I graduated from high school in a small town north of Milwaukee, WI in 1975. I was a chemistry and physics geek at the time, but also spent a lot of time in the school’s electronics lab, where I built a 4-bit counter out of relays and light-bulbs. That was the closest they came to anything digital as far as actual classes. They mostly were in to building radios from scratch out of vacuum tubes and transistors.
As a junior my parents got me a TI-SR50 calculator right after I had mastered the slide rule. As a senior in a class called “Intensive Physics” they had a TI-SR52, which was my first intro to programming and I never looked back. A few years later I was coding away in assembly language on Intel 8085s and Motorola 6800s. Still coding and loving it to this day on things such as the Spring Framework.
I’m 55 and a software architect. And I still code daily. Most recently in.Net doing WCF services and Entity Framework. Previously, couple years back, I did a fair amount of Hibernate and Spring. In my career, I have been unemployed for a grand total of 3 weeks.
Still love it, and cannot get enough of the latest APIs. And I have cleaned up more crap and bad code from junior programmers and outsourced projects than the Bloomberg idiots can imagine. In fact for most of the past ten years, my work has been cleaning up code and refactoring at assorted employers (and making a lot of $$$ in the process) such that the code is stable enough that engineering isn’t getting hammered with support calls, and the they can therefore afford to re-arch. And this has been in the medical software field!
Quote... "The purpose of this paper was to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the industrial corn-ethanol cycle accelerates the irrevocable depletion of natural resources: fossil fuels, minerals, top soil, surface and subsurface water, and air, while creating wide-spread environmental damage throughout the continental United States. My arguments relied entirely on the First and Second Law of thermodynamics, and on the Law of Mass Conservation."
"More ominously, as a country, we have diverted our collective attention from the most important issue of this century: energy conservation and increased reliance on the only renewable source of energy, the sun, and its weak derivative, the wind, see Appendix C. Instead, we have somewhat accelerated the rate of depletion of the precious natural gas and crude oil deposits, in exchange for the significantly more wide-spread pollution of water, soil and air over roughly 1/2 of the area of the United States, the incremental carbon dioxide emissions, the substandard ethanol fuel, and the continuous drain of taxpayers' money."
The HP75 (yeah, I'm damn old) had some interesting comments, though not always in the source code...
SCENE: Fade to a small cottage in the sheep country of New Zealand. Roo-man is standing in the doorway. His dark masculine hands, callused with long hours at the terminal, grip the shoulders of a young, raven haired woman.
"Wendy, my dearest, you must understand we face difficult times. Times through which only the resourceful, the methodical, the dedicated will accomplish the tasks that lay ahead. I do not do these things lightly. We may have to give a little against the foe of piece-meal programming in order to gain on the other fronts facing limited space and slow processing speed. Yes, Wendy, this is a calculated risk, but it's a risk that's got to be taken!"
"Oh, Roo-man, I never doubted that you had the best intentions. I guess... (wiping a tear from her eye) I guess a programmer must do what he must do."
Roo-man enfolds her in his arms, briefly forgetting the heavy responsibilities that have been laid upon him. Pausing, he holds her at a distance as if memorizing every feature. Brushing the hair from her eyes he smiles, then briskly turning hops between space and time, reassured that the one who means most believes in what he is about to do.
http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/docs/humor/rooman3.tx t
A good book, but nothng new.
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I have the Touchstone edition sitting right here: (c)1993. I first read it in 1994, and this book has been the topic of numerous atheism vs. theism discussion forums for years. So what's next from Katz? A review of Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" ??;-))
>To make such statements is all meaningless philosophical speculation of course. >You simply can't describe the nature of existence and reality in conventional >human terms. It only make sense when you look at it from a quantum theory >standpoint.
Yeah, but the quantum gravity thing and a TOE or GUT are as yet unverifiable speculation. And many GUT theorists have said that a GUT will only result in more questions. Anything to avoid even the slightest hint of a deity, or that something "beyond" the physical/mathematical might exist, right?
Pardon me for being agnostic (rather than atheist), and allow me to quote physicist John Polkinghorne (who later became an Anglican priest!) from his book "Belief in God in an Age of Science"...
"Moving up on the scale of bold speculation, one might evoke notions of quantum cosmology which suggest that universes of various kinds are continually appearing as a physical process called inflation blows up microworlds, which have bubbled up as quantum fluctuations in some universal substrate. Proponents of this point of view are sometimes moved to describe our anthropic universe as a 'free lunch'. The phrase itself should trigger a cautious evaluation of the offer being made. The cost of this particular cosmic meal is the provision that just the right quantum fields fluctuate in order to produce first inflation and then the necessary observed forces of nature. But this does NOT really remove anthropic particularity, for the basic physical laws still have to take certain specific forms which are the necessary foundation for the proposed quantum cosmology.
"Beyond this point, speculation [on the part of atheists] becomes rapidly desperate [and as much so as any theistic arguments]. Maybe the laws of nature themselves fluctuate, so that a vast portfolio of conceivable (or, to us, inconceivable) worlds rise and fall in the relentless explosion of random possibility -- with occasional patches of transient order in a sea of seething chaos. We [as atheists] have moved far beyond anything that could be called scientific in this exercise of prodigal conjecture. It is time to consider Leslie's other alternative: that there is a divine purpose behind this fruitful universe."
-- John Polkinghorne, "Belief in God in an Age of Science" (c)1998 Yale University ISBN 0-300-07294-5
Slashdot Mirror
I graduated from high school in a small town north of Milwaukee, WI in 1975. I was a chemistry and physics geek at the time, but also spent a lot of time in the school’s electronics lab, where I built a 4-bit counter out of relays and light-bulbs. That was the closest they came to anything digital as far as actual classes. They mostly were in to building radios from scratch out of vacuum tubes and transistors.
As a junior my parents got me a TI-SR50 calculator right after I had mastered the slide rule. As a senior in a class called “Intensive Physics” they had a TI-SR52, which was my first intro to programming and I never looked back. A few years later I was coding away in assembly language on Intel 8085s and Motorola 6800s. Still coding and loving it to this day on things such as the Spring Framework.
Actually, my "Dyson Animal" gets pretty warm after a a while. And it's more purple than black.
Tell your girlfriend it's fascinating!
http://i177.photobucket.com/albums/w225/anon112355/fascinating1ts.jpg
I’m 55 and a software architect. And I still code daily. Most recently in .Net doing WCF services and Entity Framework. Previously, couple years back, I did a fair amount of Hibernate and Spring. In my career, I have been unemployed for a grand total of 3 weeks.
Still love it, and cannot get enough of the latest APIs. And I have cleaned up more crap and bad code from junior programmers and outsourced projects than the Bloomberg idiots can imagine. In fact for most of the past ten years, my work has been cleaning up code and refactoring at assorted employers (and making a lot of $$$ in the process) such that the code is stable enough that engineering isn’t getting hammered with support calls, and the they can therefore afford to re-arch. And this has been in the medical software field!
All ya need is corn ethanol. The thermodynamics are all good. :)
Cool. I'm looking forward to even more videos of Steve Ballmer sweating.
OK, so let's not quote Pimental. How about Patzek over at Berkeley and a little bit of thermodynamics?
1 6-Patzek-Web.pdf
http://petroleum.berkeley.edu/papers/patzek/CRPS4
Quote...
"The purpose of this paper was to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the industrial corn-ethanol cycle accelerates the irrevocable depletion of natural resources: fossil fuels, minerals, top soil, surface and subsurface water, and air, while creating wide-spread environmental damage throughout the continental United States. My arguments relied entirely on the First and Second Law of thermodynamics, and on the Law of Mass Conservation."
"More ominously, as a country, we have diverted our collective attention from the most important issue of this century: energy conservation and increased reliance on the only renewable source of energy, the sun, and its weak derivative, the wind, see Appendix C. Instead, we have somewhat accelerated the rate of depletion of the precious natural gas and crude oil deposits, in exchange for the significantly more wide-spread pollution of water, soil and air over roughly 1/2 of the area of the United States, the incremental carbon dioxide emissions, the substandard ethanol fuel, and the continuous drain of taxpayers' money."
You don't know Jack! ;-)
http://www.cleanupge.org/jacksays.html
The HP75 (yeah, I'm damn old) had some interesting comments, though not always in the source code...
... (wiping a tear from her eye) I guess a programmer must do
x t
SCENE: Fade to a small cottage in the sheep country of New Zealand.
Roo-man is standing in the doorway. His dark masculine hands, callused
with long hours at the terminal, grip the shoulders of a young, raven
haired woman.
"Wendy, my dearest, you must understand we face difficult times.
Times through which only the resourceful, the methodical, the
dedicated will accomplish the tasks that lay ahead. I do not do these
things lightly. We may have to give a little against the foe of
piece-meal programming in order to gain on the other fronts facing
limited space and slow processing speed. Yes, Wendy, this is a
calculated risk, but it's a risk that's got to be taken!"
"Oh, Roo-man, I never doubted that you had the best intentions. I
guess
what he must do."
Roo-man enfolds her in his arms, briefly forgetting the heavy
responsibilities that have been laid upon him. Pausing, he holds her
at a distance as if memorizing every feature. Brushing the hair from
her eyes he smiles, then briskly turning hops between space and time,
reassured that the one who means most believes in what he is about to
do.
http://www.hpcalc.org/hp48/docs/humor/rooman3.t
http://www.hpmuseum.org/hp75.htm
"We won't get fooled again!"
Yeah, I have the Touchstone edition sitting right here: (c)1993. I first read it in 1994, and this book has been the topic of numerous atheism vs. theism discussion forums for years. So what's next from Katz? A review of Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control" ?? ;-))
>To make such statements is all meaningless philosophical speculation of course.
>You simply can't describe the nature of existence and reality in conventional
>human terms. It only make sense when you look at it from a quantum theory
>standpoint.
Yeah, but the quantum gravity thing and a TOE or GUT are as yet unverifiable speculation. And many GUT theorists have said that a GUT will only result in more questions. Anything to avoid even the slightest hint of a deity, or that something "beyond" the physical/mathematical might exist, right?
Pardon me for being agnostic (rather than atheist), and allow me to quote physicist John Polkinghorne (who later became an Anglican priest!) from his book "Belief in God in an Age of Science"...
"Moving up on the scale of bold speculation, one might evoke notions of quantum cosmology which suggest that universes of various kinds are continually appearing as a physical process called inflation blows up microworlds, which have bubbled up as quantum fluctuations in some universal substrate. Proponents of this point of view are sometimes moved to describe our anthropic universe as a 'free lunch'. The phrase itself should trigger a cautious evaluation of the offer being made. The cost of this particular cosmic meal is the provision that just the right quantum fields fluctuate in order to produce first inflation and then the necessary observed forces of nature. But this does NOT really remove anthropic particularity, for the basic physical laws still have to take certain specific forms which are the necessary foundation for the proposed quantum cosmology.
"Beyond this point, speculation [on the part of atheists] becomes rapidly desperate [and as much so as any theistic arguments]. Maybe the laws of nature themselves fluctuate, so that a vast portfolio of conceivable (or, to us, inconceivable) worlds rise and fall in the relentless explosion of random possibility -- with occasional patches of transient order in a sea of seething chaos. We [as atheists] have moved far beyond anything that could be called scientific in this exercise of prodigal conjecture. It is time to consider Leslie's other alternative: that there is a divine purpose behind this fruitful universe."
-- John Polkinghorne, "Belief in God in an Age of Science"
(c)1998 Yale University
ISBN 0-300-07294-5