Luther's Meanderings
© 2011–2016 Luther Tychonievich
Licensed under Creative Commons: CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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Efficient = Brittle (16 November 2021): The resources that provide robustness in times of exigency appear excessive in times of ease.

Friday Poem (5 November 2021): Today is an etymological holiday.

Dual-audience Data (4 November 2021): Talking to computers and humans at the same time.

What’s in a Citation (3 November 2021): An exploration of citation complexity; an extension of two posts ago.

Semantic Web (2 November 2021): Or, how we encoding arbitrary meaning in a computer.

Family History Citations (1 November 2021): Why citations in family history are more complicated than other citations.

Refactoring and personal growth (28 October 2021): Changing the unseen makes it easier to improve the visible.

Many are Called … (27 October 2021): … which helps reveal that few are chosen.

Nonsensical missive (25 October 2021): Sometimes I wake up and think “today’s a day for surrealistic nonsense.”

Friday Poem (22 October 2021): On the making of washi (和紙).

How long have you been… (21 October 2021): Estimated answers to questions I get asked from time to time.

The Rise of Text-Based File Formats (20 October 2021): How the rise of the universal editor changed file formats.

Data in a file (19 October 2021): Why files are not just copies of memory.

Data on a computer (18 October 2021): A few tools that can express almost anything.

Persons vs. People (11 October 2021): Words I wish we’d stop merging.

Three Friday Poems (8 October 2021): Speculation on what might cause people to cast war as a deity.

For thicker grits (7 October 2021): Perspective can change annoyance to joy.

Machine Learning (6 October 2021): How we solve problems we don’t fully understand

Data Quality (4 October 2021): Why more data does not better results make.

Friday Poem (1 October 2021): A limerick about speak-os.

Else statements and game-mastering (30 September 2021): What defensive programming taught me about running RPGs.

Politicking and Prayer (29 September 2021): One will from two

Easier Yesterday (27 September 2021): Why those who don’t procrastinate have more time than those who do.

Friday Poem (24 September 2021): The Cat i’ the Adage

The Number of the Beast (22 September 2021): Reflections on connotative numbers in honor of blog post number 666.

Cheat codes and silicon (21 September 2021): The Konami Code and the rationality of national fears about foreign supply-chains.

Gifts (20 September 2021): Reflections on two types of presents.

Friday Poem (17 September 2021): Tips about tips

Bounded error (16 September 2021): Why Bézier curves are magically special.

Reflection Questions (14 September 2021): Why I don’t advise emphasizing open-ended questions, and what I advise instead.

Research Paper Audiences (13 September 2021): To rate a paper, its intended audience must be known.

Friday Poem (10 September 2021): Finding good in bad times.

Terrifying Eternity (9 September 2021): I’m confident living forever will be nice, even though I can’t describe why.

It's different when you're big (8 September 2021): Reflections on why leading 100 is not like leading 5 groups of 20.

Capturing the Wild Attention (7 September 2021): Who can capture and hold your attention? Can you domesticate it so that one of the answers is yourself?

Learn and Grow (6 September 2021): Thoughts on two different ways to become “‍smarter.‍”

Friday Poem (3 September 2021): Verse inspired by a recent RPG game session.

Sock probability (2 September 2021): When I pull two socks from a pile, they usually match.

Oral Exams and Political Signs (1 September 2021): Trusting my own judgment

Multi-round Voting (31 August 2021): Alternatives to First Past the Post

From First Past the Post to Parties (30 August 2021): What to expect from an 18th-century democracy

Orthogonal Motivation (29 July 2020): Introspection on my mind during COVID-19

The Parable of the Office Hours (26 Aug 2018): A somewhat lengthy parable about communication with deity.

Acting for Others (4 Sep 2017): Peer pressure and image maintenance.

Friday Poem (1 Sep 2017): Work to be done is work to be doing.

Heavy = Timely (28 Aug 2017): Of bigger-inside houses, extra time in fairyland, and gravity.

Friday Poem (25 Aug 2017): Are kitties cute?

Sad Results (23 Aug 2017): There is good to be done when feeling bad.

Leading to discover (14 Aug 2017): Striking a per-activity balance between explanation and exploration.

Friday Poem (11 Aug 2017): Some believe that the purpose of war is to give war-like people opponents who fight back.

Knowing ≠ Believing (8 Aug 2017): The relative merit of sound results and plausible explanations.

“Bad” questions (7 Aug 2017): Some questions even a perfect teacher couldn’t (or wouldn’t choose to) answer.

Friday Poem (4 Aug 2017): A self-referential acknowledgment of a long Friday Poem hiatus.

Work while you wait (3 Aug 2017): The efficient handling of many tasks; event-driven I/O-bound programming; or why I like vibe.d

Non-understandable belief (2 Aug 2017): Recent advances in automated theorem proving support my first postulate.

Honest ≤ Truthful (1 Aug 2017): The full truth is more than simply non-deceptive.

On what do students rely? (31 Jul 2017): Successful students rely fully on their teacher, but also fully on themselves. This applies to students of mortal teachers and of the Master Teacher.

Better but Ignored (25 Jan 2017): On not choosing a known better choice.

Friday Poem (20 Jan 2017): Advice for tall people about short people.

Ease of Learning (18 Jan 2017): Does “‍can be learned by a child‍” equate to “‍easy to learn‍”?

Allocating Help (16 Jan 2017): When demand for TAs exceeds available TAs on staff, who gets help?

Friday Poem (13 Jan 2017): The Parable of the Pounds

Account-free Online Cash (12 Jan 2017): How to design online money secured without accounts or passwords.

IP and Public-key Cryptography (11 Jan 2017): How we share sensitive information securely and why we have to worry about it.

On Electronic Money (10 Jan 2017): A look at checks, credit, and digital currency.

On Money (9 Jan 2017): A pseudo-historical look at money.

Friday Poem (21 Oct 2016): What would you think about while dying?

Friday Poem (14 Oct 2016): Metaverse

Friday Poem (7 Oct 2016): Two parts of structured verse

Friday Poem (30 Sep 2016): Being different than others being different.

Aesthetics of Chaos in Games (29 Sep 2016): Reflections on unpredictability and game enjoyment.

Tenure, Tedium, and Grants (27 Sep 2016): My thoughts on efforts to protect academic freedom, and their increasing failure.

Should it be silenced? (26 Sep 2016): Airtime, stereotype threat, abuse, and freedom of expression.

Friday Poem (23 Sep 2016): Plebeian nobility.

On Meetings (22 Sep 2016): Common reasons meetings are ineffective and suggestions for their improvement.

Friday Poem (16 Sep 2016): Statues failing to communicate the relative might of swords and pens.

Untrusted Code (14 Sep 2016): On safe testing of student submissions

Home Turf (13 Sep 2016): Arguing on whose terms?

Friday Poem (2 Sep 2016): Giraffes playing chess.

Invisible Privilege (22 Aug 2016): An effort to illuminate the struggles of the minority.

Friday Poem (19 Aug 2016): Grading myself on my ability to move in all directions.

Interest vs. Distraction (16 Aug 2016): Does adding bells and whistles to a class improve student learning?

Friday Poem (12 Aug 2016): Reflections on light, and reflections of light on shadow.

Occluding pillars (10 Aug 2016): Airy tiling patterns that obstruct all lines

Friday Poem (5 Aug 2016): Roleplaying as extended, adjudicated thought experiments. rpg

On Badness (2 Aug 2016): A response to a request to address theodicy, or “‍the problem of evil.‍”

Iceberg problems (1 Aug 2016): Tiny little problems that you can make progress on without them getting smaller.

Friday Poem (29 Jul 2016): On resuming Friday Poems

Living Offline (27 Jul 2016): Reflections on some benefits of not having Internet in the home.

Missing Parsers (26 Jul 2016): A “‍solved‍” problem that isn’t.

Why People Discriminate (25 Jul 2016): Reflections on eight years of diversity promotion.

Jägerson's Perspective (27 Jan 2016): In which Jägerson daydreams, remembers, and hears good news from Ghost.

Cognitive Shortcuts (2 Nov 2015): Why using “‍big data‍” to solve problems frightens me.

Peace and Darkness (18 Jan 2016): Is peace an absence of something?

Friday Poem (15 Jan 2016): Word selection.

Friday Poem (8 Jan 2016): Don’t bother reading this rhyme

On Service (5 Jan 2016): Should the experienced serve or be served?

Friday Poem (1 Jan 2016): The genesis of magma

Prediction ≠ Causation (31 Dec 2015): An concept obvious to me but evidently foreign to many.

Multiple-choice (24 Oct 2015): How to write better multiple-choice questions.

Friday Poem (23 Oct 2015): Testing software and people

Friday Poem (9 Oct 2015): Advise for selecting a quest.

Cheating Incentives (9 Oct 2015): Graded assignments and secret exams.

Friday Poem (2 Oct 2015): ∃ rules of natural language?

Friday Poem (25 Sep 2015): How to con respectable folk.

Belief in God (21 Sep 2015): A response to a question about my belief.

Friday Poem (18 Sep 2015): By anonymous request, a poem about swords and pens

Phrasing connotation (16 Sep 2015): Comparing “‍failure in the home‍” and “‍intentional parenting‍”.

Friday Poem (11 Sep 2015): Driving to Richmond for a friend.

“Is it not true that…?” (8 Sep 2015): Reflection on the wording of a scriptural passage.

Kinds of Cheaters (7 Sep 2015): A list of kinds of cheating that I have caught.

Friday Poem (4 Sep 2015): Do insects celebrate birthhours?

Academic Honesty (1 Sep 2015): Why do students plagiarize and cheat?

Friday Poem (28 Aug 2015): School has started, meaning my functional summer is over.

If Giants Walked, (24 Aug 2015): they’d either be very stocky or all break their ankles.

The Big Bad Tree Incentive (8 Jun 2015): Will “the masses” always prefer a larger family tree to a better-supported family tree?

Monday Poem (8 Jun 2015): “I like the way you talk. I bet you’re a good teacher”

The plural of Anecdote is Overfitting (4 Jun 2015): Reflections on fields where sound research is hard.

Immutability and Partial Implementation (3 Jun 2015): Reflections on data standards and safe round-trip communication between partial implementations thereof.

Are Your Beliefs Defensible? (1 Jun 2015): Comparing religion to gravity.

Friday Poem (29 May 2015): I find myself giving life advice even to strangers I meet on airplanes.

Friday Poem (1 May 2015): A tribute to a recently deceased friend.

Friday Poem (17 April 2015): Candles, coal, and dictionaries.

Justice Sans Karma (9 April 2015): Reflections on justice, mercy, repentance, and the gift of Christ.

Being Perfect (in code) (7 April 2015): I find following Christ easier if I think recursively, not iteratively.

Friday Poem (3 April 2015): You are what you eat, which is why bats are bugs.

Ads I enjoy, ads I flee (2 April 2015): An introspection.

Vignette on Prayer and Faith (31 Mar 2015): An experience from my job interviews.

Friday Poem (20 Mar 2015): Laws of nature stop working when the boss isn’t paying attention.

How Research Happens (18 Mar 2015): An article on genealogical research and vocabulary.

More than my fair share (16 Mar 2015): Thoughts on collaboration, annoyance, bread, and accountability.

Friday Poem (13 Mar 2015): X marks the spot to make one happy.

RootsTech 2015 Report, part 3 (11 Mar 2015): Genes, culture, graphs, anatomy, and puzzles.

RootsTech 2015 Report, part 2 (10 Mar 2015): What can we store about family history research?

RootsTech 2015 Report, part 1 (9 Mar 2015): What companies I talked with at RootsTech said about the mission of FHISO.

Students, Grades, Cars, and Christ (28 Dec 2014): What price was there for Christ to pay, and if he paid it why should I bother obeying him?

Friday Poem (19 Dec 2014): Lumps in powders, but not all.

Students and Prayer (18 Dec 2014): Reflections on “‍change my grade, I pray you.‍”

Flatware (17 Dec 2014): Some thoughts on words and the lack thereof.

An IDE I wish was (27 Oct 2014): An image I wish was a snapshot of a code editor.

Friday Poem (24 Oct 2014): Verse about happiness past and future.

Friday Poem (17 Oct 2014): A kindly man with evil eye…

Immutability in Data (13 Oct 2014): Immutability, persistence, and data modeling.

Friday Poem (10 Oct 2014): A sonnet about not quite knowing.

Friday Poem (3 Oct 2014): Anticipating general conference.

Note-taking for Inspiration (29 Sep 2014): Some tips from my experience taking notes in General Conference.

Friday Poem (26 Sep 2014): Consensus and ego do not go together well.

Valves and Sponges (22 Sep 2014): A low-level survey of computer hardware.

Friday Poem (19 Sep 2014): A man with a bad battle plan.

“What should I do with my life?” (15 Sep 2014): My two bits on the challenge of chosing a major and a career.

Friday Poem (12 Sep 2014): Soup that feels as good as sleep.

Friday Poem (5 Sep 2014): Illness follows handshakes each semester.

Do you know how to add? (3 Sep 2014): We can all add, but can we describe how it works?

Achieving a Standard Terminology (29 Aug 2014): An exploration of how storing inference rules in the data can help ensure that collaborators know what they mean by the terms they use.

Friday Poem (29 Aug 2014): Ammonia helps turn wool into felt.

Widow Counting (26 Aug 2014): The double-standard ethics of action heroes.

Friday Poem (22 Aug 2014): About the number π.

Fun with Units (21 Aug 2014): Random derivations (some false) based on unit multipliers.

Using Assignments (20 Aug 2014): Reflections on assignments as an educational tool.

On Writing and Questions (18 Aug 2014): Most of my fiction stops without ending, and why it is hard to answer questions in lecture.

Splitting a Record (14 Aug 2014): Applying the Principle of Sensible Disbelief to derive polygenea.

Friday Poem (1 Aug 2014): Composed for a friend’s baptism.

Possible Properties of Sources (29 Jul 2014): What should be true of every citation?

Friday Poem (25 Jul 2014): Wildlife and death seen on a morning walk.

Software Licenses (23 Jul 2014): Reflections from a decade of reading EULAs.

Scratch work (21 Jul 2014): Three-column scratch work as a tool for thinking about thinking and a genealogical tool.

Friday Poem (18 Jul 2014): Christ’s prayers, short and long.

Source vs Derivatives (17 Jul 2014): Thoughts on the creation and storage of meaningful data.

Understandablity (15 Jul 2014): Cognitive load theory, my first postulate, and education.

After the kill (14 Jul 2014): In which we learn of Ghost’s reaction to the Barghest and Ghost and Jägerson begin to hike through the Dark Realm.

Friday Poem (11 Jul 2014): A limerick about flight.

Parts of Programming Speech (9 Jul 2014): Programming languages don’t have adjectives, and related ideas.

How I spent my Summer (8 Jul 2014): An explanation of my recent silence, with comments on FHISO and Polygenea.

Friday Poem (13 Jun 2014): Post-dragon-slaying stress disorder, with annotations.

Monads (12 June 2014): The worst-described part of computing I’ve yet encountered.

2000 Calories (11 June 2014): Pseudo-historical reflections on economics and business.

Friday Poem (23 May 2014): A knight stops for dinner.

Friday Poem (16 May 2014): Reflections on the outward image of things.

Levels of Education (13 May 2014): The meaning and of Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D. degrees in American universities.

Vain imaginations (12 May 2014): 1 Nephi 12:18

Friday Poem (9 May 2014): Light and kindness come from little things.

A Barghest's Non-Day (6 May 2014): In which Ghost hears a name and casts a shadow.

Recognizing Miracles (5 May 2014): How do you know if it is a miracle?

Majority Error (7 Apr 2014): The Foolishness of the Masses.

Friday Poem (4 Apr 2014): The self portrait of life.

Friday Poem (28 Mar 2014): I like meter and rhyme, but do we always need both?

A Ghost in the Dark (27 Mar 2014): Ghost instructs Jägerson in the ways of the Dark Realm.

Simulating grid-based fluids (24 Mar 2014): One way to model fluid flow in a computer.

Friday Poem (21 Mar 2014): About doodling, with a doodle included.

Spiraling into Darkness (19 Mar 2014): Ghost leads Jägerson toward the dark realms.

CG Physics (17 Mar 2014): An overview of how computers simulate physics.

Revelations and Rules of Thumb (16 Mar 2014): On faith, trust, knowledge, and the straw man fallacy.

The Genealogical Research Process (17 Feb 2014): Being an illustration and a discussion thereof.

Friday Poem (14 Feb 2014): A poem about the life of true love.

RootsTech 2014 (7 Feb 2014): My two talks, and reflections.

Friday Poem (31 Jan 2014): How do dragons fly on such puny wings?

Friday Poem (24 Jan 2014): When if the neuron network went down as easily as the computer network does?

Working for Justice (23 Jan 2014): My changing perspective of my father’s career.

Rasterizing Lines (22 Jan 2014): A common algorithm for turning lines into pixels.

Cones, Spectrums, and Color (22 Jan 2014): How the digital age is teaching us some colors don’t exist.

Friday Poem (17 Jan 2014): We all know myths are false; we couldn’t stand not knowing that.

Problems with Rasters (16 Jan 2014): Aliasing, Visual Width, and Holes

Friday Poem (10 Jan 2014): A poem about a cowboy and parenting.

Bijecting ℕ and ℝ? (5 Jan 2014): Response to a comment on my post on Cantor diagonalization.

Friday Poem (3 Jan 2014): “‍Paper Memories,‍” a poem about journals.

Progression vs Future State (2 Jan 2014): “‍It needs doing‍” and “‍it needs to be done‍” are different.

Speaking with Nettles (1 Jan 2014): Ghost and Jägerson go looking for leads.

Sent to the Unseely (31 Dec 2013): Lazarus sends Ghost with Jäger­son on a goblin hunt.

Friday Poem (27 Dec 2013): What if someone broke the water cycle?

Favorites (26 Dec 2013): Why does everyone else seem to have so many?

Of Christmas Eve (24 Dec 2013): With declining liturgical tradition comes a day of anticipation.

Of Books, Teachers, and Inversion (23 Dec 2013): Student comment: “‍Sometimes I had to read the book to understand the topic.‍”

Friday Poem (20 Dec 2013): Nonesense to be read with a stuffed-nose voice.

Friday Poem (13 Dec 2013): A sonnet about aging.

Planescape, Myst, and the Wanderer's Journal (7 Dec 2013): Reflections on a few of the most intriguing worlds I have encountered.

Friday Poem (6 Dec 2013): A poem for the last day of CS 2110.

The Service Paradox (5 Dec 2013): Is true service possible? Can widespread lasting happiness exist?

Deck-Building and RPGs (2 Dec 2013): How rules can restrict players’ thoughts.

Friday Poem (29 Nov 2013): Reflections on “‍black Friday‍”.

Friday Poem (22 Nov 2013): Second person, future tense… almost.

Mathematical Miracles of Christ (18 Nov 2013): Two semi-formal expressions relating to repentance.

Friday Poem (15 Nov 2013): A couplet about owing money.

Friday Poem (8 Nov 2013): Mr Jones and Blue, the bright-red rat.

Friday Poem (1 Nov 2013): A short thought inspired by a conversation on “‍the keys of the priesthood.‍”

Class-First Coding (24 Oct 2013): Lesson 4: new and Constructors

Jokes in Code (26 Oct 2013): Reflections on humor.

Friday Poem (25 Oct 2013): Can you explain why knowledge even exists?

Class-First Coding (23 Oct 2013): Lesson 3: Memory, Variables, Assignment, and Return.

Class-First Coding (22 Oct 2013): Lesson 2: Methods

Class-First Coding (21 Oct 2013): Lesson 1: Classes and Fields

1 Kings 18 (20 Oct 2013): Prophet vs. prophet; lions, death, and so on.

Friday Poem (18 Oct 2013): Money for spats.

Friday Poem (11 Oct 2013): Profits from prophets with interest in interest.

Friday Poem (11 Oct 2013): Why is fantasy entertaining?

Friday Poem (27 Sep 2013): Temper and health: try to lose them one at a time.

Power with Limits (29 Sep 2013): The church bounds power on both the top and the bottom.

Friday Poem (20 Sep 2013): Negative lyrics about presidents and prime ministers.

The Supply of Spirits (19 Sep 2013): Mind games about infinity, eternity, and sustainability.

Java Visualizer (18 Sep 2013): A tool for exposing what a computer is actually doing.

Vision-obstructing tiles (17 Sep 2013): One of the obsessions of my teen years.

Friday Poem (13 Sep 2013): A squirrel decides to eat meat instead of acorns.

Teaching in Church (12 Sep 2013): Tip 3: Loosen the reins. Loosen them much less in a lecture hall.

Teaching in Church (11 Sep 2013): Tip 2: pause to think about what they said. Perhaps more important outside of church.

Teaching in Church (10 Sep 2013): Tip 1: Wait longer. Somewhat useful outside of church too.

Church Lessons (9 Sep 2013): What makes a lesson in church remarkably good?

Friday Poem (6 Sep 2013): Silly advise seriously given.

Cacophonous Silence (2 Sep 2013): There is beautiful symbolism in having young families at church.

Friday Poem (30 Aug 2013): Bipeds value the strangest senses.

Personal Values (29 Aug 2013): Reflections on what my students value.

Friday Poem (23 Aug 2013): Pessimism can lead to depression or joy.

More Like Prunes (22 Aug 2013): Reflections on the flexibility of the mind.

Building by Proxy (21 Aug 2013): Conflicting goals in selecting material to present in class.

Vanishing Inspiration (19 Aug 2013): Consequences of “‍mind ≠ spirit‍”.

Friday Poem (16 Aug 2013): The wee ones might be crying.

Change in Blogging (15 Aug 2013): A life experiment will impact the posts herein.

The Washcloth Experiment (13 Aug 2013): A pilot study on the impact of using a washcloth in the shower.

Enumerating Trees (13 Aug 2013): A one-to-one mapping between binary trees and natural numbers.

Friday Poem (9 Aug 2013): What if the meaning I think my life has isn’t real?

Meaningful In Context (7 Aug 2013): In the classroom, choices are meaningful but their impact contained.

Robust System Paradox (6 Aug 2013): Unnecessary ≠ Unimportant.

Dinner Parties, Agency, and God (5 Aug 2013): What planning dinner parties and studying engineering taught me about deity.

Friday Poem (5 Jul 2013): A pessimistic view of deathbed repentance.

Uninstallability (3 Jul 2013): Is a non-removable feature evil or kind?

Without Going Over (1 Jul 2013): What “‍The Price is Right‍” and politic answers have in common.

Friday Poem (28 Jun 2013): Inspired by Ogden Nash

Reading Anecdotes (27 Jun 2013): A random blurb about a thing I do.

Sensible Disbelief (26 Jun 2013): Attributes, annotations, and choosing between them

Friday Poem (7 Jun 2013): For that obligatory “‍questions‍” slide at the end of every technical presentation.

“Perfect” Compression (6 Jun 2013): How to remove significant amounts of redundancy.

Compression and Security (4 Jun 2013): Is it possible to make encryption immune to brute force attacks?

Friday Poem (31 May 2013): By the way, I’m not interested in you.

Speaking of Goblins (28 May 2013): In which Jäger­son and Ghost compare notes.

Friday Poem (24 May 2013): Shooting the breeze is safe.

Selecting Assignments (23 May 2013): What makes a good programming assignment?

Grading and XP (22 May 2013): What does a point-based grading scheme suggest about the teacher’s model of learning?

Will MOOCs exacerbate inequality? (21 May 2013): One of my fears about massive open online courses.

Friday Poem (17 May 2013): Air thick as asphalt.

Finite Differences (16 May 2013): Graphing contour lines of polynomials.

Happiness, Money, Health, and Children (15 May 2013): I wish I had less/fewer _____…

Doing Dishes (14 May 2013): Thoughts on attitude and flat mates.

Friday Poem (10 May 2013): Rhymes inspired by programming paradigms.

Revelation (7 May 2013): Thoughts about the gift of certainty.

Deliberate Accidental Suicide (2 May 2013): A simplified version of a story I’ve been meaning to write for several years.

Of Number Representations (1 May 2013): Three ways to handle numbers involving non-trivial operations.

Plotting Belief (30 Apr 2013): Beliefs may be confident and/or fervent.

Friday Poem (26 Apr 2013): Islands in the skies.

Of Models and Art (25 Apr 2013): Selecting the right subset of characteristics.

Ghost Discovers Languages (24 Apr 2013): In which Lazarus’s hopes of a translator are ruined by Ghost’s good mood.

Small Price to Pay, or to Have Paid? (22 Apr 2013): The relative cost of action varies over time.

Friday Poem (19 Apr 2013): Piracy is a social ill.

Exposure Functions (18 Apr 2013): How eyes and cameras work, and why they sometimes fight each other.

Telling and Showing (15 Apr 2013): It is best to both tell the students the rules in play and show them how the rules are used in practice.

Friday Poem (12 Apr 2013): Comparing medieval and metropolitan imagery.

Binging on Arts (10 Apr 2013): A long-term trend in my character that I do not understand.

Hail (9 Apr 2013): Thoughts on Isaiah and John’s Revelation

Front of the Bandwagon (2 Apr 2013): Reflections on academic publications.

Friday Poem (29 Mar 2013): A couplet about unexpected hope.

Jägerson meets Ghost (28 Mar 2013): In which Jägerson enters Autumn Glow and finds everyone’s words confusing.

Why 3D Movies Disappoint Me (27 Mar 2013): I love 3D displays, but 3D movies are usually disappointing.

RootsTech (26 Mar 2013): What I did last week.

Naturally Good (18 Mar 2013): Reflections on the intentional morality of people.

Friday Poem (15 Mar 2013): Rejoicing in the challenges of life.

Jägerson makes a friend (13 Mar 2013): In which Jägerson finds a centaur in trouble, and joins it.

“Of Course” and Miracles (12 Mar 2013): Why I cringe when someone says “of course I’ve never seen an angel, but…”

Friday Poem (8 Mar 2013): An exploration of why we ought to be grateful for weathermen’s smajlics.

Methods of Light Transport (7 Mar 2013): Diffusion, specularity, transparency, fluorescence, phosphorescence, absorption, translucence, and sub-surface scattering.

Introducing Jägerson (6 Mar 2013): Introducing a new thread in the story of Ghost.

Computers are Poor Students (5 Mar 2013): Why I am bored by “Machine Learning” (and statistics).

Friday Poem (1 Mar 2013): A poem that’s like a rhyme that’s like a verse with meter fairly true.

Luther's Second Postulate (28 Feb 2013): Programming Languages are Antiquated.

Good people, better examples (27 Feb 2013): Reflections on one of my parents’ greatest virtues.

Cellular Automata (26 Feb 2013): There are some simple things that continue to amuse me year after year.

Friday Poem (22 Feb 2013): People and luck, good and bad.

What do Hackers Do? (21 Feb 2013): Why hacking exists and what it involves.

Luther's Fourth Postulate (20 Feb 2013): File formats control your mind via data’s influence on tools, with consequent thoughts on bearing testimony.

Parallelism (18 Feb 2013): Parallel computing shows up without computers in business.

Dismissed as a Disciple (4 Feb 2013): A short thought about discipleship.

Friday Poem (1 Feb 2013): A sonnet about believing in mythology.

Settling In (31 Jan 2013): Ghost attends a dance, and time passes.

Computing ≠ Magic (30 Jan 2013): The myth of “‍enhance this image.‍”

Is the Apocalypse Apocalyptic? (29 Jan 2013): Is “‍destruction‍” the right word to apply to the winding-up scenes of the world?

Saturday Poem (26 Jan 2013): I’m glad God is mature enough to handle His power.

Elements of Genealogical Research (24 Jan 2013): What are the core pieces of genealogical research?

Friday Poem (18 Jan 2013): A sonnet about a piece of devised theater of which I heard tell.

Flattened Arrays and Multi-Indices (17 Jan 2013): A problem I keep encountering and its solution.

On Measuring Time (16 Jan 2013): Post 365 seems a fitting place to discuss the measuring of time.

Mormon Lexicon (14 Jan 2013): Three words repurposed by Mormons: Gospel, Testimony, and Prompting.

Friday Poem (11 Jan 2013): A swan has lost its larder.

Collaborative Genealogy (9 Jan 2013): Three criteria for a good collaborative genealogical tool.

Conversation over Omelets (8 Jan 2013): Ghost arranges to attend a ball and has a tiff with Goldilocks.

Seen but not True (7 Jan 2013): On faith, knowledge, and evidence.

Friday Poem (21 Dec 2012): Thoughts about Christmas.

Christ the Receiver (18 Dec 2012): How does Christ receive the gifts we give him?

Christ the Giver (17 Dec 2012): What message is conveyed in Jesus Christ’s gifts to us?

Friday Poem (14 Dec 2012): Many sun deities and a vampire.

CS Ed Week (13 Dec 2012): Making things move.

CS Ed Week (11 Dec 2012): Some basic Javascript programs.

CS Ed Week (10 Dec 2012): By act of the 111th Congress, this is CS Education Week.

Friday Poem (6 Dec 2012): A bizarre hypothetical involving a vision, a sage, and clothing.

A Speaker's Manifesto (6 Dec 2012): Reflections on the power of the voice.

Learning by Roleplay (5 Dec 2012): A surprising lesson from an evening of entertainment.

Positional Numbering (4 Dec 2012): The surprising elegance of numerals and bigint routines.

Friday Poem (30 Nov 2012): … Oysters cry like tortured babies …

Multi-tool Collaboration (29 Nov 2012): Unfinished thoughts about using multiple tools to work on the same data.

Student Vocalization (27 Nov 2012): Reflections on the power of soliloquy and expression in the classroom.

A Morning's Work (26 Nov 2012): Ghost gets two tasks, fulfills one, and sees a flower market.

Friday Poem (24 Nov 2012): Mishearing a bank robber.

Vultures to a Carcass (19 November 2012): Thoughts on an Matthew 24 and Luke 17.

Friday Poem (18 November 2012): Two poems; last week’s about light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation and today’s about grudges and birthday cake.

Verification Difficulty in Collaboration (15 November 2012): Sometimes it is hard to share research because the results are not readily verified.

Future History (14 November 2012): Thoughts on learning from scriptural prophesy.

Solvable Problems (12 November 2012): There are a few problems we know how to solve. The rest get reduced to these.

Lazarus's Proposal (7 November 2012): Ghost gets a job.

Special Relativity (6 Nov 2012): How velocity can be relative and have a maximum value.

Friday Poem (2 Nov 2012): Nonsense about weather, gum, telepathy, imaginary pets, etc.

Number Bases (1 Nov 2012): The structure beneath Arabic numerals.

Of Cisterns, Spigots, and Pipes (30 Oct 2012): Thoughts on kinds and scopes of standardization.

Mormonism in Seven Minutes (29 Oct 2012): Transcript of a talk I presented at an academic panel on Mormonism.

Friday Poem (25 Oct 2012): A poem about types of poems.

Respecting Conductors (25 Oct 2012): Reflections on choosing expectations over direction.

Shotguns and Sniper Rifles (24 Oct 2012): A thought on structuring public addresses.

Jargon (22 Oct 2012): Groups add words and usurp others to facilitate communication inside (and, incidentally, impede communication outside) the group.

Friday Poem (19 Oct 2012): A snippet composed for my D&D game.

Font Woes (18 Oct 2012): Why I am not longer specifying a font on this blog.

Gambling vs Investing (18 Oct 2012): Thoughts on global wealth, financial markets, and investing.

The Last Ditch (17 Oct 2012): Ghost find sympathetic ears.

Collaborative Genealogy (16 Oct 2012): Sharing conclusions isn’t viable.

Friday Poem (12 Oct 2012): Disconnected bits of rhyme about food.

Human Error (10 Oct 2012): How should you react to unpleasantness?

Gallant Conversationalists (8 Oct 2012): Wield your wit in the polite attention to others.

Monday Poem (8 Oct 2012): An anonymized rhyme about an noteworthless place I’ve visited.

Error Messages (4 Oct 2012): Why program failure messages are so reliably bad.

Keep In the Vote (3 Oct 2012): A rant.

Paragraphs (2 Oct 2012): Three ruminations on a concept dependent on literacy.

Friday Poem (28 Sep 2012): The perils of eating marshmallow fluff.

Tools and Minds (27 Sep 2012): Is there a smooth path from novice to expert?

Leaving the Palace (26 Sep 2012): Ghost reacts to bad news.

Capitalism's Failing (24 September 2012): Why the most valuable jobs get the least pay.

Friday Poem (21 September 2012): Sometimes on a bright day I like to pen something dark for contrast.

Autumn Glow (20 Sep 2012): Ghost enters an elfin city.

Aspiring to Plinthhood (19 September 2012): A beautiful word, an important function.

Snapshots of the Mind (17 September 2012): Personality, IQ, fatalism, and growth.

Friday Poem (14 September 2012): Let the present exceed your expectations.

Deterministic Chaos (13 September 2012): An example of an obviously chaotic system.

Gravity (11 September 2012): Bending spacetime, not the rubber sheet.

Second Offense (10 September 2012): The discipline required for peace to exist.

Friday Poem (7 September 2012): A thought on the history of the British Isles.

Definitive Essay (5 Sep 2012): Reflections on the works of Martin Gardner.

A Surprising Dream (4 Sep 2012): My model of the universe is inadequate in many ways.

To the Fey (3 Sep 2012): In which Ghost gains a personal objective and enters the Fey Lands.

Friday Poem (31 Aug 2012): From the Latin root gradus/gradi, meaning to step, walk, or move.

Late Prologue (30 Aug 2012): Some background to my Ghost stories.

Accepting Gratitude (29 Aug 2012): The least common form of politeness.

Musical Scales (28 Aug 2012): Sound, harmonies, the 12-tone scale, and its alternatives

Friday Poem (24 Aug 2012): The ideal customer for the traveling purveyor of dapper caps.

Curious Ghost (23 Aug 2012): In which Ghost helps plants, kills beavers, and ponders many questions.

Ghost is given a Mission (22 Aug 2012): In which Ghost meets her Goblin again and visits town.

Hungry Ghost (21 Aug 2012): In which Ghost learns just how much her tree did for her.

Ghost’s Shadow (20 Aug 2012): How Ghost discovers a downside to dealing with the Unseely Court.

Friday Poem (17 Aug 2012): Many great names in computing know little if anything about computing.

Drawing Heaven (16 Aug 2012): What is the desirable end?

Blather (15 Aug 2012): Generating nonsense from the Arabian Nights

Listening to your Soul (14 Aug 2012): Faith and desiring to desire.

Failure of On-Line Learning (13 Aug 2012): Why are so many online courses bad?

Friday Poem (10 Aug 2012): How peculiar are our criteria for marriage.

Enduring (1 Aug 2012): How long must I endure?

Beauty (31 Jul 2012): Various kinds of beauty.

Proactive Hope (30 Jul 2012): I asked Ellie Walker what faith is; she replied “proactive hope.”

Friday Poem (27 Jul 2012): A handful of ants is a soothing thing.

Take and Have (16 Jul 2012): The subtle implication of invisible words.

Friday Poem (13 Jul 2012): Being paint in the world mosaic.

Real People (11 Jul 2012): “It is difficult to write about a real person.” — T. H. White

What Should Children Learn? (10 Jul 2012): The “Ought” of Education

Empty Success (9 Jul 2012): Research and Passion.

Hiatus (11 Jun 2012): I will post only sporadically for the next several weeks.

Friday Poem (9 Jun 2012): A sonnet for entertainment junkies.

Research like a Genealogist (7 Jun 2012): The genealogical research process might be a good model for the rest of the research world.

Good ≠ Publishable (6 Jun 2012): Conflated concerns in academia.

Closed-loop Education (4 Jun 2012): How many brains are needed to facilitate learning?

Friday Poem (1 Jun 2012): Doggerel about wigs.

Rice's Theorem (31 May 2012): Any interesting, general program analysis is undecidable.

Two-Input Halting Problem (30 May 2012): The quintessential undecidable problem.

Quining (29 May 2012): A step toward undecidability.

Confused by Myself (28 May 2012): There are so many things that confuse me…

Friday Poem (25 May 2012): Life is like a three-act play.

Programming Ad Ideas (25 May 2012): Some ideas inspired by Lucy Sanders at NCWIT.

Love/Hate Diversity (24 May 2012): My love/hate relationship with diversity initiatives, part 2: the love.

Love/Hate Diversity (23 May 2012): My love/hate relationship with diversity initiatives, part 1: the hate.

Friday Poem (18 May 2012): What if I couldn’t write this poem?

Taxonomy of Thought (17 May 2012): Thinking about the boundaries of a revised Bloom taxonomy.

The Right Redundancy (16 May 2012): Redundancy. Computers take it out, then put it back in again. Why?

What Beholdest Thou? (14 May 2012): On perspective and matters of eternity.

Friday Poem (11 May 2012): An effort to modernize an old canon.

Genealogical Research (10 May 2012): Is academic research like genealogy?

Research Masonry (9 May 2012): Is academic research like building a brick wall?

Emergent Research (8 May 2012): Is academic research like building an ant hive?

Research Ventures (7 May 2012): Is academic research like venture capital investments?

Friday Poem (4 May 2012): What is “‍real life‍”?

Different Underneath (3 May 2012): Processes that look the same for different reasons.

Doublespacing (2 May 2012): A common requirement ill-defined.

Diversity and Offense (30 Apr 2012): Tempering tolerance with toleration.

Friday Poem (27 Apr 2012): The fallacy of easy money.

Sharing Small Data (26 Apr 2012): One common approach to reusing information, rather than algorithms.

(Not) Liking a Subject (25 Apr 2012): Why do students like (or not) particular subjects?

Because of thy faith (23 Apr 2012): Thoughts on Enos and answered prayer.

Friday Poem (20 Apr 2012): In the real world, sometimes a great set-up isn’t followed by an action scene.

What to Grade? (19 Apr 2012): What would you grade, or on what do you wish to be was graded?

Questions not to answer (18 Apr 2012): When is it better to let the student think it out?

It's all a game (16 Apr 2012): When you get far enough into anything, everyone is flying by the seat of their pants. I think.

Friday Poem (14 Apr 2012): A thought about pointless fun.

Who gets the ‘A’s? (12 Apr 2012): Are confidence and grades correlated?

Software Morphs (11 Apr 2012): Code reuse is hard because software doesn’t stand still.

Rights and Responsibilities (10 Apr 2012): Giving power with duties.

Set Apart (9 Apr 2012): Observations on the LDS practice of setting apart individuals in callings.

Friday Poem (6 Apr 2012): What will the time do next?

More Express (5 Apr 2012): “…Wherefore it is more express than other scriptures, that it might work upon the hearts of the children of men…”

Linkers and Loaders (4 Apr 2012): The 2.5 kinds of program linking and how they work.

Guilloche (2 Apr 2012): guilloche, v. trans. To decorate with intersecting curved lines, or with any pattern composed of curved lines.

Friday Poem (30 Mar 2012): Dancers and directors correlate with music differently.

The Math Analogy (29 Mar 2012): Nature doesn’t even know about mathematics.

Installation (28 Mar 2012): What is going on during program installation?

Shall (27 Mar 2012): How changing language can make understanding hard.

D&D, StarWars, and Kobolds (26 Mar 2012): The intersection of several childhood delights.

Friday Poem (23 Mar 2012): A nightmare of sorts.

Sounds Hard (22 Mar 2012): Topics kept hidden by reputation.

Copy-Paste and #include (21 Mar 2012): Reuse by repetition.

Italics or Bold? (20 Mar 2012): On matching type to purpose.

Academic Publications (19 Mar 2012): In academic publications, cui bono?

By the Numbers (14 Mar 2012): RPG mathematics ≠ RPG engineering.

Relative neighborhood graphs (12 Mar 2012): A side product of my daily work.

Friday Poem (10 Mar 2012): Reflections on childhood writing.

Schläfli Symbols (8 Mar 2012): Describing regular tiles in any dimension.

What is a program? (7 Mar 2012): The bits and pieces of a modern computer program.

Behold (6 Mar 2012): The most-repeated commandment.

Unlocking Programming: Programming Languages (5 Mar 2012): Four meanings of “‍a language.‍”

SIGCSE 2012 (3 Mar 2012): The 43rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education.

Teaching in Pairs (28 Feb 2012): The power of divided labor.

Discernment and Discrimination (27 Feb 2012): Is it good to distinguish between individuals?

Friday Poem (24 Feb 2012): In God’s school of life, the lesson being taught is Happiness.

What is a Character? (23 Feb 2012): On characters, letters, and glyphs.

Code Reuse (22 Feb 2012): “Didn’t someone already write this?”

The Impossible Lesson (21 Feb 2012): Teach them to think.

Saith the Prophet (20 Feb 2012): On knowledge and belief.

Friday Poem (17 Feb 2012): The Thunder Hoedown.

Multiple choice or short answer? (16 Feb 2012): The intellectual impact of question format.

Righteousness and Similarity (15 Feb 2012): Perfect ≠ identical, but righteous ~ righteous.

An Apology (14 Feb 2012): Comments were broken; fixed now.

Odd Numbers (14 Feb 2012): We expect numbers to be boring, predictable. Not so.

Teaching Whom? (13 Feb 2012): A collection of small observations about audiences in teaching.

Friday Poem (10 Feb 2012): A ramble about humor.

Vision by Committee (9 Feb 2012): Are visionaries always individuals?

Sorting Asymptotics (8 Feb 2012): Worst- and best-case runtime for sorting, and why anyone cares.

Watching Your Curriculum (7 Feb 2012): Curricula writers ought watch others use their curricula.

Too much fudge (6 Feb 2012): Speculations on the trustworth of common knowledge.

Friday Poem (4 Feb 2012): One of the arrows of time.

It's not enough to be right (2 Feb 2012): On trust and influence in politics.

Whence predictability? (1 Feb 2012): With surprising reliability…

Polynomial or Not? (31 Jan 2012): Defining “‍tractable‍” or “‍efficient.‍”

John 14:15 (30 Jan 2012): If ye love me, keep my commandments.

Friday Poem (27 Jan 2012): How much history is fact?

The Pilot System (26 Jan 2012): Fred Brooks’ rule, “‍design one to throw away.‍”

Ghost the Dryad (25 Jan 2012): Introducing Ghost, a dryad without a tree.

“Say Grace” (24 Jan 2012): Whence the habit of praying before meals?

Faith and Courage (23 Jan 2012): Is faith to doubt what courage is to fear?

Being a Juror (21 Jan 2012): What I learned this week.

Divine Visions (16 Jan 2012): Are visions interactive?

Friday Poem (13 Jan 2012): Friday the 13th always brings to mind Walt Kelly’s masterwork, the Pogo comic strip.

Specializaton (12 Jan 2012): To specialize or not to specialize?

Office Politics (11 Jan 2012): A random sampling of observations about office politics.

Asymptotics (10 Jan 2012): How do you define “‍efficient‍”?

On Goals and Resolutions (9 Jan 2012): A speculation.

Friday Poem (6 Jan 2012): Nonsense about scarecrows and air flows.

Rites (5 Jan 2012): Thoughts on rites in general.

Portrayals True and Free (4 Jan 2012): Art and Fiction vs Visualization and Biography

Democracy (3 Jan 2012): Some thoughts from Aristotle.

Parallelism (2 Jan 2012): Counting with friends.

Friday Poem (30 Dec 2011): The End is Now.

Life Entire (29 Dec 2011): Levels of perspective.

Typography: Subliminal Art (28 Dec 2011): Artists who try not to be seen.

On Omniscience (27 Dec 2011): Can God change His mind?

On Omniscience (26 Dec 2011): Omniscience and choice.

Friday Poem (23 Dec 2011): Today is the anniversary of Joseph Smith’s birth. It is also close to Christmas

Recreation vs. Entertainment (22 Dec 2011): Decoupling two ideas.

Non-Regular Languages (21 Dec 2011): Some languages aren’t regular.

Adventurer's Lament (20 Dec 2011): A conversation between an adventurer a retired adventuring companion.

Judgment (19 Dec 2011): Hidden skeletons and uncut jewels.

Friday Poem (17 Dec 2011): About the Christmas spirit.

Typography terminology (15 Dec 2011): Of glyphs, type, typefaces, fonts, kerning, ligatures, etc.

NFA = Regular Expressions, part 2 (14 Dec 2011): The language of every DFA is described by a regular expression.

NFA = Regular Expressions, part 1 (13 Dec 2011): An equivalence between a class of languages and a class of machines.

Not Rememberable (12 Dec 2011): A postulate that some things are beyond our memory apparatus’s capabilities.

Friday Poem (9 Dec 2011): Cat food, dog food, fish food… what about human food?

Nondeterministic Automata (8 Dec 2011): Of NFAs and the unimportance of regular nondeterminism

Acknowledging All of Life (7 Dec 2011): I love my life, and since that leaves a lot of free time, I also…

Un-Asked Questions (6 Dec 2011): Killing the conversation by assuming an answer without discussion.

A Gulf of Understanding (5 Dec 2011): Educators as proselytizers: converting student’s thought processes.

Friday Poem (2 Dec 2011): An accidental hole in the fabric of reality.

Hire a Boss (1 Dec 2011): Could we separate management and power?

Why is Repentance Painful? (30 Nov 2011): The parable of the worn-out trousers.

Students That Drive (29 Nov 2011): An observation about classroom dynamic.

Nondeterminism (28 Nov 2011): Doing everything all at once, or magically making the right choices.

A Week of Gratitude (26 Nov 2011): Free, open-source software.

Friday Poem (25 Nov 2011): Gratitude can be awkward…

A Week of Gratitude (24 Nov 2011): This piece of eternity.

A Week of Gratitude (23 Nov 2011): The ones who made me.

A Week of Gratitude (22 Nov 2011): The lives we share.

A Week of Gratitude (21 Nov 2011): The overlooked structure of things.

Friday Poem (18 Nov 2011): The consequences of treating delicate goods without delicacy.

Educators Ought to Listen (17 Nov 2011): A little extension of an earlier post.

A Smooth Beige World (16 Nov 2011): A fictional setting of uncertain applicability.

Delighting in Failure (15 Nov 2011): To learn more, make more mistakes.

Disseminate Information, Organize Knowledge (14 Nov 2011): “Let me organize your thoughts…”

Friday Poem (11 Nov 2011): Parents and authors name their children differently.

Know your Exits (10 Nov 2011): How (not to) flake out on your commitments.

Regular Expressions (9 Nov 2011): A notation for describing the languages of Finite Automata.

Vital, Arbitrary Decisions (8 Nov 2011): Of getting dressed, being stressed, and commandments.

Going Down Stairs (7 Nov 2011): Where does the energy go?

Friday Poem (4 Nov 2011): Violently saving the environment.

On Interesting Fights (3 Nov 2011): Action scenes in film and RPGs

State Machines (2 Nov 2011): The simplest of information machines.

“I can't, I need to study” (1 Nov 2011): Not having time takes a lot of time.

The Used Car Lot (31 Oct 2011): A thought about the niceties of having commandments.

Friday Poem (28 Oct 2011): I wrote this poem tomorrow.

Completing “Che Sarà, Sarà” (27 Oct 2011): What will be, let be; but what may change, change.

Memorization (26 Oct 2011): On memorizing and listening.

Irrationality (25 Oct 2011): Some numbers are not fractions.

Cantor Diagonalization (24 Oct 2011): An infinity bigger than infinity

Friday Poem (21 Oct 2011): Monsters assuring mutual demise.

Decision Problems (20 Oct 2011): Yes/no questions are “‍enough‍”.

Belief in Others (19 Oct 2011): One definition of maturity.

Just for larks (18 Oct 2011): A few bits of pseudo-code.

“I feed 20 families” (17 Oct 2011): On the happy perspective.

Friday Poem (14 Oct 2011): A rhyme from the title “‍with the moon came doom.‍”

Richie and Jobs (13 Oct 2011): A reflection on two giants of computing.

The Church-Turing Thesis (12 Oct 2011): If it can be done, it can be done by a computer.

We are Many (11 Oct 2011): Reflections on personal identity.

Life is not a Book (10 Oct 2011): Me: “‍I learned a great lesson that day…‍”. Them: “‍What was it?‍”

Friday Poem (7 Oct 2011): A meditation on friends who do not share my near-perpetual sense of happiness.

If you knew it would work… (6 Oct 2011): On exploring life.

Learning to Program (5 October 2011): Part 0: Text editors and HTML Basics.

Leaving the Intersection (4 October 2011): Embrace losing options.

Theory: Know the Possible (3 October 2011): In introduction to the notion of formal reasoning and theory.

Friday Poem (30 Sep 2011): Backlash from too many weeks of expository prose.

Chaos (29 Sep 2011): Revealing the infinitesimal character of things.

Thoughts on an ongoing RPG (28 Sep 2011): I’m running a table-top roleplaying game.

Of Logarithms and Numbers (27 Sep 2011): More on the digitation theme.

“Helping” God (26 Sep 2011): Sometimes I feel like a 3-year old.

Friday Poem (23 Sep 2011): About gasoline.

When Fires Die (22 Sep 2011): Motivation, faith, hope, love, and how they are lost.

Learning Bipartite Graph (21 Sep 2011): Reflections on instruction and understanding.

Luther's Second and Third Postulates (20 Sep 2011): Programming Languages are Antiquated. The Compilation Pipeline is Harmful.

Heterogeneity (19 Sep 2011): Diversity and what it’s lacking.

Friday Poem (16 Sep 2011): A simple message inspired by a flow chart shared with me by my friend Markham.

Unlocking Programming: Abstract Data Types and JSON (15 Sep 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Respect, Love, Compassion (14 Sep 2011): Three words from “‍The Family: A Proclamation to the World‍”.

Backward Compatibility (13 Sep 2011): Accepting a curse to provide a blessing.

… to its Logical Conclusion (12 Sep 2011): A truth behind Aristotle’s Golden Mean.

Friday Poem (9 Sep 2011): A little mumble about listening.

Gifts of Tongues (8 Sep 2011): Reflections on tongues and the problem of thinking about deity.

Unlocking Programming: Pointers (7 Sep 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Unlocking Programming: Composite Datatypes (6 Sep 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Being Annoyed (5 Sep 2011): It’s all in your mind.

Friday Poem (3 Sep 2011): A Saturday reflection on a Friday temple excursion.

Unlocking Programming: State and Parallelism (1 Sep 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

On Philosophy (31 Aug 2011): Philosophy as a non-scientific field.

Random (30 Aug 2011): What do people mean by the word “‍random‍”?

Digitation (29 Aug 2011): The 99¢ phenomenon (and it’s solution).

Friday Poem (26 Aug 2011): Five beats on time.

Unlocking Programming: Lambdas and Coroutines (25 Aug 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

On Writing This Post (25 Aug 2011): An explanation why this post took so long to appear.

K-12 Programming: Counting (23 Aug 2011): Practical programming in kindergarten or first grade.

Bang-Bang Beliefs (22 Aug 2011): Reflections on “‍Open your mouths and they shall be filled‍” (DC 33:8).

Friday Poem (19 Aug 2011): “‍A blue moon falls from an empty sky where never star has gleamed…‍”

Mind Twister Redux (18 Aug 2011): A second try at a recent post.

Unlocking Programming: Recursion (18 Aug 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

The Command Lines (17 Aug 2011): A practical application of programming.

A Mind Twister (16 Aug 2011): My own take on a very old paradox.

Audacity of Science (15 Aug 2011): The Functional is not necessarily the Actual.

Friday Poem (12 Aug 2011): You know what they say about hindsight? They’re wrong.

The First Law of Heaven (11 Aug 2011): Trying to unravel Bruce R. McConkie’s statement, “‍obedience is the first law of heaven.‍”

Unlocking Programming: Blocks and Subroutines (10 Aug 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Editing for Knowledge (9 Aug 2011): Editing as a tool for understanding difficult texts.

Unlocking Programming: Loops (8 Aug 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Friday Poem (5 Aug 2011): Dana and Jane bicker till dawn while burning that which is neither a box nor a shepherd’s crook.

What Should Teachers Do? (4 Aug 2011): Reflections on information, knowledge, understanding, intelligence, wit, acuity, aptitude, instruction, etc.

Software Engineering Example (3 Aug 2011): The discovery of phylogenetic trees as an example of the software engineering process.

Offended by Perspective (2 Aug 2011): How do you handle someone who feels slighted because their perspective of a situation is off target?

Unlocking Programming: What is CS? (1 Aug 2011): A discussion of the terms “‍computer science‍”, “‍computer engineering‍”, “‍information technology‍”, “‍information systems‍”, “‍software engineering‍”, and “‍programming‍”.

Friday Poem (29 Jul 2011): The curse of the magic elephant.

Teaching Yourself to Program (28 Jul 2011): Some thoughts on how to start learning to program.

The State and Future of this Blog (28 Jul 2011): Where I am and where I’m going with this blog; comments, tags, etc.

Programming Ad Ideas (27 Jul 2011): A reaction to the appalling way educators act like computing isn’t important.

Unlocking Programming: Conditionals (26 Jul 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Etymological Hypothesis: Atonement (25 Jul 2011): Informed guesswork on how the word “‍atonement‍” came to have the meaning it has today.

Friday Poem (22 Jul 2011): Inspired by old “‍fancy rooms‍” with a touch of morbid romanticism.

Historical Touring in Britain (21 Jul 2011): Some reflections on my experience visiting historic sites on the isle of Great Britain.

Because the Principle is Correct (20 Jul 2011): A brief thought shared in a recent church service.

Unlocking Programming: Control Constructs (19 Jul 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Unlocking Programming: Paradigms (18 Jul 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Friday Poem (15 Jul 2011): A few couplets inspired by my four-hour-long visit to Wales.

Unlocking Programming: Types (14 Jul 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Pilate and the Easy Out (13 Jul 2011): A thought from the account of Christ’s trial and death.

Reflections on London (12 Jul 2011): An American peripatetic’s perspective of the city of London.

Unlocking Programming: Expressions and Values (11 Jul 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Friday Poem (8 Jul 2011): A guy looks downstairs at a Wisconsin statue he doesn’t like.

Unlocking Programming: Statements (7 Jul 2011): Part of a series of posts explaining programming for the lay-person.

Unlocking Programming: Introduction (6 Jul 2011): An explanation of a series of posts I plan to add explaining programming for the lay-person.

Mathematics for Hyperbolic Tiles (5 Jul 2011): Representation of the numbers used in {5, (3,)* 4} tessellations matrices.

Delegation (4 Jul 2011): A part of leadership I wish more people understood.

Friday Poem (1 Jul 2011): A sonnet for CS1.

Talking to Slaves (30 Jun 2011): A different way of viewing programming.

Carrots, Reigns, and Love (29 Jun 2011): There are three reasons to follow a leader; the highest must be freely given because of who we are.

Wisdom and Hidden Treasures (28 Jun 2011): Thoughts on a promise from the Word of Wisdom.

Why Wash Feet? (27 Jun 2011): A thought on one of Jesus Christ’s last acts in mortality.

Friday Poem (24 Jun 2011): A late-night mumble following a full day of teaching and coding.

Faith, a Composite (23 Jun 2011): An effort to disentangle the modern usage of the word “‍faith‍”.

Living Hyperbolically (22 Jun 2011): A subjective description of hyperbolic geometry (sans maths).

Tribute: Brian McGeever (21 Jun 2011): Recalling Brian McGeever and the A-to-Z Mathematics Award.

Pronouns and Verbs (20 Jun 2011): Proper usage of “‍Thee‍”s and “‍Thou‍”s.

Friday Poem (17 Jun 2011): Free verse typifying prayer.

Lifestyle and Means (16 Jun 2011): A random thought pattern without clear objective.

Hyperbolic Transformations (15 Jun 2011): A discussion of matrices for hyperbolic geometry

Brain or Driver? (14 Jun 2011): Speculation about why we think as we do think.

I don't much care where (13 Jun 2011): Commentary on a famous quote from Lewis Carroll.

Friday Poem (10 Jun 2011): “‍Glistening Heaps of Jelly‍”, flash poetry developed from a title in under 30 minutes.

The Simple Art of Listening (9 June 2011): In defense of a dying art form.

Basic Hyperbolic Operations (8 June 2011): A technique for the Minkowski representation of hyperbolic geometry, including the hyperbolic linear interpolation or hlerp.

Logic, Tool not Truth (7 June 2011): Why I don’t “‍believe‍” logic, yet use it all the time.

HTML5: Canvas and SVG (6 June 2011): A couple of random demos to test ECMAScript-enabled SVG and Canvas elements.

Friday Poem (3 June 2011): Couplets about vegetables.

The Game of Spies and Townies (2 June 2011): Can you find out who knows the secret without revealing it?

Slodoop: Bottom of the Universe (1 June 2011): The Bottom of the Universe isn’t Euclidean.

Are the Righteous Sad? (31 May 2011): A scriptural thought about happiness and sadness.

Infinite Decimals Times a Digit (30 May 2011): How to compute an endless repeating decimal times a single-digit constant in any base.

Friday Poem (27 May 2011): A “‍devil strategy guide‍” encouraging the use of plot to keep people enslaved.

Most Significant Bit First Addition (26 May 2011): A technique for adding infinite binary sequences.

Tea Tree Oil (25 May 2011): A stronger odor than old dehydrated fish. Also more pleasant.

Slodoop: The Doops (24 May 2011): A back-derivation on the name of a setting I designed in my teens.

Another CS1 Approach (23 May 2011): Get the students to propose each element before it is taught.

Friday Poem (20 May 2011): An opening about a barber, with two possible endings based on suggestions from Matt Crook.

A Different Way to Teach Computing (19 May 2011): How would I teach computer science if I didn’t have any computers?

What I Wish People Knew about Scripture (18 May 2011): If He could have taught what He wanted us to know more easily, He would have.

RPGs: The Other Game (17 May 2011): A role-playing game (RPG) is collaborative story telling, but the most popular systems are another game as well.

Continued Fractions (16 May 2011): Continued fractions are a beautiful representation of real numbers, but they have some problems as well.

Friday Poem (13 May 2011): An small meander regarding glass professionals.

Homebrew RPGs 3: Chaos (12 May 2011): There are many commercial roleplaying games out there, but often the best games are ones you design yourself.

Homebrew RPGs 2: Conflict (11 May 2011): There are many commercial roleplaying games out there, but often the best games are ones you design yourself.

Homebrew RPGs 1: RPG Basics (10 May 2011): There are many commercial roleplaying games out there, but often the best games are ones you design yourself.

Luther's First Postulate (9 May 2011): Most algorithms are outside the scope of Computer Science.

Welcome, and Styling (26 January 2011): Welcome to my blog.