Here’s a funny problem that you may probably know if you read Douglas Hofstadter’s wonderful book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. You are given a small alphabet, which consists in the letters M, U and I, and a set of four rules, where x and y denote any string:

• xI to xIU: append U at the end of a string that ends with I;
• Mx to Mxx: append the string after M a second time;
• xIIIy to xUy: replace III with U;
• xUUy to xy: remove UU.

Let’s start with the string MI. The goal is to convert this string to MU using those rules, that you can reuse at will. I can’t remember where I saw this problem mentioned on the internet. There is no solution to this problem, but I keep thinking of this gorgeous book each time I see some mention of Hofstadter’s puzzles.

If you like pv and wants a tool that can be launched afterwards, then try progress, the Coreutils Progress Viewer. BTW, it’s available via Homebrew.

Mathematica/Mathics tutorial for the First Course in Applied Differential Equations.

Herbie: Find and fix floating-point problems. #racket

Hot off the kitchen:

  Bill Fay, Who is the Sender?.

What a wonderful work on SICP on Eli Bendersky’s website. #lisp #clojure

Identification of hidden population structure in time-scaled phylogenies. #bioinformatics

What’s coming in Python 3.8. #python

If Racket shares the beauty of Lisp and Python, it may even get ride of parenthesis in the near future. #racket