Holy cow! Can you believe your luck? What better way to spend some portion of whatever day of the week it is than to think about parallelizing reduction algorithms?

Really? You can't think of one? In that case, I'll kick off our inevitable friendship by contributing a clojure implementation of a fancy algorithm that asynchronously reduces arbitrary input streams while preserving order. Then I'll scare you with glimpses of my obsessive quest to visualize what this algorithm is actually doing; if you hang around, I'll show you what I eventually cobbled together with clojurescript and reagent. (Hint. It's an ANIMATION …

Synecducers

Great computer languages, like monarchs and planets, become emblems of what surrounds them. The greatest computer languages are barely there, as nearly everything we file under their names could be described as a library or other customization. It's not unusual and not even absurd to find a question about socket() on a C language forum: Linux is arguably a morphogenic implication of C. Clojure, too, is formally minimal, but it induces composition. Much of what we specifically admire about it isn't the language itself so much as an expression of it.

Clojure provides Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) via the …

Some time after my recent fiddles with IMDB, I read an interesting article about using a perceptron to classify words as parts of speech based on features that precede them in text. It's all done in python or some such sh*t, but whatever. Still very cool. Since I had all of this IMDB data accumulated in Mongo, I thought I would try to play with it, and the idea I had was to predict metacritic scores from the actors that appeared in each film. In retrospect, it's far from clear that such a prediction can be made and especialy …