Did Diderot really say that?

Alt: From Toy Story 2: Stinky Pete says to Woody 'Two Words, Sputnik'

Open ended stories and the role of the reader.

A woman in early 20th century astronomy and computing

A winter storm. A broken rule. Too much blood. GET. ADAM. HOME.

A philosophical monologue by Spitio the spiteful

YouTube video by Computer History Museum

Supernatural shenanigans in 1920s Toronto.

The Victorian sculptures are removed from Historic England's heritage at risk register.

CBS wasn’t ready to share its ad revenue with Hulu in March, but the network is alright splitting those dollars with YouTube. Today, CBS began streaming content on Google’ video site. For now the netw...

A stop motion animation to a soon to be classic piece by the Radio Free Vestibules.

The argument over pressing red or blue in a Twitter poll, should how we may describe it change our actions.

I am riding again in the Ride of Heart in remembrance of my friend Kiran van Rijan who died at the age of 29 from a cardiac event in 2005. I have participated in many Rides for Heart in the Toronto...

YouTube video by Allan Olley

A few possible sources for Einstein's distinction between theories and some of the implications drawn.

Bob Metcalfe is most famous for his co-invention of the Ethernet in the 1970s as Xerox. He also made the statement that the value of a network is roughly proportional to the to the number of nodes on the network squared, this became known as Metcalfe's law. He contributed to the computer industry as an executive, columnist, venture capitalist, professor and research consultant. He has received numerous awards recognizing his accomplishments and in 2022 receive the ACM A. M. Turing for the invention, standardization, and commercialization of Ethernet. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Bob Metcalfe grew up in Bayshore, Long Island and graduated Bayshore High School. He completed  5 years of study at MIT in 1969 earning bachelor degrees in electrical engineering and management. He was also captain of the MIT tennis team. He did computer work for Raytheon during his undergraduate years. He did a Master's (1970) and a PhD in Applied Mathematics (1973) at Harvard. His doctoral dissertation was on computer networking. During his graduate years he was also working on MIT's Project MAC research into computer-timesharing and on the early ARPAnet. Starting in 1972, before his finishing his doctorate, he worked for Xerox and created the Ethernet as a way to locally network the numerous desktop computers at Xerox offices. In 1979 he founded 3Com which became a successful commercial provider of network infrastructure. In 1989 he left 3Com and became publisher and a columnist at InfoWorld, writing a popular regular column for the magazine through the 1990s. In 2001 he changed careers again becoming a partner at Polaris Partners venture capital firm. In 2011 he changed careers again becoming professor of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Texas, retiring in 2022. In 2022 he was working as a research affiliate in computational engineering at MIT. Metcalfe's greatest single contribution to IT was his co-invention of the Ethernet. His co-inventor David Boggs was responsible for implementing much of the hardware on the system.  Metcalfe worked with Boggs starting in 1973 at Xerox to build a local network for Xerox workstation computers that were coming on-line. Metcalfe's ideas for how to manage many transmissions over a single coaxial cable were inspired in part by reading in 1972 about the Hawaii ALOHAnet that networked computer over the radio waves using a single channel. ALOHAnet resolved conflicting (overlapping) transmissions by having sender's retransmit at random intervals when interference occurred. Metcalfe's PhD thesis had initially been rejected in 1972, but the final accepted version included mathematical analysis of the implications of the ALOHAnet's retransmission procedures. This idea became integral to Metcalfe's ideas for the Xerox local network. The ether in Ethernet refers to the anachronistic 19th century concept of an ether, an invisible medium pervading space, that carries radio waves. The ether is what carries the network traffic. Metcalfe continued to maintain the system at Xerox until 1979. In 1979 Metcalfe and Gordon Bell at DEC helped make Ethernet the common local network standard of Xerox, DEC and Intel paving the way for it to become an open industry standard (IEEE 802.3). At 3Com Metcalfe helped develop products like the EtherLink card for IBM PCs that were a part of Ethernet's commercial viability, among his colleagues there Metcalfe credits Robert C. Crane in particular for his contributions.

I began 2025 in Arizona. I returned to Oakville with my dad this time so it was less lonely that these returns often are. I was thus back in Canada before the new regime took over in Washington. My da...

Last time I finished by suggesting I would discuss internal and external constraints. I am going to start talking about a potential external constraint to illustrate certain oddities in how some decis...

Continuing my comics reviews. I should note my friend Ari Gross is just finishing up fund raising for the second issue of his comic Wardens also. Today I'm reviewing his other continuing comic Upkeep....

I was reading a list of the most cited works in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and was moved to merge the authors cited multiple times.

Betting on predictions As I finished up talking about last time an issue that seems key to me when talking about Newcomb's problem are things like gambling, insurance and the future's markets. These i...

In my previous post I finished by talking about a scenario related to Newcomb's problem which I called a blackmail scenario (also known as the XOR blackmail scenario). A predictor sends a homeowner a ...

In the past decade or so I have become very interested in Newcomb's Problem (it is I guess usually called a paradox, but to me there is no logical paradox as such implied although it is surprising and...