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sharkboton New Google ad strategy: 10 minutes of a guy saying "pizza"

The handpuppet background cracked me up. To the haters: just skip around the video, and/or watch more Wonder Showzen.

sharkboton The Laws Underlying The Physics of Everyday Life Are Completely Understood

I don't think Carroll's remark is inconsistent. Rather, he's attempting to show the correspondence between everyday physics and (something like) elementary number theory; both consist of an agreed-upon set of axioms, subsequently focusing future work on identifying how those axioms interact to produce interesting results.

The realization that there are still areas of research doesn't overshadow the amazing fact that we have near-certainty of the foundations responsible for everyday experiences.

sharkboton Who killed Prolog?

Check out js-prolog: http://ioctl.org/logic/jsprolog-history

It's a quick-and-dirty implementation of a Prolog interpreter, but it's a great resource for prototyping. JavaScript ports very well to Lua, so you should be able to port the code in a busy afternoon.

I made a couple of suggestions to increase the speed of the interpretation, but I'm not sure Jan ever integrated them into the code. The big one was using a trace to destructively modify environments rather than recreating them on choice points; WAM and tabling would be great, but it's a non-trivial piece of work following Warren's tech report, even with the help of the (very good) tutorial.

sharkboton Why GNU grep is Fast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift-or

Check out Shift-Or: used in agrep, and another example of a very clever algorithm. Rather than translating a non-deterministic finite state automata to a deterministic one, it uses the boolean operations of the hardware to simulate the NFA directly. Result: linear time regexp for patterns that have less than the bit-length of a machine's registers. I.e., 32 bytes on x86, 64 bytes on x86_64, etc.