Link Archive
Dongsok Shin performs the Giga of
Sonata number 6 in B flat major by Lodovico Giustini (1685-1743) on the earliest known
surviving piano, made by the instrument's inventor, Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731), in
Florence, 1720. This sonata is from the 12 Sonate da cimbalo di piano e forte detto
volgarmente di martelletti, Op. 1, written in 1732. These are the first known pieces to
have been composed specifically for the piano.
Over the past few years, ever
since writing "If Susan Can Learn Physics, So Can You", I've been contacted by people from
all backgrounds who are inspired and want to learn physics, but don't know where to start,
what to learn, what to read, and how to structure their studies. I've spoken with single
mothers who want to go back to school and study physics, tenured philosophy professors who
want to learn physics so that they can make significant and informed contributions to
philosophy of physics, high school students who want to know what they should read to
prepare for an undergraduate education in physics, and people in dozens of various careers
who want to really, really learn and understand physics simply for the joy of it.
Pretty much everyone has heard
about AlphaGo’s tremendous Go playing success beating the European champion by 5 games to
0. In all the excitement at the time, less was written about how AlphaGo actually worked
under the covers. Today’s paper choice is a real treat since it gives that us that inside
look, and by virtue of being published in Nature, explains things in a way that makes them
accessible to a broader audience than just deep learning specialists.
For quite a while, I’ve been
disturbed by the emphasis on language in computer science. One result of that emphasis is
programmers who are C++ experts but can’t write programs that do what they’re supposed to.
The typical computer science response is that programmers need to use the right
programming/specification/development language instead of/in addition to C++. The typical
industrial response is to provide the programmer with better debugging tools, on the
theory that we can obtain good programs by putting a monkey at a keyboard and
automatically finding the errors in its code.
This test file has been provided
to EICAR for distribution as the "EICAR Standard Anti-Virus Test File", and it satisfies
all the criteria listed above. It is safe to pass around, because it is not a virus, and
does not include any fragments of viral code. Most products react to it as if it were a
virus (though they typically report it with an obvious name, such as "EICAR-AV-Test").