25. October 2011 · Comments Off on Tab Clearing · Categories: General

I slept for maybe five minutes last night.  Then work’s help desk called, and I spent the next eleven hours fighting a mother-lovin’ fire at work.  I got a great deal done today but not much of what I planned on doing.  Not complaining – I’m well compensated for what I do and I like it.  Just .. man it’s been a day.

So .. links.

The Roots of Lisp – Paul Graham.    In 1960, John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. He showed how, given a handful of simple operators and a notation for functions, you can build a whole programming language. He called this language Lisp, for “List Processing,” because one of his key ideas was to use a simple data structure called a list for both code and data.

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I   I don’t know if I’ll understand this, but I’m going to give it a go.

Progress and its Sustainability – John McCarthy.  With the development of nuclear energy, it became possible to show that there are no apparent obstacles even to billion year sustainability.

The Sayings of John McCarthy.  When there’s a will to fail, obstacles can be found.

US Air Force grounds the F-22 fleet (again).  I sure hope the Air Force kept the receipt for the F22. I want cash back, not store credit.

disable/enable dtlogin.  Work.  You don’t think I’d run CDE at home do you?

AIRcable – Serial5x.   Saw one of these at work.  Sitting next to a rack, which is next to a machine blowing a hurricane of cold air across one’s head, is an awful way to work.  This lets you get out of the room and into the hallway, while talking serial to the equipment.  I need this.

Dreamsongs – Blending Art & Science.  I don’t know why I opened this up.

Professional Educators (I am the only one professional enough to teach children (BOOM)) [1]  told kids there was an intruder, go, run, hide.  They lied.  They lied so they could search the school for drugs.  They didn’t find any drugs.  Anyone with a passing acquaintance with high school knows how friggin’ improbable this is, can draw conclusions about the effectiveness of treating children like inmates.  And that of the Great Drug War.

Confessions of an Actual Man.  Men are like little boys, always wanting to go higher and faster, to explore jungles and invent exotic aircraft. Always childlike, we love to race alone across the late-afternoon deserts of Arizona on a Harley, with the air furnace-hot and sunset burning out from incandescent reds to rolling waves of oranges on celestial beaches, the night rising from behind distant mountains. Women want granite counter-tops. These last, and are easy to clean.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

[1] That never gets old.

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