First, "It was twenty years ago today", Paul Ginsparg's history of arXiv.org, which includes some history of the Web from the perspective of the community for which it was invented:
Second, Scott Aaronson's tour-de-force, "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity". Sample punch to the jaw:
In other highbrow news, right now I'm reading a draft of Mike Amundsen's Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node, and it's pretty awesome.
Mon Sep 12 2011 13:20 Papers!:
Recently I read some academic papers that were comprehensible and interesting, and since I'm not a professional academic, that's really all I need out of such things. Check 'em out.
In early 1994, I
happened to serve on a committee advising the APS about putting Physical Review Letters
online. I suggested that a Web interface along the lines of the xxx.lanl.gov prototype might
be a good way for the APS to disseminate its documents. A response came back from
another committee member: “Installing and learning to use a WorldWideWeb browser is a
complicated and difficult task — we can’t possibly expect this of the average physicist.” So
the APS went with a different (and short-lived) platform. Meanwhile, the CERN website
had partitioned its linked list of ‘all the web servers in the world’ into geographic regions,
as if keeping such lists could still be a sensible methodology for navigating information.
Suppose
we want to claim, for example, that a computation that plays chess is “equivalent” to some other
computation that simulates a waterfall. Then our claim is only non-vacuous if it’s possible to
exhibit the equivalence (i.e., give the reductions) within a model of computation that isn’t itself
powerful enough to solve the chess or waterfall problems.
under a Creative Commons License.