Year's end

2011 was a hard year. But personally I had some satisfactions, and achievements that let me come out with a positive balance. A year being hard doesn’t make it a bad year.

We live in a time when people don’t reflect much, so the clarification matters. The trouble with the digital age is that it has led people to think in binary, 0 or 1. The year is good or bad. We computer people are partly to blame for that: on facebook, people are friends or not, like or not, +1 or nothing. I invite you to see life as it really is, a continuous reality, not discrete, not digital. With highs and lows, with states, with variables, with contradictions and few certainties.

It’s time to end the year and start the new one, which we’ll talk about soon enough. It’s time to reboot. But this post is about closing out, about taking stock. I leave you with my personal selection of the articles I think came out best this year, and I’ll see you in the next one.

1. The Sugar King: dedicated to my friends who studied at Universidad Federico Santa María (by the way, I don’t like the initials USM: Universidad Santa María carries a connotation I suspect Don Federico would not have appreciated; in fact, if you read this story you’ll see that things didn’t turn out according to his will).

2. On the properties of unicorn horn, a reflection on collaboration between university and industry (I really like that title).

3. Time as a parameter, I don’t know why I took the time to answer the nonsense the minister said.

4. Talking drums: discovering the secret of the talking drums was an epiphany, “White man, spirit in the forest, come, come to the house of the tall bushes above the spirit of the white man in the forest. The woman with the yams is waiting. Come, come.”

5. Two men and a universal machine. It’s not in that text, but I recently found out that Von Neumann was a teacher to Turing and Shannon, and that during the war they met again, an episode I’ll have to tell someday.

6. The paradox of common sense: this post is the first in a series that was a pleasure to write.

7. Imagined causes: the post hoc fallacy explained. I’ve noticed this fallacy gets used quite a bit in our national debate; the other day I caught a friend at it and told him so. Writing about these cognitive biases was the best thing I did on the blog this year.

8. Circular reasoning: another fairly common kind of reasoning error.

9. Listening: let’s get this ability back.

10. The problem with reason, progressives need to learn cognitive science.

11. Poetry, calligrams and the beauty of code, programming is an art…

12. On how to scratch an ear, computer people make their lives more complicated than necessary.

13. Salads and algorithms, a tasty recipe for a nice cool salad for the summer.

14. Java must die, so that Java may live.

Happy 2012!!