tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post116422746808216239..comments2024-03-28T15:48:48.514-07:00Comments on CONTRARY BRIN: Practicing What We Preach: “Be Prepared!”David Brinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comBlogger12125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164378465115949002006-11-24T06:27:00.000-08:002006-11-24T06:27:00.000-08:00I don't know if this is obvious or not, but I thou...I don't know if this is obvious or not, but I thought I should point out that massbile's posting above is spam (the telltale signs being vague comments and irrelevant links; the links are the reason for the posting). I've flagged massbile's blog for objectionable content, as there doesn't seem to be a way to flag a user for making objectionable postings in other blogs.Woozlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17948248776908775080noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164327890805880412006-11-23T16:24:00.000-08:002006-11-23T16:24:00.000-08:00Somewhat apropos DB's last nugget:The currently-in...Somewhat apropos DB's last nugget:<BR/><BR/>The currently-in-theaters movie "The Queen" is quite well done, with dandy acting and a great story that contrasts the behind-the-scenes reactions to the death of Princess Di of Blair's family (and administration) and that of the royal family.<BR/><BR/>(That's a hideously ill-contructed sentence, but I'm too beat to recompose it!)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164312343715852862006-11-23T12:05:00.000-08:002006-11-23T12:05:00.000-08:00Dang... well it almost tempts me to open the book ...Dang... well it almost tempts me to open the book and have a look! ... uh... not! I doubt I would even assign a ditto.<BR/><BR/>Often in tales like this one, my own alarm bells go off when I hear that twinned forces of dark and light are posed against each other, while civilization as a whole bleats cluelessly, like sheep. Are we to believe that this ZOROASTRIAN view of the universe is something we can swallow?<BR/><BR/>None of the intelligence services, or illuminati-rich, or Zurichgnomes know a thing about this thing that's been going on for centuries? Is there any POINT to this "royal blood line" OTHER than repudiating the divinity of Jesus?<BR/><BR/>In fact, it does nothing of the kind. It only refutes the celibate-male fixation, which may have been one of Paul's sickest trips and diametrically opposite to the beliefs of a Judean rabbi at the time. I can see Brown's point right there... but... what would he have us do with this news, even if it were even remotely plausible?<BR/><BR/>Feh.<BR/><BR/>Other matters:<BR/><BR/><BR/>http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061121/dctu004.html?.v=81<BR/>Ten Scholars were asked by The Atlantic Magazine to rank the “100 Most Influential Americans.” A thought provoking little exercise that seems to be only slightly influenced by the magazine’s inherent anti-modernity fetishism. The purpose is to stimulate discussion, hence my own good natured quibble would be to add a factor that the scholars left out - “how likely is it that someone else would have filled the same slot in public life, if he (or she weren’t there?”<BR/><BR/>By that standard I would:<BR/> - lift Ben Franklin to third (and possibly first) place<BR/> - drop John D Rockefeller from #11 to fortieth place<BR/> - raise George Marshall from 63rd to #10 (maybe higher).<BR/> - switch Ronald Reagan with Lyndon Johnson<BR/> - switch Emerson with Lewis & Clark<BR/><BR/>Ah well.<BR/><BR/>==<BR/><BR/>Oh, here's a <BR/>Fun snippet from the PPI:<BR/><BR/><B>Ten of the Western Hemisphere's 35 Nations are Monarchies</B><BR/><BR/><BR/>Between 1910 and 1979, 25 royal families lost their thrones; only two, those of Cambodia and Spain, have returned. But after a 70-year storm, the 21st-century monarchies look in good shape. Kings and queens (plus the occasional Grand Duke and Prince-Bishop) now rule 44 independent countries, the highest number since 1972. And though a few absolute monarchies, notably those of Tonga and Nepal, appear shaky, all the modern constitutional monarchies seem stable and popular.<BR/><BR/>The number of monarchies has grown mainly because 10 newly independent British colonies have chosen 'Commonwealth Realm' rather than republic status. Thus, though independent, they are also constitutional monarchies loyal to Queen Elizabeth II. Ten of the group (Canada, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, the Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, and St. Lucia) are in the western hemisphere, meaning the Americas -- once almost solidly small-"R" republican -- have more monarchies and the U.S. more monarchist neighbors than at any time since Columbus. <BR/><BR/>The Western hemisphere now trails Europe's 12-kingdom count by only two. The Middle East has eight monarchies, all absolute or semi-constitutional; Asia has seven; Africa has two, and the Pacific islands have two indigenous hereditary monarchies and five Commonwealth Realms. By population, the 21st-century monarchs rule about half a billion people.<BR/><BR/>And... like... who cares?<BR/><BR/>Well, if the feudalists do take over, Marx tells us that kings will be friends of the people. Perhaps as in my short story THE FOURTH VOCATION OF GEORGE GUSTAF?David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164293922696441122006-11-23T06:58:00.000-08:002006-11-23T06:58:00.000-08:00Coincidentally, I posted this article yesterday af...Coincidentally, I posted this article yesterday afternoon - <A HREF="http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=834" REL="nofollow">UK Officers Wear Brin's Tru-Vu Lenses</A>. Happy Turkey Day!<BR/><BR/>BillAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164265117817945132006-11-22T22:58:00.000-08:002006-11-22T22:58:00.000-08:00Rob, the purpose ofmy endeavor in this area is to ...Rob, the purpose ofmy endeavor in this area is to offer publishers and teachers and students the easiest possible way to publish, assign and perform simple exercises that will allow millions (99% of whom will never program again) to at least have a taste with minimum trauma.<BR/><BR/>Hence the number of lines of code is one of many factors. Simplicity of entry and use... plus the way that BASIC lines intuitively are similar to the algorithms they execute, are among the reasons that I like QuiteBASIC for this purpose, despite the fact that the language is obsolete for modern uses.<BR/><BR/>Ubiquity is one desired trait. The other is ease of use.<BR/><BR/>----<BR/>Famed Internet Law scholar Lawrence Lessig touts The Transparent Society at:<BR/>http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/003610.shtml<BR/><BR/>----<BR/>I just saw the Da Vinci Code. Ron Howard strives mightlily and sometimes brilliantly to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse... but please. Oy.David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164263738896426092006-11-22T22:35:00.000-08:002006-11-22T22:35:00.000-08:00Naw. You get those sorts of issues in every intera...Naw. You get those sorts of issues in every interactive application, especially web and database applications. It's particularly important in my work, where I put front-end interfaces on long-running FORTRAN programs. <BR/><BR/><I>BASIC is the crayons and play-doh of computer languages.</I><BR/><BR/>Sure. Why not? <BR/><BR/>One thing which occurs to me is that a student, perhaps as early in time as my grandchildrens' time in schools, will not have a textbook.<BR/><BR/>Instead, he'll have some version of what we now call a website, and if there is any hope in the world at all for us, authors of those educational websites will embed interactive elements like a BASIC interpreter right into the curriculum, in the way that some are doing now online to explain physics concepts.Rob Perkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13115249244056328076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164259943721018262006-11-22T21:32:00.000-08:002006-11-22T21:32:00.000-08:00Rob's right about current priorities. His list sou...Rob's right about current priorities. His list sounds like the things that our developers bitch about every day.<BR/><BR/>OTOH, our product deals with real-time video streaming, so we have to worry about efficiency too!<BR/><BR/>* * *<BR/><BR/>Possibly useful analogy:<BR/><BR/>BASIC is the crayons and play-doh of computer languages.<BR/><BR/>Few artists use play-doh or crayons for serious sculpting or illustration work. You could argue that play-doh and crayons induce poor skills and habits that would have to be overcome before an artist can be taken seriously. But you'd sound awfully silly, especially if you came to the conclusion that play-doh and crayons should be banned from elementary school art classes, because they're a danger to the next generation of working artists.<BR/><BR/>But becoming a professional artist is not the <I>point</I> of play-doh and crayons. They are easy to use, <I>accessible</I> tools for sculpting and illustration. They give <I>all</I> kids a chance to try out the basics of these skills.<BR/><BR/>The relatively few kids who go on to become artists -- amateur or professional -- <I>will not</I> be held back by their crayon and play-doh experiences, because they have the talent and drive to adapt to new media. <BR/><BR/>Similarly, budding computer scientists <I>will not</I> be somehow tainted or held back by having used "GOTO" or line numbers for a year or two when they were in school. One of the signs of a good programmer is a adaptive and playful attitude toward language and grammer. <BR/><BR/>A typical programmer will learn a lot of programming languages, and switch back and forth as needed. Perl for web scripts; Java for graphic interfaces. 'c' for heavy-duty code.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164258438464044832006-11-22T21:07:00.000-08:002006-11-22T21:07:00.000-08:00I agree with Dr. Brin that code should be kept as ...I agree with Dr. Brin that code should be kept as brief as possible. Firstly, that encourages more thought in programming. For basic tasks, especially recursive ones, it is easy to write out a verbose program. It takes thought to write a compact one. It may not be practical in most cases, but it is certainly good training for beginning ones.<BR/><BR/>Many people have tracked Nostradamus's predictions, but this is simply because he was publicized well. Not that Dr. Brin isn't famous worldwide (particularly after that convention in Japan!), but he hasn't had the benefit of 400 years of people with an agenda. <BR/><BR/>I also think that community preparedness is important. I just happened to have concentrated upon CPR and First Aid, with a smattering of lots of other things... personally, I think more people should get First Responder training. It's not for everyone, but it's also very useful.<BR/><BR/>A Happy Thanksgiving to you too.Victoriahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08940680121278368202noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164257059862475002006-11-22T20:44:00.000-08:002006-11-22T20:44:00.000-08:00Borrowing a little from the last thread and carryi...Borrowing a little from the last thread and carrying it forward.<BR/><BR/>David wrote: <I>"Wow! Cool concepts.<BR/><BR/>Though it remains ideal to keep the number of lines of code as small as possible."</I><BR/><BR/>Why? Honestly, that kind of shibboleth is worth discarding.What would be the point, in an era like today, where you get up to 4 GB of RAM address space, 32 registers, three levels of cache, and screaming-fast (and non-blocking!) nearline storage (memory mapped files, forex) for your program?<BR/><BR/>Consider an analytical problem I'm working on. In my problem, I can optimize the iterative solution code for speed, but the program will have more than three times as many lines in it, and be clearer to people than if I try and optimize for space.<BR/><BR/>Consider, too, that the tightest little programs are generally also recursive programs, a concept no beginner should have to deal with up front. But there, in almost every case, you've made a vast tradeoff of a little code segment space for an awful lot of stack segment space, and you've also surrendered speed, sometimes orders of magnitude of it. <BR/><BR/>It is not ideal to express programs in a compact space, because there is now space to express the programs clearly, (even if it's vital to *play* in a memory-constrained environment and *try* to develop tight code-segment programs *simply so you know what you're doing before moving on*.) <BR/><BR/>The premiums are no longer focused down on RAM and disk resources. These days, you watch out for inter- and intra-process race conditions, OS blocking issues, and latent data-transfer blocking issues, such as waiting for a network reply or a block of data from a hard disk. Or for a recursive algorithm to hit its exception condition and start returning results. <BR/><BR/>Now, I may be fully off-base. Were we talking about learning how to write an algorithm? Fine, make it tight, but not so tight that a student can't make out the algorithm; it must be human-understandable, and for best results it might be nice to combine algorithm learning with a bit of boolean algebra, if possible.Rob Perkinshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13115249244056328076noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164251763908157752006-11-22T19:16:00.000-08:002006-11-22T19:16:00.000-08:00Perhaps CERT is a better outlet of militias' energ...Perhaps CERT is a better outlet of militias' energies rather than huddling over guns and worrying about if the U.S. Government is becoming a tyranny that will turn its all-seeing-eye on them next. ;) Personally I think that groups of survivalists and many of these individual militias would do well to offer their services and have training of that sort.<BR/><BR/>Then again, they may already do that; I've only a bare-bones concept on militias in this day and age. ;)<BR/><BR/>Rob H.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164238461283765522006-11-22T15:34:00.000-08:002006-11-22T15:34:00.000-08:00And of course there's the commentable wiki version...And of course there's the commentable wiki version here:<BR/><BR/>- <A HREF="http://issuegroups.org/index.php/2006-001_Recommendations_for_the_US_House_of_Representatives" REL="nofollow">Summary</A> with links to separate page for each issue<BR/>- <A HREF="http://issuegroups.org/index.php/2006-001_full_text" REL="nofollow">Full text</A>, also with links<BR/><BR/>...although I haven't yet transcribed parts 2 and 3 (but don't feel you have to wait for me).Woozlehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17948248776908775080noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8587336.post-1164228606524816572006-11-22T12:50:00.000-08:002006-11-22T12:50:00.000-08:00ANNOUNCEMENT FLASHMy series of SUGGESTIONS FOR THE...<B>ANNOUNCEMENT FLASH<BR/><BR/>My series of SUGGESTIONS FOR THE NEW CONGRESS are now gathered into a single, coherent article that you folks can refer people to:<BR/><BR/>http://www.davidbrin.com/suggestions.html<BR/><BR/>Please feel free to write in with comments, fixes and suggestions. I hope at least a few of these win-win-win proposals resonate somewhere and do some good.<BR/><BR/>db</B>David Brinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14465315130418506525noreply@blogger.com