Xamuel

Not wishing to be rude but that's peanuts. Try http://www.xamuel.com/busy-beaver-numbers/ If anyone can come up with any larger numbers I'd like to hear them. EDIT: Oh and if you think the universe is big and hard to imagine, try considering the phase space of the entire universe! That's the set of all possible configurations of all the particles. Bananas. I encourage you to watch this lecture from Roger Penrose, Aeons Before the Big Bang, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OutKE3tyG94 ...if only for the fantastic hand-drawn overhead transparencies in all the colours of the rainbow. They are a delight and I want to see hipster programmers using them at conferences. BTW also watch it for the crazy physics.

If productivity rises to an absurd degree, I think it makes sense to start having a citizen's wage / minimum guaranteed income: http://www.xamuel.com/ten-reasons-for-guaranteed-minimum-income/ Sure, a lot of people might just become layabouts doing nothing. But are they really doing much right now, by enduring crappy jobs that add marginal value? Other people might unlock vast reservoirs of creativity which would bring great positive externalities to society, if they didn't have to spend their productive hours on such a trite problem as survival.

There'd be a whole lot of programs. There's a good reading that approaches a related subject, but isn't specific to C programs: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/bignumbers.html In short, `busy beaver number' -- number of steps that a halting Turing machine with dictionary of size N can have -- grows pretty fast with N; faster than Ackermann function anyway. Also, supposedly a katamari is the only thing which outgrows the busy beaver sequence ;) http://www.xamuel.com/katamari-damacy-growth/

French/Swedish translator here. . I learned by living in the other countries. Semi-immersion in your home country is possible (movies, books, tutor, conversation exchange) but harder. . What's your goal? Business, pleasure? Focus on finding the vocab you need to know and figuring out what level you'll need to reach. . Fluency in itself isn't a true state - ability to communicate clearly is the best gauge, most of the time this means spoken communication. This can range from simple formalities to industry-specific negotiations. . Traditional reading and writing exercises are only useful to learn the language framework, i.e. its basic grammar. Try to get these out of the way quickly, and use them more as a reference. . Modern novel reading is good for vocab and cementing grammar knowledge, as well as being amusing. . IMO the key to the most important communication channel is learning to speak in a way that is received loud and clear by a native. This means learning the sounds of the language, phonetics, and seeing where they differ to your own sound-bank. A recent blog experiment I read about [http://www.xamuel.com/french-in-30-days-day-30/] made some interesting discoveries - his intensive daily learning only resulted in an understanding of many single words. His actual communication skills weren't functional. I'd say that they could have been, had he focused on the right things. I left my further thoughts on the linked page. . You can do all you need to for effective…

You're mixing up where the negation goes. The lemma says that in any configuration which starts finite and never dies out, there DOES exist at least one lifeline which DOESN'T go in a forbidden direction. (There are almost certainly lots of other lifelines which do go in forbidden directions, that's fine.) An example of a lifeline in a southeastward spaceship that never goes S or SE: http://www.xamuel.com/images/lifeline.gif The proof I outlined above was published in the Elect. J. of Combinatorics (last section): http://www.combinatorics.org/ojs/index.php/eljc/article/view/v20i1p31

All roads lead to Mathematics answers it -- http://www.xamuel.com/all-roads-lead-to-mathematics/

http://www.xamuel.com/inverse-graphing-calculator.php?phrase=Hi Found this link to just such a tool on a related comment thread. Pretty cool.

One of the most entertaining things I've read period, and it's by a mathematician talking about his coming of age: http://www.xamuel.com/homeless-by-choice/

Xamuel doesn't get much traction on HN but here he is spot on: http://www.xamuel.com/a-message-of-regret/ He also has many interesting very non conventional posts beside the purely "math nerd/tech nerd" ones.

The empty string does not. http://www.xamuel.com/inverse-graphing-calculator.php?phrase= But, I have no idea. Perhaps it is a bug wherein a CRLF is being added to the internal string? However, I highly doubt that.