Jesse Hughes

Mikhail

(May 20, 1990--July 27, 2005)

R.I.P.

I teach the following courses:

Bentley University in Waltham.
- Problems of Philosophy, Section 01 (MR 8:00 — 9:20) (course outline)
- Ethics, Section 01 (TR 9:30 — 10:50) (course outline)

Foundations of Logical Reasoning, Sections 05 (TR 8:00 — 9:15) (course outline) and 09 (TR 9:30 — 10:45) (course outline)

From September, 2003 to September, 2006, I was a post-doc in the philosophy department at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. My work is part of the Norms in Knowledge project. My work involved a conceptual analysis of artifactual function. The aim was to understand artifactual function by providing a suitable formal language and semantics for expressing functional claims. You can see an example of this work here and also in my papers, posters and slides pages.

From August, 2001 to August 2003, I was a post-doc in the Computer Science Department at the University of Nijmegen. My research was part of the "Modal Operators for Coalgebras" joint project with CWI.

My wife Ling Cheung Hughes works at an IP law firm. My son Quincy attends Milton Academy and writes for Slant, Milton's online news and opinion journal.

I received my PhD in Logic, Computation and Methodology from the Philosophy Department of Carnegie Mellon University in May, 2001. While at CMU, I was involved in the Logics of Types and Computation Group.

I received an MS in Logic and Computation at CMU in 1996. I received an MS in Mathematics from Oklahoma State University. I also received a BS in Computer Science, Math and Philosophy from OkState in 1990.

Hockey team info

Our Hockey NA team info page

Shameless self-promotion

Public radio stuff

National Public Radio
The news programs Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday
Car Talk
This American Life
My (out-of-date) scripts for timeshifting NPR's news programs and burning them to CD or MP3 player.
The Linux Radio Timeshift HOWTO, a more complete guide how to do the above.
Some NPR stations: WDUQ Pittsburgh (with live MP3 streams that just about any media player can play), WHYY Philadelphia, WBEZ Chicago and KOSU in Metropolitan Stillwater, OK.
Radiolovers.com has a pretty good selection of old radio programs (which they hope aren't under copyright control any more). You can find Abbott and Costello, Gunsmoke, Benny Goodman, Flash Gordon and others there, all in mp3 format. The filenames and interface are a bit haphazard and they mp3s don't have id3 tags, but it's a nice service. (I have my doubts that this material, mostly from the 1940s and 50s, is really in the public domain, however.)
Mercury Theatre, another site offering great old radio programs and again likely infringing on copyrights (thanks to simply unsupportable retroactive term extensions). Includes Welles's "War of the Worlds".
Get yer free Swastika!, a somewhat strange advertisement from the 1930s.

Geek stuff

Games

A character sheet generator for Avalon Hill's Gunslinger.
A couple of files related to the SPI game CityFight.
My own gnome-hearts AI player, Jake.

Linux

The wonderful Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide. A great reference!
The GIMP, a full-featured, free software image manipulator. (Available for Windows, too)
A great Gimp tutorial site for touching up and playing with photos.

Emacs

Emacs , the original FSF text editor as operating system.
Xemacs, its somewhat prettier cousin (sorry, I'm not a purist).
Gnus, the amazing Emacs mail and news client.

Turing machines

Slackware? FreeBSD? Bah. These are for the real nerds.

Gturing, the premier Linux TM simulator.
Shelburne's Turing Machine Simulator for Windows/DOS.
My teeny collection of sample programs and emacs-lisp utilities.

Intellectual property issues

So-called intellectual property rights are increasing, to the detriment of consumers. Here are a few sites about this issue.

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group defending consumer rights from increasingly unfair copyright laws.
Freedom to tinker A blog about reverse engineering, digital rights management (a hot new means of crippling computers), etc.
Lawrence Lessig's blog.
Creative Commons. Congress has tipped the balance in favor of "content providers", but they don't have to accept it. Creative Commons gives authors the ability to reserve a reasonable portion of their rights.
The Free Software Foundation, the original copyleft folks. The FSF is the author of the GPL and sponsor of the GNU project.

Miscellaneous geek

A textual analysis of Green Eggs and Ham. (Okay, actually, it's just a word count.)

Sociology lessons from superheroes.

An examination of artifacts and functions, as explained in a children's book.

Metaphysics in the News.

Hans Christian Anderson gives an insightful assessment of the value of self-absorbed academics like me. My boy understood this story not at all.

There are lots of paper airplane sites out there, but I think that Joseph Palmer's site has some of the best designs and clearest instructions.

If you like supporting over-educated, hippy dropout soap-makers (and who doesn't), swing by the Meadow Sage website and order a bar or seven.

My first animated feature, an insightful look at the horrors of modern warfare.

JogLab, a homemade backronym and acrostic tool.

Jesse F. Hughes

Last modified: Sun Feb 16 10:08:08 EST 2020