Julian's Polymath Explorations

Informative, fascinating class and a VERY entertaining professor, with a delightful understated humor and clear explanations, motivations and examples. I was expecting a class entirely about Mathematical Logic... so I was surprised (a good surprise, it turned out) when I discovered that this class roams much more broadly into the Philosophy of Logic.  I was satisfied that enough chapters were about Mathematical Logic - and actually I found the broader context interesting.  For example, I had long heard about Aristotle's syllogisms , but had never looked into them. While there are no Math prerequisites for this class, you'll probably find your head spin by the middle of the course, unless you have a "mathematical predisposition."  (I have a Master's in Math, so for me it was a fun and light "feasting on proofs"...  but a lot of people might feel differently!)  Nonetheless, this great course is quite worthwhile to at least START... ...

Time for the opening shot of a series about Semantic Technology , and in particular contrasting-and-comparing the opposing (but perhaps ultimately complementary) camps of:   RDF Triple Stores , aka Triples-Based Graphs.   For example, Blazegraph or Apache Jena   (Labeled) Property Graphs .  For example, Neo4j or Blazegraph (For this article, I'll assume that you have at least a passing acquaintance with both.  Here is background info on Triplestores and Property Graphs ) It’s my opinion that modeling in terms of Subject/Predicate/Object triples (aka RDF ) might be appealing to mathematicians or philosophers for its minimalist foundation (though a lot of baroque add-on’s quickly come out of the closet!) Modeling in terms of (Labeled) Property Graphs might be appealing to computer scientists, because such graphs appear more usable and less clunky once you start actually doing something with them. Perhaps because I straddle both the Math and CS camps...

What is Time?  And why does it seem to "flow" in just one direction ("arrow of time")? Few questions could be more spellbinding - and almost intractable - than that! In this blog, I'll periodically include detailed reviews of some online courses I've taken. REVIEW OF ONLINE COURSE " Mystery of Time " (course by Cal Tech prof. Sean Carroll, produced by "The Great Courses" in 2012) Another fascinating course by Sean Carroll!  He's very ambitious to not only tackle the Universe - and the difficult abstract concept of Time's Arrow (direction) - but also to make it accessible (sort of) to a (serious and determined) lay audience. Speaking of "layperson", even though that's the intended audience, I'd only recommend this course to people who are used to, at the VERY least, watching (and enjoying!) documentaries on topics such as quantum mechanics and relativity. Let's face it: to seriously tackle...