Month: March 2008
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Latchkey Children
I recently heard, purely anecdotally, about a case where a neighbor called Child Protective Services when a ten-year old boy came home and his mother wasn’t there. His mother was out shopping or something, and had given him a key. I don’t know if this really happened or not, but it seems like an extraordinary…
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Walking Robot
I was very impressed by this walking robot (that link is to a video on YouTube). Watching it gave me a very strong feeling of “the future is now.” No doubt there are many hurdles to overcome, but it sure seems like we could all have a walking robot pack horse in ten years (well,…
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St. Patrick’s Day
Growing up outside of Boston, St. Patrick’s Day was a significant holiday. We even got it off school–though to avoid church and state conflicts it was known as Evacuation Day, supposedly in honor of the date that the British troops were forced out of Boston in 1776. I was quite surprised to discover that this…
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Social Entrepreneurs
A friend of mine who has been working for many years in an area that is now known as social entrepreneurship commented that there is no good economic model for it (he thinks of things like this because he went to business school). This led me to think about economic models for charitable giving. Economists…
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Compiler Warnings
There is an ongoing issue within gcc as to where warnings should be issued. The question is whether warnings should be issued only by the frontend, or whether it is also OK for the optimizers to issue them. The advantage of issuing warnings in the frontend are that warnings are independent of optimization level. Also,…