Effective Papers

This novel, Ra, is available online free at http://qntm.org/ra . Apparently there is a paid version of the book with a different ending available on bookstores. But I didn't get to the ending of the book. The book got boring for me after a while, and I dropped reading it. That said, I loved the book's premise and the first one-third, and that is why I wanted to discuss the book. The author, Sam Hughes, proposes to us a world where magic is real and is employed as a technology.    Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity. Magic is real, but it is hard work. The spells need to be written very carefully, and it takes a long time to compose/create the spells. And then the spells don't always work, they are very sensitive as to how you cast it. (Hey, it worked at home on my machine!) The spells also require mana/energy to burn (like...

It turns out I churned out a decent number of book reviews in the last four years. (I think I blogged about only half of the books I read. In retrospect, I wish I had blogged about all of them, so I could refer to the posts to recap their main ideas quickly.) Recently I was asked if I have a post that consolidates my book reviews. Well, this post is it. These books can be helpful for researchers and information workers, both in terms of providing inspiration and supplying techniques for thinking and writing. They are all easy reading. I classified the books as technological, writing, personal development, biographies, fiction, and other. Technology Zero to One (Peter Thiel) Crypto: How the code rebels beat the government---saving privacy in the digital age. (by Steven Levy) Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (by Ed Catmull, cofounder of Pixar, with Amy Wallace) Loonshots: How to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure d...

I recently listened to the audio book of Lust for Life, a biographical novel on Vincent van Gogh's life. The book was written by Irving Stone in 1934 after a lot of research and processing through 200+ letters between Vincent van Gogh and his younger brother, art dealer Theo van Gogh. The book is long at around 500 pages. But I enjoyed the book because I was mesmerized to learn about Vincent van Gogh's life and the hardships he endured. On the other hand, this book was written 90 years ago, and it shows.  In many places, the book is cheesy, novelized with cheesy romance, oversimplification, sentimentalization, and chivalry. It is ironic that the book explicitly violates the principles of avant-garde art movement, which it narrates from Emile Zola's mouth while narrating Van Gogh's life at Paris. A short biography of Van Gogh Courtesy of Wikipedia Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet, and thoughtful. As a young man he w...

It seems like 20th century was the golden age of science and technology . Just look at that list, so many breakthroughs in math, physics, astronomy, biology, medicine, energy, electronics, computing . Some of these include: set theory, topology, abstract algebra, formal logic, incompleteness theorems, theory of computation special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics, fundamental interactions, electroweak interaction, nuclear fusion Big Bang theory, space probes, moon landing, space station, hubble space telescope DNA structure, human genome project, antibiotics, many vaccines, many drugs Transistor, semiconductor, integrated circuits, MOS image sensors, CPUs, radio, TV, Internet What about the breakthroughs in the last 30 years, 1990 onwards? There isn't any significant breakthroughs we can point to in basic sciences except for detection of gravitational waves and Higgs boson . On the applied side of things we have the human genome project and personal computing rev...

This paper is by Kun Ren, Dennis Li, and Daniel Abadi, and it appeared at VLDB 2019. This paper is about providing strict serializability in geo-replicated databases. Strict serializability implies that all reads within a transaction must see the value of any writes that committed before the transaction began, no matter where that write was performed world-wide. Furthermore, if a transaction, A, begins after (in real time) transaction B completes, no client can see the effect of A without the effect of B. Since a strict serializability system behaves like it is running on a single machine processing transactions sequentially, this reduces application code complexity and bugs. However, strict serializability comes with a cost. Current state-of-the-art geo-replicated systems cannot provide strict serializability  alongside low latency writes and high transactional throughput. To achieve all three (strict-serializability, low-latency writes and high transactional throughput), SLOG use...

During this Covid-19 pandemic, I have been staying home and putting a lot of trust in medicine assured that they will find a way to get us through this. What else can I do? I don't know about the domain, so I defer to the experts. But, several months in to the quarantine, with the deluge of disheartening news about lack of progress on this problem, I am getting more and more worried, anxious, and restless. I am sensing I am not alone. There is a clash of civilizations brewing between medical and lay people, and maybe more relevant for my domain, between medical and IT people. OK, this is how we will do this. I will first give you off-the-cuffs comments from the Cynical Murat. I know that Cynical Murat is wrong in many places, because I don't know anything about medicine and he is a caricaturized version of myself to voice my insecurities/worries about the situation. (Oh God, this is getting weird.) So I can't just leave you with his rant. I follow that up with a response fr...

Around the beginning of the quarantine, my son, Ahmet (age 12), has started working on the Unity framework . Unity is a popular game engine, like Unreal Engine 4, and Godot. It was launched in 2005, aiming to democratize game development. It is very versatile and beginner friendly. There are many YouTube tutorials about Unity. It is also powerful, as it includes 2D, 3D terrain engines, physics simulator, real-time dynamic shadows, graphics rendering, networked multi-player support, etc. Unity was used for building many amazing games , including Call of Duty: Mobile. Ahmet's Unity journey  I would have loved to say that I supported Ahmet in his quest to learn Unity. But I am just a professor, I am hopelessly disconnected with cool new programming environments/frameworks. I couldn't even help him install the thing, when he had difficulties in the beginning. This was a 5GB installation, and he would ran into problems in the last GB, and also had problems with package dependencies....