Peevishness and Science

Last night I was about the crankiest I’ve been in a long time, largely as a result of the full-on pep band playing crap arrangements of mid-90s pop tunes outside my window. I mean, I’ve played in pep bands, I like a lot of pep band music, even at midnight it was still an improvement over the caravan of buses that had previously been idling (for an extravagantly wasteful amount of time) just across the street… but “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is just not suited to the idiom.

  • Bill Tozier wants you (baby) – you, and some new approaches to academic project management:

    Wanted: Two or three smart folks, at least two familiar with C++, for a quick suite of experiments involving the genetic programming of optimization algorithms, probably using the PushGP and Pushpop systems for automatic code generation. The project will be run at least a little bit “agile”, meaning we will have frequent quick and to the point meetings online, we will obey 100% shared ownership of all code, will stress unit and acceptance tests (and will discover what that implies in a research setting), and try at every turn to make sure that the stuff we’re doing brings us as close as possible to the thing we want.
    [...]
    And at the same time, we’ll be trying to discover a useful and formal agile research methodology.

    Hell, if I knew C++ (or gave the slightest shit about genetic programming, or thought it would be a good career move to do so) I’d sign up myself, if only to gain some stylistic counterpoint for my growing collection of research koans.

  • Cosma Shalizi also wants you to do research for him, but in a rather more pieful-sky (and yet painfully politically relevant) sort of way.
  • Happy 30th anniversary of the Icelandic women’s strike!
  • Theorems don’t count until they’ve been proved in a sarong.

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