Niall's Weblog

I came across MIT’s course Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course today. The accompanying text-book is freely available online and also video of the lectures are available from the Internet Archive. This course has a great reputation for being difficult and teaching pretty advanced functional programming techniques. Very cool that it is freely available [...]

One of my personal challenges in physical activities (martial arts, Yoga, weightlifting) has always been flexibility. Some people have quite naturally good flexibility, others have to work on it. What exactly is flexibility? There is a very common perception that flexibility is a physical characteristic – that its a question of muscle, ligament and tendon [...]

I’ve written a little bit about Nassim Nicholas Taleb before. In particular, I posted a short snippet to implement Monte Carlo simulation in Python. Anyway, I’ve lately been reading Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. In this book, published after his death, he writes about the connections between human language and logic – and the nature of knowledge [...]

I’m in Ireland for the holidays, and I’m trying to keep up some training while I’m away from the gym. At least I managed to find a couple of 30lbs dumbbells at the house, that increased versatility a lot: 150 dumbbell squats. 100 push ups. 50 dumbbell thrusters. 50 dumbbell swings.

The squat is an exercise I’ve really come to appreciate of late. The difficulty and importance of this movement cannot be underestimated. While the squat is in fact a very natural and innate movement – witness young children doing this effortlessly all the time. However, years of sitting in chairs and other things conspire to [...]