So, I think Richard Dawkins has finally erased his debt to me

(his debt for being such a prick)

Richard Dawkins calls for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI

(What does it is really that, plus this:

Richard Dawkins: I greatly admire Lynn Margulis's sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I'm referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.

)

You will hope you have Neanderthal Genes.

Steven Mithen (2006) proposes that the Neanderthals had an elaborate proto-linguistic system of communication which was more musical than modern human language, and which predated the separation of language and music into two separate modes of cognition.[67]

(From Neanderthal Language)

I blush with pride and rememb'rance

Austin found this post from 2004. He and I worked on this game back in the early '90's. This error, which I put in, is from a Hole song. I was sure it had been removed before we shipped. It hadn't.


>Hi, I'm trying to run the DOS version of Flight Unlimited 1
>under Windows Me. I have installed the patch (from Avsim), but
>I get a page fault after the loading screens every time I try
>to run the game. The exact error message is:
>
>[i]Flight Unlimited vF2.4S has CRASHED.
>(Someday you will ache like I ache.)
>
>Page fault
>EAX: 00000000 EBX: fe000000 ECX: 3f5f8000 EDX: 00000003 TXT: 00000207
>ESI: 0000000e EDI: d01e0000 EBP: 847f1498 ESP: 848ebe40 DTA: 0000020f
>EIP: 8475726f ERR: 00000006 EFL: 00010216 EXC: 0000000e EMN: 846d583c
>CS: 0207 DS: 020f ES: 020f FS: 0000 GS: 02cf SS: 020f



That's a uniquely phrased error message. ;-)
Can't say as I've ever seen one like that before.

So much progress has been made!

You often hear things like this said nowadays:

An automated data system analysis technique is described.

The technique is designed to alleviate some of the principal

problems that beset current analysis--large data workloads,

long span of time between project inception and system

operational date, the lack of explicit directions for conducting

data system analysis and using the results, and the lack of a

technique to control data system changes throughout its life-

time. The analysis is geared to determining workload, rela-

tionships and storage characteristics of documents in the in-

formation network automatically.

The sad thing is, this was written by O. T. Gatto in 1964.

Yesterday was a Bad Day

• The Supreme Court decided that corporations are very important citizens
• Air America announced it was going away

This is why I can barely read newspapers

I've had a hard time reading for most of my life -- my recall isn't great, I read kind of slowly, and most of the time I have to read stuff over and over to really understand it. Mostly I just accept the fact that I'm only going to remember a little bit of what I read. I can't tell you most of the plot of a book I've just finished, and I almost certainly can't tell you how it ended.

But I have an even harder time with newspapers. The standard journalistic voice is really confusing and infuriating to me. Here's an example of something that's basically impossible for me to just read:

(The third paragraph of http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2466002)

The newspaper was expounding the nationalistic argument now being used in China to counter Google's announcement last week that it would stop censoring its Chinese search engine and may even pull out of the world's fastest-growing Internet market because of sophisticated cyber attacks, originating in China, that resulted in the theft of intellectual property and targeted the g-mail accounts of human rights activists and some businesses.

I mean, come on. If you wrote a sentence like this in middle school, your teacher would tell you that you are really smart, and that you should rewrite the sentence.

Can you really read this sentence just once, at a normal speed, and understand it? Blows my mind. Now, it may be an extreme example, but I find all newspaper writing like this to one degree or another. Even the puff pieces are like this for me. The only stuff that I can really follow are the pieces in the Book Review, because they are deliberately not trying to spray facts at you -- they're discursive, and get to the hard facts somewhere in the middle. In other words, they're not journalistic.

Here's how I would rewrite this:

Sophisticated cyber attacks resulted in the theft of intellectual property, and targeted the g-mail accounts of human rights activists and some businesses. The attacks originated in China, causing Google to announce last week that it would stop censoring its Chinese search engine, and may even pull out of the world's fastest-growing Internet market. The Global Times expounded the nationalistic argument to counter Google's announcement.

I know this is utterly unacceptable for journalistic writing, but it is much easier for me to understand. Am I the only one?

I always assumed that a major reason for the journalistic style is that it's more succinct. My rewrite however, saves one character.

I do see one real problem: "the nationalistic argument" at the end is too far enough from its referent in the previous paragraph. I would therefore want to move the previous paragraph after this one. But that breaks what seems to be another rule of journalistic writing: start with the barest facts, and add detail as you go along. By this rule, the nationalistic argument should be before the context of the nationalistic argument. So I can't fix this, um, stretched reference without making my version a few words longer.

In any case, my version sounds weird, right? It breaks the text up into smaller sentences, which makes it kind of sing-song. It might even feel condescending, in a Dick-and-Jane kind of way. But in the end, it's just another specialized, stylized voice for conveying information rapidly, and one I would find much easier to read.

Overheard on the Subway

So I'm on the F train trying to concentrate on my Nethack, when I hear two Park Slopey types get on the train already involved in a smarty-pants conversation. The train was noisy, so I wasn't able to catch everything. But I didn't need to.

Cast of Characters:

HE: Mid-forties, hair prematurely grey (but only slightly prematurely), horn-rimmed glasses.
SHE: Mid-thirties, maybe in marketing?


HE
They didn't understand even the most basic things, I mean, you would tell them something, something so obvious --

SHE
heh

HE
-- and they just didn't get it. Anyway.



[At this point I stop listening, and return to my game, which I promptly lose.]



...

HE
... semiotics ...

SHE
... semiotics ...



[Okay, now I'm listening. This should be good.]


HE
... want to promote Semiotics as a ...

SHE
Yeah, Augustus, Aurelius.

HE
... right ...

...

SHE
... Semiotics ... marketing ... Semiotics ...

HE
... marketing ... branded ... Semiotics ...



[Oh my god.]



...

HE
... has a degree, an MA in philosophy from the New School; her boyfriend is really talented, he's in this band, they're getting big, they have songs in Michael Cera films

SHE
... Cera? ...

HE
... baby-faced actor ...

...

SHE
... and I was hoping she would, you know, because I don't want to be alone, I would rather have someone to handle sales ... a company to be in ...

...

HE
... Semiotics ...

SHE
... really marketing ...

HE
... I prefer to call it, promote it as Semiotics ...

SHE
... Semiotics ... I mean, [sotto voce] it's not the *real* semiotics, it's a corrupted form of it.

HE
Of course.

...

HE
... I don't know what kind of assistants I would have ...

SHE
... someone to just ...

HE
... yeah, one thing I want to do, I don't want to manage any of this stuff , I just want to do the Work ...

...

SHE
... vice president of research and development at Google ...

SHE
... friend ... someone who's been at Google from the beginning ...

...

SHE
... they're into a lot of stuff, so If there's anything, I'm trying to think of something I would pitch to them ...

SHE
... real world, I mean it would be out there, in the real world ...

SHE
... totally funded ...

HE
... they can't make any decisions ... have to go to the CEO ... can't do it ... visions ... totally disempowered ...

HE
... Canal Street ...

...

SHE
I cant do it alone... I'm trying to think of a way can do it with, um, *you* ... guys.

HE
... she knows about identity politics ...

SHE
... going forward ...



[They head towards the door of the subway car.]



SHE
... first of all ...



[They get off at Canal Street.]

Come back, email address!

From: "DR. GABRIEL SAMAD"
YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS WON THE LOTTERY AWARD 2010.

Bye-bye email address, and thanks for collecting my email for me for 15 years...

My Three Components

This year has seen the 40'th anniversary of three things:

- Sesame Street
- Unix
- Monty Python

It also contained my 40th birthday.

This is fitting, because I think I can say that those three things are my
component parts; nothing else was needed.

The kitten is well, thanks for asking.

Well fed and well rested.

The great Guy Steele on C++

As for C++–well, it reminds me of the Soviet-era labor joke: "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." C++ pretends to provide an object-oriented data model, C++ programmers pretend to respect it, and everyone pretends that the code will work. The actual data model of C++ is exactly that of C, a single two-dimensional array of bits, eight by four billion, and all the syntactic sugar of C++ fundamentally cannot mask the gaping holes in its object model left by the cast operator and unconstrained address arithmetic.

(From Objects have not failed, 2002.)

Quote from Susan

Hilarious.

"Look at the Woolworth Building -- it looks like a Christmas Bruise."
-- Susan Beal 9/11/2009

Annie's first full sentence!

Young kitten annie typed her first full sentence on my laptop the other day. I'm so proud!!!


]\l,k
e4555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555555Z&&&&ZZ$eeeeeeeeeeeem7555deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee78
45\/.5
"$ ./
k bddddddddGd

They really do say the darndest things.

Annie y Greg

Here's what I love about cats. They can be comfortable almost anywhere.

In this picture, Annie is on my shoulder. My shoulder and arm were vaguely horizontal at that moment, and she took the opportunity to sit down like it was the floor. It's quite gratifying to be treated as a floor by a small creature; it's hard to explain why, but if you've experienced it, you know what I mean.

She looks like she might be playing here, but at that moment she was taking a break. The break lasted somewhere between 500 and 1500 milliseconds, but that's a decent break for a kitten.

Annie update

If you saw the pictures of the very-young and very-thin Annie,, you might have been a bit worried about her. We were worried too.

But everything is just fine now.

A bit of legal knowledge from my wife.

From: Susan Beal
To: Greg Travis
Subject: there's actually a statute about this!

Authority to represent the state as owner of abutt

Who'd'a thunk it?

Google does it to me again.

Okay, so you may recall that Susan and I made a lego portrait of Nancy, which I placed amongst the other lego portraits here at Google NYC. Here's Nancy next to another famous programmer and Google employee, Brian Kernighan:



The other portraits are other famous people, or the Google founders, etc. But there's this one guy I didn't recognize, shown on the right here:



I see various images of him everywhere here -- on t-shirts, posters, computer screens, etc. The haircut has a late-70's / early-80's look, so I figure this must be another computer luminary whose name I probably know, and who might work at Google.

I decided to pose myself the challenge of figuring out who it is without asking anyone. I would look at the list of upper management, which includes a bunch of famous computer scientists; I would examine every place I found his face, try to find a pattern. Check out old pictures of people at Xerox Parc back in the day. Look closely at the people I saw around me. And so on.

At one point, someone set up a computer in the Hall of Old Computers running the operating system called Plan 9 from Bell Labs. It used an old-yet-advanced email system that included a little picture of the person sending the email. And there, on the screen, was a bunch of little pictures of people who had sent email to this computer, people I recognized, and they mystery man as well! The little pictures had the usernames under them! The mystery man's picture was partially obscured, so I couldn't see his username. I clicked on the window to bring it to the front -- and it disappeared.

Hmmm.

A couple of weeks ago, I finally figured it out. Strangely, I cannot for the life of me remember how I figured it out, but I suspect that I saw the picture along with the guy's username, pjw. A quick image search for 'pjw' brings up the picture, and from that I got the name: Peter Weinberger.

It turns out, he was a researcher at Bell Labs a while back, and then he was the "Director of Computer Sciences" or something like that. He was involved in early work in digital photography, and he left a head shot lying around and someone scanned it and started putting it everywhere as a joke. It also became a test image for showing off digital image processing.







Apparently, this is a long-standing geek meme. I thought I kept up on most of those, but this is one I missed entirely.

Anyway, mystery solved! So, does he work at Google? I look him up, and, sure enough, he does. I look at the picture on his internal page, and he looks vaguely -- wait -- oh my god.

This guy has been sitting behind me, in the next cubicle-pen, the entire time I've worked here. I even had a conversation with him and some others a while back.

It's a small world here.

I am big fan of Richard Clarke. He's a capable counter-terrorism expert, honest to a fault, and the only person to apologize for the 9/11 attacks. Which is actually kind of inappropriate, since he tried over and over to get the Bush administration to heed his warnings, and was ignored every time.

Also, he looks like a baby eagle.

Spam of the day

From: "Tamara Acevedo"
Subject: Pay less for luxury and qualitative watches.

Hmm! Quantitative watches give me a lot of stress, what with all those numbers telling me I'm late. A qualitative watch sounds a lot more laid back.

I've been developing a new software development system, called TESSA (Tertiary Enterprise System Solution with Aspects). Here it is in action:

Initializing:


Syntax Error:


Compilation Successful: