Autumn 2012 at the Great Falls Park

Great time and lots of fun with friends and family - first, at the Normandie Farm for an awesome brunch, then onto a brief walk at the Washington, D.C. Great Falls Park

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Alan Mathison Turing

Update (11/23/2013): " Now, nearly half a century after the war hero's suicide, Queen Elizabeth II has finally granted Turing a pardon." ( http://usat.ly/19bLZET ) Long overdue!!! With academic background in applied mathematics and computer science and years of experience in Information Technology it would be incredibly surprising if I didn't know of Alan Turing, or so I thought. Sure, I knew who he was and had a good idea of what he had contributed to the fields of mathematics, logic, cryptography, and of course computer science, which he basically founded; and things like Turing Machine, Turing Test, and Enigma Code-breaking have been widely popularized. I also knew that he died relatively young, but I am ashamed to admit that I didn't know anything about the circumstances surrounding his premature death. That is until I read the following in the book titled "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick: "Turing's hom

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

" In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. " The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - t his was not an easy read for me, I spent more time on this book than on two before and two after (all of comparable volume) combined. And I am not exactly sure why. I guess it could be the style, the vocabulary, the depth and the breadth of the subject matter coverage , or all of these and few other things put together. But I feel like it was well worth the effort. The story flows smoothly from the talking drums of Africa to the world of oral culture; to the invention of scripts and alphabets; to evolution of languages, books, catalogs and dictionaries; to further developments of abstraction, symbolic logic, and mathematics; to the birth of computer science, communications theory , information theory, quantum theory, ... I don't think I can right a review that will do this book justice. So, I would simply s

Free to Choose

A while back I have written a post about two popular books by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Freidman . Books that had, through their undeniable logic, a profound and lasting effect on my socioeconomic and political views: Now, through the digital powers of social networking the legendary 10-part PBS TV series "Free to Choose" (1980), based on the book of the same name, is available on YouTube. Yes, one would be committing about 10 hours of one's life to watch through all of these; but, in my opinion, this would be time well spent. So, enjoy - " Free to Choose ".

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