Booklover -- Joy and Against the Grain

Against the Grain

Going against the Grain

We review a general, space and time eecient technique for delivering a sequence of values computable by a recurrence relation, in the order opposing the data-dependencies of the recurrence. The technique provides a series of time/space tradeoos we characterize by parameter K > 0. Namely, N values can be delivered against the grain in O(KN) time and O(KN 1=K) space. This basic idea is not new, b...

Going against the Grain

2748 The data that would change the course of Jonathan Tilly’s career and cause an uproar in the field of ovarian biology almost never saw the light of day. In Tilly’s cell death lab, postdoctoral fellow Tomoko Kaneko had twice repeated her experiments to kill off mouse egg cells, but something was wrong because the egg cell numbers were still high after treatment with a chemotherapy drug. Kane...

The biology of joy.

Richard Davidson was in a lab observing a Buddhist Monk Sink deep into serene meditation when he noticed something that sent his own pulse racing. Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, hurriedly double-checked the data streaming to his computer from electrodes attached to the monk's skull, but there was no mistake. Electrical activity in the left pre...

The Joy of Sets

A colony of beavers, an unkindness of ravens, a murder of crows, a team of oxen, . . . each is an example of a set of things. Rather than define what a set is, we assume you have the “ordinary, human, intuitive (and frequently erroneous) understanding”1 of what a set is. 1 Paul Halmos, Naive Set Theory, Springer–Verlag, NY 1974. Sets have elements, often called members. The elements of a set ma...