Niall's Weblog

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 [...]

I’m a big fan of Baudelaire’s poetry. I am particularly fond of his interest in conveying beauty through typically repulsive imagery – e.g. Une Charogne which features vivid description of a decomposing human body.
While I enjoy reading the original French, I’ve recently discovered a fantastic online resource – http://fleursdumal.org/. This site not only [...]

This week I had the pleasure of reading a very recent short story by Roddy Doyle called Sleep. Roddy Doyle is very well-known in my hometown of Dublin, but I suppose not so familiar over here in the USA.
I like the story – having grown up in the city in which it is set, [...]

After a year of Association for Computing Machinery “professional-level” membership ($200 / year) I’ve decided not to renew. Why not? A number of things really rubbed me up the wrong way about the ACM.
First of all, I had been looking forward to having an @acm.org email alias which I could use as [...]

On our boat, cold, in the midst of a particularly lonely sea. Clouds sitting overhead, fat fearsome and lazy, refused to let any sun filter through. Biscoe was standing on the deck, eyes dulled by the frozen wind, struggling for a matchstick to set his [...]