I keep coming across articles (and occasionally videos, and occasionally fiction or poetry) online that I want to share and comment on, but I recently realized that I will never have time to fully comment on everything I read that I find interesting. So I’m pulling another page out of Cory Doctorow’s book: here is a dump of links to cool stuff, along with some (hopefully very) brief descriptions of why I found these articles interesting. (Also, here is a link to a link dump where Doctorow ¹ talks about link blogging. It might be interesting for you to look at.)

Last summer, I was tasked with writing a report about the research I completed and submitting it to my supervisor by the end of the summer. I, of course, had never done this kind of writing before, so I learned several lessons. The hard way. The learning process was super painful, but it did come in handy when I had to write two other research reports in my classes last fall. Here are a few of the lessons I learned.

I think there might be people out there who think I’m a poet, and I think it’s terrifying. I haven’t been a poet since my middle school days of writing rhyming couplets about hating school and my early high school days of writing terrible prose with line breaks. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure the main reason I wrote so many poems in grade nine was because my teacher seemed to have no idea how to grade poems but very strong opinions about fiction, and I felt like I was terrible at writing fiction and wanted a shot at a decent grade. Man, high school was such a great time.

In Part 2 of this talk, we gave a crash course to graph theory and showed how we can use it to view some real-world problems as instances of the densest subgraph problem (DSP). But what exactly is the DSP? If you’ve studied graph theory, you may have heard of something called the Maximum Clique Problem. The goal of the max clique problem is to find the largest complete subgraph in a graph. If we consider our vertices to be people, and edges to represent a friendship relationship between two people, in the max clique problem we are trying to find the largest friend group in a community.

Today, I found out that some students at Carleton University have started a “webring” (or well, close enough) for students in computer science and engineering to post their personal websites. (In fact, this blog also joined that webring, and you can find a link to the rest of the pages in the webring here.) I thought this was a really cool idea, so I asked how they came up with it. It turns out that a few other CS and software engineering (+ adjacent) programs in Canada have also started such webrings.