Valedictory Lecture: A Micro-Century of Computational Miscellany
Larry Snyder (UW CSE)
CSE 520 Colloquium
Thursday, June 3, 2010, 4:30pm
Abstract
NOTE: this talk will not be broadcast live.
A micro-century (uC) is 52.6 minutes, the optimum length for a college lecture in the opinion of people who worry about such things. A valedictory lecture, a concept with a British pedigree, is a ponderous speech on an arcane topic of no apparent interest to anyone but the speaker. (Retiring academics, after several thousand micro-centuries in the classroom, are wonderfully well prepared to deliver them.) Miscellany, of course, is a collection of diverse things- odds and ends with no unifying theme.
In this decidedly non-technical talk, I describe interesting odds and ends about computing that have caught my attention over the years, because, unfortunately, the dog ate my notes for the originally planned lecture: 'Apposition or Opposition: Dialectic Analysis of 'binary' in Post-modernist Computer Science Thought.'