Interview with Bruce Schneier on Privacy, Security & the Future

Bruce Schneier talks about how the mechanics of privacy changed since the advent of social media, who holds control and power in the new arena, what are real issues and what are just generational differences in dealing with them. He has a lot of good analogies to make his points. 🙂

Authors@Google: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is discussing his book “The Pluto Files” … basically recounting a few thousand years of finding things in the night sky, naming them and building an understanding of what they are … case in point: (now dwarf planet 😉 ) Pluto … including his hypothesis on why Americans in particular get so worked up about Pluto not being a planet any more. 😀

The Y Combinator

I take my head off to Jim, that’s a great way to approach a weird intersection of mathematics and programming. 😉 For those who are curious … he uses a very simple mathematical algorithm to explore how you can express recursions in Lambda calculus and thus “derives” the Y combinator.

Totally useless, but worth every minute. 😉

 

Secrets of Search

Douglas Merrill from Google talks about what it takes to build a search engine for the web.

Besides that what strikes me as interesting is their choice of languages “focusing” (he didn’t exactly say that, but it’s what you understand, when he says they won a prize for it) their efforts in machine translation on: Arabic and Chinese … o.O