burritos
roach motels
nuclear waste containers
closure operators
space suits
assembly lines
lawnmowers
raiiiiiyayn, on your wedding day
ordinary monoids
objects
analogies
building a car out of bicycles instead of walking
souls
the Hotel California
recipes
playing at someone else’s house
Several of these are facetious references to the monad explanation problem itself, one is actually a reference to Liebnizian monads that got left in the list by mistake, and one is just something I threw in to be silly.
If you want my opinion, and I haven’t got deep enough into it to be much more than snide about it, which is why this post is here rather than on my programming blog, I think monads are like general algebras, or models of computational forms. And they are also a way of representing a temporal sequence as a chain of functional compositions, which is how the eternal static Spinozan plenitude of a Haskell program can actually get its hands dirty and do something useful.
Whether this is right, and how it all really works is something I don’t expect to understand until I write one of my own.
Singularity (n.) hypothetical future scenario in which science fiction writers and fans get so into computers that they can’t imagine any hypothetical future scenarios other than “runaway hyperintelligent AIs turn the whole Solar System into a vast computer”
Swingularity Unexpected fad for a cappella jazz sweeps the world, resulting in a billions-strong toe-tappin’ close-harmony groupmind.
Engularity In the wake of Great Depression 2.0, the only remaining economic activity on Earth is teaching English as a second language to business students.
Wingularity We bioengineer ourselves to be flight-capable, but it’s so much fun and so energy-consuming that all we do in our spare time is hunt for grubs.
Seems that “busy/important” is so last century, because these days even politicians have time to stuff around on Twitter. And to think I was vaguely embarrassed about doing something which I thought was the equivalent of gluing cut-out pictures of bands from Smash Hits onto your folder at high school, oh, wait, no, that’s what Facebook is.
Anyway it all reminds me of that time in the 70s when Malcolm Fraser ate a sausage which had been barbequed by solar power. Sure, people laughed, or at least my parents did, but look at how far we’ve come since those early days.
For the last five years I’ve given my computer names which have all fallen into a very general theme: I added a new one to the list about a month ago. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a computer at home which was faster than the one at work.
Amateur medical visualisation go! The green blob is my benign arachnoid cyst, which was nicknamed the “brain cloud” when it was first discovered in 1991.
