well have won, the tie feels good because before the game everyone was writing us off as easy pray, as Russia is theoretically a much stronger team than Poland. What also feels good to me is that the goalscorer for Poland was a player that I'm personally a big fan of--the team captain Jakub (Kuba) Błaszczykowski. Błaszczykowski, 27, is currently a right-winger for the Bundesliga champions Borussia Dortmund. I've been following his career ever since he was a wee lad of 18, playing for a small club in Poland, telling everyone who would listen that one day Kuba was going to be great. Ha! Told you so.

One thing that many fans do not know about this player is that he lives his life in the shadows of an unspeakable tragedy. When he was 10, his father stabbed his mother to death right in front of him. Since then he has been raised by his uncle and his grandmother. Traumatized by the event, little Kuba refused to leave his bed for a week, and didn't utter a single word for months. Already showing sings of tremendous soccer talent, he has lost the will not just to play but to live at all. Somehow, though, he has been able to reclaim that will. So congratulations, Kuba, for today's goal, I knew that one day you were going to do something like this.

Here is a compilation of clips showing Kuba's skills throughout his career:

Obviously a vast improvement

From a hilarious post by John D. Cook about the blessings of object-oriented programming:

In the dark ages of programming, functions acted on data. To slice your bread, you passed a bread data structure to a slice function: 

slice(bread);

Then came object oriented programming. Instead of having an external function slice our bread, we would ask the bread to slice itself by calling the slice method on a bread object: 

bread.slice();

Obviously a vast improvement.

Basic principle of science: If something happens, it must be possible

About five years ago I got in the middle of an internet discussion about torture. It took place in the comments section of a blog that strongly opposed legalizing torture as means for national security agencies to gather intelligence in extremely important national security cases, for two reasons: 1) because torture is morally reprehensible and 2) because it's ineffective in terms of providing reliable intelligence due to the fact that torture victims will say anything, come up with any lie to make the pain stop, so that the information they provide is completely unreliable. I wrote a comment agreeing with the first point but disagreeing with the second, and provided a few examples showing that torture can sometimes "work" (i.e. generate truthful, actionable intelligence that could not have been procured otherwise).

I've had many replies, with one consistent theme in most of them: that my examples weren't plausible because everyone knows that torture victims will say anything and come up with any lie they can think of to make the pain stop. I started replying to this theme, my reply being something to the effect of that sometimes there probably are situations such that, even though the torturer doesn't know what the truth is (otherwise why torture anyone in the first place), he nonetheless has some knowledge as to what the truth is not, which means he can tell if his victim is lying to him. As I was drafting this reply, I realized I was full of shit: I didn't have the first clue if that was indeed the reason why torture worked in my examples, or any examples, and that I was basically making it up as I went along. I also realized something more important: that I didn't have to answer this question in the first place, that the argument was already over and I had won it.

You have a clever and a priori very plausible theory as to why event X can't happen. One way for me to disprove your theory is to find an instance of event X having happened. All I need is a counterexample. I don't have to come up with a counter-theory that explains why your theory doesn't work. I don't have to understand why X happens; I can be as mystified and baffled by it as you are. Your theory says X is impossible. I show you that X happened. Since X happened, it is obviously possible, and I don't need to know why it's possible to know that your theory must be wrong.

Best opening sentence in a work of fiction

That I have ever read, at least.

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

Makes you want to keep reading doesn't it.