some kind of forgetfulness?

Don't you hate it when you *knew* the answer to a question, but you didn't remember to put it on your paper, and leaving the impression that you didn't know?

This concerns the question of a more efficient algorithm for Constrained n-Rooks: of course I know of one. I was talking about it last summer! The idea is to *first* prune (making those entries 0) and make all the remaining entries 1, and *then* use a k-th best assignments algorithm, for increasing k. The admissible permutations will score equally well (with a score of n).

I just wasn't concerned about algorithms for many many months.

hand-tuning only once

I want a way of generating LaTeX from wikitext. This will probably not work 100% anytime soon, so I expect to need to hand-tune the output of the conversion.

But if I do things the naive way, whenever I make a minor change to the wikitext (we don't want to edit the generated LaTeX, because that would be a version control nightmare), I'll need to do the hand-tuning again, EVERY TIME.

Possible solutions:
* use the diff(history) provided by the wiki to make the analogous change to the LaTeX file, without touching the parts that were hand-tuned.
* programming by demonstration?

rbjones

Who is Robert Bishop Jones?

His factastic website focuses on philosophy, mathematical and philosophical logic, automated reasoning and transhumanism (see their bibliography). Its funny and colorful design and its exuberant visionary-ism make it looks a bit "crazy"er than it already is. Kinda like TUNES in the old days.

I like its focus on important questions about the human condition, meta-philosophy and AI.

It used to be a powerful attractor in my websurfing, but either its PageRank has taken a beating, or my search terms have changed. Maybe both.

Since fare (the mind behind TUNES) turned out to be such an interesting guy, I'd be very curious to meet RBJ.

---

Today, rbj led me to this quote:

<< But ordinary language is all right.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958: 28)>>

I don't know the context, but I suspect I'll use this someday soon, when arguing with the type theorists about proof rigour.

bleg: buying flexible tickets

I should have my passport back from the Canadians before the time comes for me to fly to Finland, but just in case, I probably want my tickets to be flexible. Do any of the usual travel sites (Orbitz, Travelocity, Expedia, CheapTickets, etc.) have flexible tickets? Do they cost more than the usual?

New York, here I come

Flight: Pittsburgh to New York to Pittsburgh

Traveler name: Gustavo Lacerda

Pittsburgh (PIT) to New York (JFK)	6/05/08	6:15 pm - 8:05 pm	Delta Operated By: ATLANTIC SOUTHEAST
New York (LGA) to Pittsburgh (PIT)	6/10/08	9:15 pm - 10:43 pm	US Airways Operated By: US AIRWAYS EXPRESS-REPUBLIC AIRLINES

people to see: cozmic1, Max, nastiadrofa, _wirehead_, Adam, rdore, Justin?, craigslist strangers?