Taking the term “Rockstar Programmer” to a new level—well, perhaps they’re half way there?—Dylan Beattie has developed a programming language called Rockstar that allows people to live their wildest dream of writing code that resembles a 1980s rock song: Rockstar is designed for creating computer programs that are also song lyrics, and is heavily influenced by the lyrical […]
About: Mason Porter
Posts by Mason Porter:
University Course Proposal: “Calling Bullshit”
Professors Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin West from University of Washington have developed a new interdisciplinary course with the compelling title of Calling Bullshit. From publication bias to fake news, bullshit is everywhere. And it’s important to be able to navigate it, separate delusion from reality, and call out bullshit when we see it. In a post-truth world, […]
Galam’s Work on Galam Models (Reviewed by Galam)
In 2008, French physicist Serge Galam wrote a review article about “Galam models,” in which he cited 71 papers, all of which were written or cowritten by him. Galam specializes in a topic known as “social physics” (or “sociophysics” for short), an area of complex systems that concerns the use of ideas and tools from physics to study collective social […]
Time Travel and Journal Publishing
Can journal publishers travel backwards in time? You may think the answer is no, but consider the following case. Along with Ginestra Bianconi of Queen Mary University of London, I edited a special issue of European Journal of Applied Mathematics on “Network Analysis and Modelling.” To introduce the special issue, Ginestra and I wrote an editorial. As […]
