i.justrealized

Creep is someone unpleasantly strange or eccentric and Prolog is calling me that.

Prolog calling me a creep

What is this “creep” business? In SWI Prolog, the implementation of Prolog which this dictionary uses for the syntax of its examples, when you press return at the end of a line of tracing, Prolog prints “creep” on the same line, and then prints the next line of trace output on the next line. Pressing return again produces “creep” again and another line of tracing, and so on. (Source)

Prolog is a logic programming language. It is a general purpose language often associated with artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. It has a purely logical subset, called “pure Prolog”, as well as a number of extralogical features.

Having its roots in formal logic, and unlike many other programming languages, Prolog is declarative: The program logic is expressed in terms of relations, and execution is triggered by running queries over these relations. Relations and queries are constructed using Prolog’s single data type, the term. Relations are defined by clauses. Given a query, the Prolog engine attempts to find a resolution refutation of the negated query. If the negated query can be refuted, i.e., an instantiation for all free variables is found that makes the union of clauses and the singleton set consisting of the negated query false, it follows that the original query, with the found instantiation applied, is a logical consequence of the program. This makes Prolog (and other logic programming languages) particularly useful for database, symbolic mathematics, and language parsing applications. Because Prolog allows impure predicates, checking the truth value of certain special predicates may have some deliberate side effect, such as printing a value to the screen. This permits the programmer to use some amount of conventional imperative programming when the logical paradigm is inconvenient. (Everything above is from Wikipedia)

Jud and Mike, get into character as they play the inventors of the programming language known as “Prolog”, in the “Introduction to Prolog”

Intoruction to Prolog *updated

I don’t know why someone would do this. But I was looking for some prolog videos and found this.

…In Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe’s dollar is virtually worthless, with foreign currency now being used to purchase basic items. In the past, it gets you 2 oranges.

Zimbabwe introduces $50 billion note

HARARE, Zimbabwe (CNN) — Zimbabwe’s central bank will introduce a $50 billion note — enough to buy just two loaves of bread — as a way of fighting cash shortages amid spiraling inflation.

Zimbabwe is grappling with hyperinflation now officially estimated at 231 million percent, and its currency is fast losing its value. As of Friday, one U.S. dollar was trading at around ZW$25 billion.

When the government issued a $10 billion note just three weeks ago, it bought 20 loaves of bread. That note now can purchase less than half of one loaf.

John Robertson, an economist in Zimbabwe, said he’s puzzled by the introduction of the $50 billion and $20 billion notes.

“I am not really sure what these notes would be for,” he said. “No one now accepts the local currency. It is a waste of resources to print Zimbabwe dollar notes now. Who accepts a currency that loses value by almost 100 percent daily?”

In August, the RBZ slashed ten zeros from the currency. But the zeroes have bounced back with more vigor. (Source: CNN)

At least everyone’s a billionaire there.

This is what Microsoft wants to make Japanese feel with Windows 3.1. Wacky I say.

Weird Japanese Windows 3.1 commercial

Weird Japanese Windows 3.1 commercial.

This looks like English but I never understood what it meant.

modular modular homogenate

modular passerby decontrolling? sunshine, themselves humble.
aniline faulkner haynes fertile sorb reredos, sorb
motor mooney beatnik homogenate mueller.

quarry compleat.

This kinda reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”.

Daily Star reports that coffee shrink women’s breasts and, well, has an opposite effect on men’s.

CUPPA COFFEE GIVES GIRLS A SMALLER CUP

The caffeine-fuelled drink is well-known for keeping people alert and sobering up drunks.

But Swedish scientists have caused a stir by suggesting women who drink more than three cups a day could see their bra size drop.

Nearly 300 women were quizzed but Helena Jernstroem, of Lund University, said women should not worry too much.

She explained: “Coffee-drinking women do not have to worry their breasts will shrink to nothing overnight. They will get smaller, but the breasts aren’t just going to disappear.

While caffeine may shrink women’s breasts, the reaction is the reverse for coffee-slurping blokes – it can make their “moobs” swell.

On the plus side, the study showed regular hits of caffeine reduce the risk of women
developing breast cancer. (Source: DailyStar)

(Icecream with espresso. Tried it at somewhere I can’t recall.)

Breast cancer, by the way, is number five in cancer deaths.

Ah this is quite interesting, an excerpt from Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, page 159:

The Birthday Paradox

The most intuitive way to describe the data mining problem to a non-statistician is through what is called teh birthday paradox, though it is not really a paradox, simply a perceptional oddity. If you meet someone randomly, there is a one in 365.25 chance of you sharing their birthday, and a considerably smaller one of having the exact birthday of the same year. So, sharing the same birthday would be coincidental event that you would discuss at the dinner table. Now let us look at a situation where there are 23 people in a room. What is the chance of there being 2 people with the same birthday? About 50%. For we are not specifying which people need to share a birthday; any pair works.

Now 50% is really high chance! Bet you never thought of that. Well, you could read more at Wikipedia for the exact math of The Birthday Problem or the Birthday Attack.