Posts tagged "history"

Jul 08, 2025 from Palladium

Will Future Civilizations Bother to Excavate Our Remains?

The practice of archaeology is almost unique to our contemporary Western civilization rather than universal, and it is unlikely to be continued by future civilizations. The post Will Future Civiliz...

Jun 20, 2025 from The Scholar's Stage

Book Notes: Stoner (1965)

NEITHER THE MALE AUTHORS NOR THE MALE READERS most preoccupied with middle age are inclined to face it cleanly. The male author depicts the mid-life crisis to escape his own. His novels and screenp...

Jun 11, 2025 from ℤ→ℤ

The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers (Review)

The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes is a technical and business history of the roughly three-decades when Seymour Cray dominated the development of a class of c...

Jun 04, 2025 from ℤ→ℤ

Improving Product Discovery of Tabletop RPG Maps (Preliminary Investigation)

As catalogs for digital marketplaces grow in size, customers have greater difficulty in finding products that meet their needs. Marketplace owners might improve product discovery by adding new cate...

Apr 22, 2025 from ℤ→ℤ

Connect Four Ply Dataset

Connect 4 is a solved game in the m,n,k family. On a 7 column, 6 row board, players alternately drop a token into a column, attempting to establish four tokens of the same color along any row, colu...

Apr 03, 2025 from ℤ→ℤ

Routines of Substitution (Review)

Early post-war computing can often seem alien as terminology mixed metaphors and the pioneers brought their own distinct toolsets to the field. Thus, it seems fitting that a powerful influence on c...

Mar 31, 2025 from The Scholar's Stage

The Eight Tribes of Trump and China

LAST OCTOBER I published a short breakdown of four geopolitical ‘schools’ that might shape China strategy under Trump. That piece was a pre-election preview of a much larger report I was writing fo...

Mar 26, 2025 from ℤ→ℤ

Ludii Wumpus World

Ludii is a general game system for modeling games and puzzles, although it focuses on historical and traditional games. Ludii was recently used to provide the training data for a Kaggle competition...

Mar 25, 2025 from ℤ→ℤ

Investigating MacPaint's Source Code

MacPaint is a monochromatic raster image painting program that introduced many people to mouse-driven controls, tool palettes, and copy and paste integration with other applications. One of two lau...

Feb 21, 2025 from The Scholar's Stage

The Euro-American Split (I): Dread Possibility

THERE ARE DECADES WHEN possibility is constrained in a narrow frame. The terrain has been surveyed, boundaries have been laid, and rules have been established. In such an age there is still room fo...

Jan 05, 2025 from The Scholar's Stage

Observations From India

In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see thin...

Jan 01, 2025 from The Scholar's Stage

Science Proceeds One Question at a Time

MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory...

Dec 26, 2024 from ℤ→ℤ

Programming Lewis Carroll's *Memoria Technica*

Charles Dodgson (pen name Lewis Carroll) had difficulty remembering numbers, such as dates. He developed a cipher to help him remember numbers by embedding them in couplets or phrases. For example,...

Dec 14, 2024 from ℤ→ℤ

Using LLMs to Explain Historical Code: FLOW-MATIC Investigation

The new generation of code assistance tools powered by Large Language Models (LLM)s may be useful in efficiently categorizing and translating historical software corpora. In this qualitative study,...

Nov 15, 2024 from ℤ→ℤ

Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI (Review)

Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI is a new exhibit from the Computer History Museum (CHM) opening November 20th, 2024. In development for more than a year, the exhibit covers both the history of chatb...

Oct 31, 2024 from The Scholar's Stage

Republican Debates on China: A Political Compass

MANY HAVE TRIED to pin Trump to Heritage’s “Project 2025.” The Trump campaign has not only refused to endorse Project 2025—they have refused to endorse any detailed policy plan whatsoever. Trump pr...

Oct 29, 2024 from ℤ→ℤ

Mathematical Analysis of the Royal Game of Ur

From the Board Games Study Journal: Mathematical analysis of the Royal Game of Ur Despite many discoveries and proposals for rules for the ancient board game known as the Royal Game of Ur (RGU), no...

Oct 28, 2024 from ℤ→ℤ

A New Look

I’ve given this blog a new look by switching the theme from Noteworthy to Long Form, the latter a theme of my own design. Why the change? I adopted the Noteworthy theme at the onset of this blog an...

Oct 28, 2024 from ℤ→ℤ

About

The mapping of integers to integers is a fair summary of the work of programming. A blog about computer science, history of computing, engineering, game theory, and other things that attract my int...

Oct 14, 2024 from ℤ→ℤ

Exposure to Art: a MTA Case Study

Many corporations and agencies allocate a certain amount of their budget towards the creation of public artwork. For instance, New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) has funded near...