In 1985, I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It's like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time, and so is a very poorly understood, difficult to treat illness.
The symptoms include paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, deep depression and a profoundly manic state called mania. I was diagnosed as a result of being brought by the police to a mental hospital that is part of the Los Angeles County Central Jail. I was in a profoundly manic state, and at one point was hallucinating so hard I couldn't see where I was going when I walked.
My illness made a huge wreck of my life, but I was determined to get it back. With the help of medicine and psychotherapy, I made a career for myself as a computer programmer. I've been doing it for twenty years, and am now employed as a Principal Software Engineer, writing Mac OS X device drivers for a company that makes hardware RAID controllers.
For about ten years now, I've been working to educate the public, the mentally ill and their loved ones about mental illness. I do this by posting essays about mental illness on my website as well as at Kuro5hin.
I wasn't lucid when I wrote some of those essays, but I keep them online because they help others to understand the mentally ill.
A housemate of mine at Caltech, a brilliant young woman named Misha Mahoyan, did notable research in which she grew neurons in petri dishes atop arrays of electrodes, so that the neurons could be stimulated and their signals picked up.
I understand she published in Scientific American.
But she was struck down by schizophrenia. I found a page recently that said she committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. (There is no great genius without madness.) -- Seneca
I'm developing a Free Software audio application called Ogg Frog. It will be GPL when it is released, but I'm not certain whether to make it GPLv2-only, or GPLv3-only. I'm not comfortable with the "or any later version" clauses many GPL programs have.
I realize that GPLv3 was designed to address a lot of problems such as Tivoization, but in following the debate on the Debian-Legal mailing list, I'm not completely comfortable with choosing version three.
Trying to actually read the whole license to decide for myself just makes my head spin.
Note: there is no software to download yet; there won't be any until the alpha test version is ready.
It was a stand-up game costing a quarter, and was located at a Pizza restaurant in Bend, Oregon. My family would stop there for lunch when driving to or from my grandparents' house in Spokane, Washington.
Yes, that's right - I had to drive hundreds of miles to play a video game!
Much later on I was to work as a software engineer for Dave Johnson, who was himself a games programmer for Atari very early on. He introduced me to Nolan Bushnell when we ran into him in a bookstore.
It's a form of Black Hat search engine optimization, in which you destroy a competitor's website. The way it's done is to set up a link farm of your own, but with every page pointing at your competitor's site. Eventually Google and the other search engine operators discover the link farm, but assume that your competitor put it there, and remove it from the index.
Quite a while back, maybe ten years ago or so, I read that the Electric Power Research Institute was proposing that each power and light socket have a unique IP address so that they could be remotely controlled by the power company, for the same reason as given here - to reduce consumption at peak times, and to prevent rolling blackouts.
That wasn't feasible at the time, as they would have quickly run out of available addresses, but now with IPv6 that's not such a problem anymore. I expect that the proposal will resurface again soon.
My dad was an engineer for a Naval submarine shipyard. He told me that thermoelectric panels attached to the inside of the hull cooled the submarine silently when a voltage was applied.
Hope that wasn't classified or anything - but then Dad passed away a while back.
I'm curious how they're going to distinguish between downloads that infringe copyright, and downloads that are done with the permission of the copyright holder, like those in my sig.
I read in Scientific American that some guy wore special glasses for several weeks that turned his field of view upside-down.
After a while, everything began to appear right-side-up to him when he wore the glasses, so much so that he was able to ride a motorcycle while wearing them!
... and paraplegics. To qualify for the class, the disabled students had to have just enough arm control to plug their nose, which is needed to "clear" their ears, that is, adjust the pressure inside the ear drum to the water pressure outside.
Two of us fully-abled people would buddy with the disabled divers. We'd pull them around the ocean floor.
I found it quite an eye-opening experience.
One of the students was my quadriplegic friend Foster Anderson, who was injured in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. I haven't seen him for a while, but he used to commute from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley in a special van to work as an engineer. He can just control his arms, but not his fingers.
I understand he once appeared on the cover of a surfing magazine, riding a surfboard.
I also read in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that a study of Italian paraplegics found the unanimous opinion that becoming disabled was the best thing that ever happened to them: before their injuries, they failed to fully appreciate their lives. Afterwards they were able to live far more rich and rewarding lives, because they understood better just how precious the gift of life is.
Don't write off the disabled. They - we, rather, as I myself have a profoundly serious mental illness - are capable of far more than most of society gives us credit for.
Think of that next time you park illegally in a handicapped spot. (Foster saw someone do that at a restaurant once, and started repeatedly ramming the car with his electric wheelchair!)
I was able to get my first real programming job based on a single, well-taught CS class, as I posted previously in this discussion.
I have grown weary of coding, though, so I'm studying piano with the aim of enrolling in music school to study musical composition. Someday I'm going to write symphonies!
But twenty years of playing as a self-taught pianist wasn't going to enable me to pass the music school entrance audition. So I started formal lessons, having now had three and a half years of them.
At my rate of progress, I expect to have to study, and diligently practice, for another five years or so before I can pass the audition for a school like Dalhousie in Halifax, or the U of British Columbia in Vancouver.
I don't think there's any hope that I could ever get accepted to Julliard. And all that study is required just to get accepted to a University-level program. Far more study is required to graduate.
Given all that, consider what a failure in my understanding of music theory might cost someone: my audience might not enjoy my show as much, or my CDs might not sell.
Now consider what a failure in my current job writing hardware RAID device drivers might cost someone: wiping out a business' data, or the failure of my employer to compete in the marketplace.
Yeah, I'd say other professions do indeed have much harsher standards.
He is one of the pioneers of VLSI design, and a founder of Foveon, which makes a better kind of sensor for digital cameras. I knew him as the instructor for CS 10 at Caltech.
He started by discussing how electrons move about in silicon crystals, for example how "holes", or places where electrons were missing, effectively acted as positive charge carriers.
He went on to explain transistors, then how to make logic gates from transistor circuitry, and then the basic architecture of microprocessors and memory, machine code and assembly code.
With this grounding, he want on to teach the basics of Pascal - including pointers - and basic data structures like linked lists and binary trees, as well as recursion.
To cement our understanding, we used these concepts throughout the quarter to write simple vector graphic editors on 68000-based workstations made by HP.
That one quarter was the only computer science course I ever had - my degree is in Physics, not CS - but it was enough grounding in the fundaments to allow me to succeed as a software engineer for more than twenty years now, with a resume that looks like this.
I have no problem with Java being used for the purposes for which it is best suited. I do have a problem with using it for teaching students how computers work.
For example, it's commonly thought that garbage collected languages like Java don't suffer from memory leaks. Nothing could be further from the truth, as was evidenced by the Java eCommerce app one company I knew had - it would run out of swap space every couple days, so they had to keep rebooting their server every day.
Consider the Document Object Model (DOM). Each node in a DOM tree holds a reference to its parent and all its children. So if a client object holds a reference to any object anywhere in the tree, none of it is available for collection. That's a memory leak.
While really appropriate applications of assembly code are uncommon in today's computer industry, one place it is completely appropriate is in the teaching of computer science and software engineering.
One reason is that those who later use higher-level languages like Java will be able to visualize what effect the actual implementation of their code has on the machine.
For all you kids who want to make fun of me for being an old-fashioned old coot, I learned my first programming language, FORTRAN, at the tender age of 12 in 1976. The IBM 360 I ran my first program on, I understand, had magnetic core memory.
Nuclear reactors can be made smaller and more efficient if they use liquid sodium for cooling. I think this may be because they can run at a higher temperature, which is more harmonious with the laws of thermodynamics.
But the US Navy refused to build any sodium-cooled submarine reactors. Finally a Congressional committee hauled Admiral Rickover in to a hearing to testify as to why he wasn't making better use of taxpayer's money.
To which he replied "This is what happens when sodium gets wet," and he threw a chunk of sodium into some water.
While it's true that parody is fair use, fair use only applies to copyright, not to trademarks.
The names of famous people are trademarks. If I were to open a restaurant called Chuck Norris' Good Eats, I'd be infringing his trademark, not his copyright.
This even goes so far that someone else who was not famous, but happened to also be named Chuck Norris could not use his own name as a business name.
While IANAL, I heard about this on TV, so it must be true.
As with previous particle accelerators, people both inside and outside the physics community have voiced concern that the LHC might trigger one of several theoretical disasters capable of destroying the Earth or even the entire Universe. This has raised controversy as to whether any such risks outweigh the potential benefits of constructing and operating the LHC.
This reminds me that at the time of the first atomic bomb test, there was concern that it might cause fusion of hydrogen found in atmospheric water vaport. A chain reaction of that would cause the entire Earth's atmosphere to explode, thereby destroying all life on Earth.
I understand that one of the Manhattan Project scientists was taking bets on whether this would happen.
The definition of "non-commercial" has been discussed a great deal on the cc-community mailing list. Among their conclusions is that charities using a CC-NC work for fundraising counts as commercial use.
So in your Red Cross example, it wouldn't be necessary to run the ad in a profit-making publication to count as commercial use.
I last read them before Mozilla 1.0 shipped, but among the more heinous "advice" was to not use templates.
While that doesn't rule out Resource Allocation Is Initialization (RAII) - a standard C++ memory management tool - it does make it a lot more labor intensive, by requiring special code to be written for each type of object that's managed.
With templates being allowed, one can use the standard library auto_ptr, as well as reference counted smart pointer templates.
Someone posted below that intelligent design isn't science because it's not falsifiable.
Now, I don't support ID, but I also don't see how falsifiability is a requirement for something to be scientific.
Sure, it's convenient, in that it allows you to eliminate theories that eventually are proven false.
But the Universe is under no obligation whatsoever to cooperate with the aesthetics of human scientists. It could well be that there are laws that aren't falsifiable.
Many of you have raised the reasonable objection that a scramjet wouldn't be economical. But it might be economical for certain people: the very rich.
The mother of a friend of mine was a top executive at Dow Chemical, at the time the company's highest-paid woman. She always flew Concorde when she could because the company was paying her salary during her flight.
Being able to get across the ocean with time left in the work day meant that Dow actually saved money paying for a Concorde ticket.
This reminds me of a story I heard when I was a student at Caltech. A Tech Physics grad got a job with a defense firm where he was assigned to design a kill verification system. The way it was supposed to work was by using a spectrometer to detect the carbon emission lines from vaporized human flesh.
When he realized what he was doing, he quit his job to become a pig farmer.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1985, I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. It's like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time, and so is a very poorly understood, difficult to treat illness.
The symptoms include paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, deep depression and a profoundly manic state called mania. I was diagnosed as a result of being brought by the police to a mental hospital that is part of the Los Angeles County Central Jail. I was in a profoundly manic state, and at one point was hallucinating so hard I couldn't see where I was going when I walked.
My illness made a huge wreck of my life, but I was determined to get it back. With the help of medicine and psychotherapy, I made a career for myself as a computer programmer. I've been doing it for twenty years, and am now employed as a Principal Software Engineer, writing Mac OS X device drivers for a company that makes hardware RAID controllers.
For about ten years now, I've been working to educate the public, the mentally ill and their loved ones about mental illness. I do this by posting essays about mental illness on my website as well as at Kuro5hin.
I wasn't lucid when I wrote some of those essays, but I keep them online because they help others to understand the mentally ill.
I understand she published in Scientific American.
But she was struck down by schizophrenia. I found a page recently that said she committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a train.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementiae fuit. (There is no great genius without madness.) -- Seneca
I realize that GPLv3 was designed to address a lot of problems such as Tivoization, but in following the debate on the Debian-Legal mailing list, I'm not completely comfortable with choosing version three.
Trying to actually read the whole license to decide for myself just makes my head spin.
Note: there is no software to download yet; there won't be any until the alpha test version is ready.
Yes, that's right - I had to drive hundreds of miles to play a video game!
Much later on I was to work as a software engineer for Dave Johnson, who was himself a games programmer for Atari very early on. He introduced me to Nolan Bushnell when we ran into him in a bookstore.
Thus they tell me at webmasterworld.
That wasn't feasible at the time, as they would have quickly run out of available addresses, but now with IPv6 that's not such a problem anymore. I expect that the proposal will resurface again soon.
Hope that wasn't classified or anything - but then Dad passed away a while back.
Take my files, please:
After a while, everything began to appear right-side-up to him when he wore the glasses, so much so that he was able to ride a motorcycle while wearing them!
Two of us fully-abled people would buddy with the disabled divers. We'd pull them around the ocean floor.
I found it quite an eye-opening experience.
One of the students was my quadriplegic friend Foster Anderson, who was injured in a motorcycle accident as a teenager. I haven't seen him for a while, but he used to commute from Santa Cruz to Silicon Valley in a special van to work as an engineer. He can just control his arms, but not his fingers.
I understand he once appeared on the cover of a surfing magazine, riding a surfboard.
I also read in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience that a study of Italian paraplegics found the unanimous opinion that becoming disabled was the best thing that ever happened to them: before their injuries, they failed to fully appreciate their lives. Afterwards they were able to live far more rich and rewarding lives, because they understood better just how precious the gift of life is.
Don't write off the disabled. They - we, rather, as I myself have a profoundly serious mental illness - are capable of far more than most of society gives us credit for.
Think of that next time you park illegally in a handicapped spot. (Foster saw someone do that at a restaurant once, and started repeatedly ramming the car with his electric wheelchair!)
I have grown weary of coding, though, so I'm studying piano with the aim of enrolling in music school to study musical composition. Someday I'm going to write symphonies!
But twenty years of playing as a self-taught pianist wasn't going to enable me to pass the music school entrance audition. So I started formal lessons, having now had three and a half years of them.
At my rate of progress, I expect to have to study, and diligently practice, for another five years or so before I can pass the audition for a school like Dalhousie in Halifax, or the U of British Columbia in Vancouver.
I don't think there's any hope that I could ever get accepted to Julliard. And all that study is required just to get accepted to a University-level program. Far more study is required to graduate.
Given all that, consider what a failure in my understanding of music theory might cost someone: my audience might not enjoy my show as much, or my CDs might not sell.
Now consider what a failure in my current job writing hardware RAID device drivers might cost someone: wiping out a business' data, or the failure of my employer to compete in the marketplace.
Yeah, I'd say other professions do indeed have much harsher standards.
He started by discussing how electrons move about in silicon crystals, for example how "holes", or places where electrons were missing, effectively acted as positive charge carriers.
He went on to explain transistors, then how to make logic gates from transistor circuitry, and then the basic architecture of microprocessors and memory, machine code and assembly code.
With this grounding, he want on to teach the basics of Pascal - including pointers - and basic data structures like linked lists and binary trees, as well as recursion.
To cement our understanding, we used these concepts throughout the quarter to write simple vector graphic editors on 68000-based workstations made by HP.
That one quarter was the only computer science course I ever had - my degree is in Physics, not CS - but it was enough grounding in the fundaments to allow me to succeed as a software engineer for more than twenty years now, with a resume that looks like this.
For example, it's commonly thought that garbage collected languages like Java don't suffer from memory leaks. Nothing could be further from the truth, as was evidenced by the Java eCommerce app one company I knew had - it would run out of swap space every couple days, so they had to keep rebooting their server every day.
Consider the Document Object Model (DOM). Each node in a DOM tree holds a reference to its parent and all its children. So if a client object holds a reference to any object anywhere in the tree, none of it is available for collection. That's a memory leak.
While really appropriate applications of assembly code are uncommon in today's computer industry, one place it is completely appropriate is in the teaching of computer science and software engineering.
One reason is that those who later use higher-level languages like Java will be able to visualize what effect the actual implementation of their code has on the machine.
For all you kids who want to make fun of me for being an old-fashioned old coot, I learned my first programming language, FORTRAN, at the tender age of 12 in 1976. The IBM 360 I ran my first program on, I understand, had magnetic core memory.
But the US Navy refused to build any sodium-cooled submarine reactors. Finally a Congressional committee hauled Admiral Rickover in to a hearing to testify as to why he wasn't making better use of taxpayer's money.
To which he replied "This is what happens when sodium gets wet," and he threw a chunk of sodium into some water.
The names of famous people are trademarks. If I were to open a restaurant called Chuck Norris' Good Eats, I'd be infringing his trademark, not his copyright.
This even goes so far that someone else who was not famous, but happened to also be named Chuck Norris could not use his own name as a business name.
While IANAL, I heard about this on TV, so it must be true.
I understand that one of the Manhattan Project scientists was taking bets on whether this would happen.
So in your Red Cross example, it wouldn't be necessary to run the ad in a profit-making publication to count as commercial use.
While that doesn't rule out Resource Allocation Is Initialization (RAII) - a standard C++ memory management tool - it does make it a lot more labor intensive, by requiring special code to be written for each type of object that's managed.
With templates being allowed, one can use the standard library auto_ptr, as well as reference counted smart pointer templates.
Now, I don't support ID, but I also don't see how falsifiability is a requirement for something to be scientific.
Sure, it's convenient, in that it allows you to eliminate theories that eventually are proven false.
But the Universe is under no obligation whatsoever to cooperate with the aesthetics of human scientists. It could well be that there are laws that aren't falsifiable.
The mother of a friend of mine was a top executive at Dow Chemical, at the time the company's highest-paid woman. She always flew Concorde when she could because the company was paying her salary during her flight.
Being able to get across the ocean with time left in the work day meant that Dow actually saved money paying for a Concorde ticket.
When he realized what he was doing, he quit his job to become a pig farmer.