teaching machines

CS 491 Lecture 1 – Restaurand

Welcome to the course notes for CS 491, Mobile Software Development. You can subscribe to RSS feed with your favorite reader. (I use Google Reader.) Take a moment to check out the syllabus! Introduction Hi. My first cell phone had a cord. It was so big I couldn’t fit it under my car seat. It […]

CS 145 Lab 1

Welcome CS 145 is a class where you learn to teach machines. You won’t just use them. You’re going to become a developer. Unlike the natural and social sciences, computer science and programming are not topics addressed in many of our schools. Let’s take a moment to describe what we computer scientists do with each […]

A man on the bus

In Knoxville, Tennessee, a gentleman was talking with a friend of mine on the bus about some troubles he was having with modern technology. I thought the incident would make a nice limerick: I once met a man who was miffed ‘Tween email and him was a rift When he pressed the @ key Number […]

Lucy and the Linear Search

My wife and I are reading C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader together before we go see it in the theater. We stumbled upon this nice little discussion on computational complexity in chapter 10: One thing that worried [Lucy] a good deal was the size of the Book. The Chief Voice had not been able […]

IEEE-754 sighting

I was walking through our local transit system’s headquarters yesterday when I saw what I presumed was someone dividing 0 by 0 in the marquee software: When I showed my non-programming wife, she politely chuckled and moved on with her business. On questioning, she confessed she didn’t think much of it — just a cute […]