Bitcoin Prospects

When I first heard about Bit­coin sev­eral years ago, I was dis­mis­sive that a cur­rency not backed by a cen­tral bank or valu­able com­mod­ity could suc­ceed as a cur­ren­cy. It still seems doubt­ful to me that Bit­coin could estab­lish itself as a proper world cur­ren­cy, but recent events have lead me to believe that it’s possible and that those involved are not nec­es­sar­ily par­tic­i­pat­ing in a de-­facto ponzi scheme. Bank of America seems to be get­ting into the game so Bit­coin looks to me like it might be on it’s way to legit­i­ma­cy. With this in mind, I thought I’d do some back­-of-the-en­ve­lope cal­cu­la­tions to see if I could fig­ure out the likely future worth of Bit­coins and the value of invest­ing in them at the present time… Read More

Some fun with D3 and Clojurescript

I was recently play­ing around with D3 and ClojureScript and I ended up cre­at­ing this silly exhaustive sort sim­u­la­tor for the TSP. I ended up learn­ing a cou­ple of things… Read More

Lazy Sequences in Clojure

I was look­ing for some more infor­ma­tion on how to con­struct lazy sequences and real­ized that there is lit­tle in the way of doc­u­men­ta­tion on lazy sequences in Clo­jure. These design notes were the best I could find on the sub­ject and while they are illu­mi­nat­ing, I thought the con­cept could be explained bet­ter.

Lazy Sequences are an inte­gral part of the Clo­jure pro­gram­ming lan­guage but one you don’t see in a lot of other pro­gram­ming lan­guages. A sequence, in Clo­jure, is a sort of metatype or pro­to­col. It sig­ni­fies a class of datas­truc­tures which store items in a log­i­cal sequence, such as arrays or lists. Clo­jure has sev­eral types of sequences includ­ing clas­sic Lisp-style lists, vec­tors (which cor­re­spond most closely to arrays in other lan­guages,) and lazy sequences… Read More