A Special Midweek Recipe: Ad-Libbed Cranberry Chutney
It's not saturday, but I've got a recipe that I needed to write down before I forget it, so you're getting an extra bonus. I usually make a simple cranberry relish for thanksgiving. But it needs to be made a couple of days in advance. This year, I completely forgot about the cranberries until this morning. So I figured I needed to do something else. A good chutney sounded nice. I went hunting online, but couldn't find anything that sounded good, so I went ahead and ad-libbed. And the results were amazing - this is definitely the new cranberry tradition in the Chu-Carroll household. Sweet, tart, and spicy - it's a perfect compliment for the turkey.

Creating User-Defined Types in Haskell
(This is an edited repost of one of the posts from the earlier version of my Haskell tutorial.) (This file is a literate haskell script. If you save it as a file whose name ends in ".lhs", it's actually loadable and runnable in GHCI or Hugs.) Like any other modern programming language, Haskell has excellent support for building user-defined data types. In fact, even though Haskell is very much not object-oriented, most Haskell programs end up being centered around the design and implementation of data structures, using constructions called classes and instances. In this post, we're going t

The Balance of Screening Tests
As you've no doubt heard by now, there's been a new recommendation issues which proposes changing the breast-cancer screening protocol for women under 50, by eliminating mammograms for women who don't have significant risk factos. While Orac has done a terrific job of covering this here and here, I wanted to throw in a couple of notes and a personal perspective. Read the rest of this post... |

Shameful Innumeracy in the New York Times
I've been writing this blog for a long time - nearly four years. You'd think that after all of the bad math I've written about, I must have reached the point where I wouldn't be surprised at the sheer innumeracy of most people - even most supposedly educated people. But alas for me, I'm a hopeless idealist. I just never quite manage to absorb how clueless the average person is. Today in the New York Times, there's an editorial which talks about the difficulties faced by the children of immigrants. In the course of their argument, they describe what they claim is the difference between th

Types in Haskell: Types are Propositions, Programs are Proofs
(This is a revised repost of an earlier part of my Haskell tutorial.) Haskell is a strongly typed language. In fact, the type system in Haskell is both stricter and more expressive than any type system I've seen for any non-functional language. The moment we get beyond writing trivial integer-based functions, the type system inevitably becomes visible, so we need to take the time now to talk about it a little bit, in order to understand how it works. Read the rest of this post... |