The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha -- which is to demean oneself.
-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me... I pushed '1' and he just stood there... I said 'Hi, where you going?' He said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors opened, two tumbleweeds blew in... we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert. Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said 'Hello?'... the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'... I said 'Yes...' The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank... It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you... we would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones, I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick, and with it he built a nuclear weapon... and I would appreciate it if you never called me again."
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being... The machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable...
-- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I used to live in a house by the freeway. When I went anywhere, I had to be going 65 MPH by the end of my driveway.
I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights. Now it looks like I'm the only one moving.
I was pulled over for speeding today. The officer said, "Don't you know the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?" And I said, "Yes, but I wasn't going to be out that long."
I put a new engine in my car, but didn't take the old one out. Now my car goes 500 miles an hour.
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
... an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When a programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and never when standing.
Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though, know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to hypothesize: was there a loose with under the carpet, or problems with static electricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible. An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard: the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led astray by hunting and pecking.
-- "Programming Pearls" column, by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Research is the best place to be: you work your buns off, and if it works you're a hero; if it doesn't, well -- nobody else has done it yet either, so you're still a valiant nerd.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The growth-decay formulas were developed in the trivial fashion by Isaac Newton's famous brother Phigg. His idea was to provide an equation that would describe a quantity that would dwindle and dwindle, but never quite reach zero. Historically, he was merely trying to work out his mortgage. Another versatile equation also emerged, one which would define a function that would continue to grow, but never reach unity. This equation can be applied to charging capacitors, over-damped springs, and the human race in general.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness. This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A Severe Strain on the Credulity
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt... for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react... Of course he only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
-- New York Times Editorial, 1920
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
This is the first numerical problem I ever did. It demonstrates the power of computers:
Enter lots of data on calorie & nutritive content of foods. Instruct the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a minimum level of each component, for fixed caloric content. The results are that one should eat each day:
1/2 chicken
1 egg
1 glass of skim milk
27 heads of lettuce.
-- Rev. Adrian Melott
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Worthless.
-- Sir George Bidell Airy, KCB, MA, LLD, DCL, FRS, FRAS
(Astronomer Royal of Great Britain), estimating for the
Chancellor of the Exchequer the potential value of the
"analytical engine" invented by Charles Babbage, September
15, 1842.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest amount of hot air.
-- Thomas L. Martin
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Or is it supposed to be one of those recursive acronyms? Diety Is Excellent To You. Deity Eats Icecream That's Yellow. Diety Is Eloping To Yokohama. I'll stop now.
-- Guy Maor
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The best equipment for your work is, of course, the most expensive. However, your neighbor is always wasting money that should be yours by judging things by their price.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
In the beginning there was only one kind of Mathematician, created by the Great Mathamatical Spirit form the Book: the Topologist. And they grew to large numbers and prospered.
One day they looked up in the heavens and desired to reach up as far as the eye could see. So they set out in building a Mathematical edifice that was to reach up as far as "up" went. Further and further up they went... until one night the edifice collapsed under the weight of paradox.
The following morning saw only rubble where there once was a huge structure reaching to the heavens. One by one, the Mathematicians climbed out from under the rubble. It was a miracle that nobody was killed; but when they began to speak to one another, SUPRISE of all suprises! they could not understand each other. They all spoke different languages. They all fought amongst themselves and each went about their own way. To this day the Topologists remain the original Mathematicians.
-- The Story of Babel
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The best rebuttal to this kind of statistical argument came from the redoubtable John W. Campbell:
The laws of population growth tell us that approximately half the
people who were ever born in the history of the world are now
dead. There is therefore a 0.5 probability that this message is
being read by a corpse.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her...
[EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the woman's skin. Thank you.]... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from below.
-- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine," said a monk, coming into a teahouse where Nasrudin sat.
"And yet just a short time ago, I was challenged by a scholar with an unanswerable question," said Nasrudin.
"I could have answered it if I had been there."
"Very well. He asked, 'Why are you breaking into my house in the middle of the night?'"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"You will be fortunate if you can get him to work for you."
(We certainly never succeeded.) There is no other employee with whom I can adequately compare him.
(Well, our rats aren't really employees...) "Success will never spoil him."
(Well, at least not MUCH more.) "One usually comes away from him with a good feeling."
(And such a sigh of relief.) "His dissertation is the sort of work you don't expect to see these days; in it he has definitely demonstrated his complete capabilities."
(And his IQ, as well.) "He should go far."
(The farther the better.) "He will take full advantage of his staff."
(He even has one of them mowing his lawn after work.)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
-- Jules Henri Poincar'e
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have no legitimacy.
-- Albert Einstein
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
People seem to think that the blanket phrase, "I only work here," absolves them utterly from any moral obligation in terms of the public -- but this was precisely Eichmann's excuse for his job in the concentration camps.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub-systems and so on ad infinitum -- which is why we're always starting over.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Slashdot Mirror
The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a
digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top
of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean
the Buddha -- which is to demean oneself.
-- Robert Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"I got into an elevator at work and this man followed in after me... I
pushed '1' and he just stood there... I said 'Hi, where you going?' He
said, 'Phoenix.' So I pushed Phoenix. A few seconds later the doors
opened, two tumbleweeds blew in... we were in downtown Phoenix. I looked
at him and said 'You know, you're the kind of guy I want to hang around
with.' We got into his car and drove out to his shack in the desert.
Then the phone rang. He said 'You get it.' I picked it up and said
'Hello?'... the other side said 'Is this Steven Wright?'... I said 'Yes...'
The guy said 'Hi, I'm Mr. Jones, the student loan director from your bank...
It seems you have missed your last 17 payments, and the university you
attended said that they received none of the $17,000 we loaned you... we
would just like to know what happened to the money?' I said, 'Mr. Jones,
I'll give it to you straight. I gave all of the money to my friend Slick,
and with it he built a nuclear weapon... and I would appreciate it if you never
called me again."
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general ... The machine will begin ...
intelligence of an average human being
to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be
at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be
incalculable
-- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
I used to live in a house by the freeway. When I went anywhere, I had
to be going 65 MPH by the end of my driveway.
I replaced the headlights in my car with strobe lights. Now it looks
like I'm the only one moving.
I was pulled over for speeding today. The officer said, "Don't you know
the speed limit is 55 miles an hour?" And I said, "Yes, but I wasn't going
to be out that long."
I put a new engine in my car, but didn't take the old one out. Now
my car goes 500 miles an hour.
-- Steven Wright
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
... an anecdote from IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Center. When a
programmer used his new computer terminal, all was fine when he was sitting
down, but he couldn't log in to the system when he was standing up. That
behavior was 100 percent repeatable: he could always log in when sitting and
never when standing.
Most of us just sit back and marvel at such a story; how could that terminal
know whether the poor guy was sitting or standing? Good debuggers, though,
know that there has to be a reason. Electrical theories are the easiest to
hypothesize: was there a loose with under the carpet, or problems with static
electricity? But electrical problems are rarely consistently reproducible.
An alert IBMer finally noticed that the problem was in the terminal's keyboard:
the tops of two keys were switched. When the programmer was seated he was a
touch typist and the problem went unnoticed, but when he stood he was led
astray by hunting and pecking.
-- "Programming Pearls" column, by Jon Bentley in CACM February 1985
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Research is the best place to be: you work your buns off, and if it works
you're a hero; if it doesn't, well -- nobody else has done it yet either,
so you're still a valiant nerd.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Chapter 2: Newtonian Growth and Decay
The growth-decay formulas were developed in the trivial fashion by
Isaac Newton's famous brother Phigg. His idea was to provide an equation
that would describe a quantity that would dwindle and dwindle, but never
quite reach zero. Historically, he was merely trying to work out his
mortgage. Another versatile equation also emerged, one which would define
a function that would continue to grow, but never reach unity. This equation
can be applied to charging capacitors, over-damped springs, and the human
race in general.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness.
This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a
computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
A Severe Strain on the Credulity
As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the
highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the
multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt...
for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its
flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the
charges it then might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in
Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not
know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something
better than a vacuum against which to react... Of course he only seems to
lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
-- New York Times Editorial, 1920
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
This is the first numerical problem I ever did. It demonstrates the
power of computers:
Enter lots of data on calorie & nutritive content of foods. Instruct
the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a
minimum level of each component, for fixed caloric content. The
results are that one should eat each day:
1/2 chicken
1 egg
1 glass of skim milk
27 heads of lettuce.
-- Rev. Adrian Melott
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Worthless.
-- Sir George Bidell Airy, KCB, MA, LLD, DCL, FRS, FRAS
(Astronomer Royal of Great Britain), estimating for the
Chancellor of the Exchequer the potential value of the
"analytical engine" invented by Charles Babbage, September
15, 1842.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Of all possible committee reactions to any given agenda item, the
reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the greatest
amount of hot air.
-- Thomas L. Martin
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Uh... deity is a word, and diety isn't.
Or is it supposed to be one of those recursive acronyms? Diety Is
Excellent To You. Deity Eats Icecream That's Yellow. Diety Is
Eloping To Yokohama. I'll stop now.
-- Guy Maor
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The best equipment for your work is, of course, the most expensive.
However, your neighbor is always wasting money that should be yours
by judging things by their price.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
In the beginning there was only one kind of Mathematician, created by ...
the Great Mathamatical Spirit form the Book: the Topologist. And they grew to
large numbers and prospered.
One day they looked up in the heavens and desired to reach up as far
as the eye could see. So they set out in building a Mathematical edifice that
was to reach up as far as "up" went. Further and further up they went
until one night the edifice collapsed under the weight of paradox.
The following morning saw only rubble where there once was a huge
structure reaching to the heavens. One by one, the Mathematicians climbed
out from under the rubble. It was a miracle that nobody was killed; but when
they began to speak to one another, SUPRISE of all suprises! they could not
understand each other. They all spoke different languages. They all fought
amongst themselves and each went about their own way. To this day the
Topologists remain the original Mathematicians.
-- The Story of Babel
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The best rebuttal to this kind of statistical argument came from the
redoubtable John W. Campbell:
The laws of population growth tell us that approximately half the
people who were ever born in the history of the world are now
dead. There is therefore a 0.5 probability that this message is
being read by a corpse.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and ...
... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your
it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin
very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently
tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her
[EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events
such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the
woman's skin. Thank you.]
cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of
billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more
interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your
skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran
cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices
with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first,
without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from
below.
-- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
There is nothing which cannot be answered by means of my doctrine," said
a monk, coming into a teahouse where Nasrudin sat.
"And yet just a short time ago, I was challenged by a scholar with
an unanswerable question," said Nasrudin.
"I could have answered it if I had been there."
"Very well. He asked, 'Why are you breaking into my house in
the middle of the night?'"
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
What they said:
What they meant:
"You will be fortunate if you can get him to work for you."
(We certainly never succeeded.)
There is no other employee with whom I can adequately compare him.
(Well, our rats aren't really employees...)
"Success will never spoil him."
(Well, at least not MUCH more.)
"One usually comes away from him with a good feeling."
(And such a sigh of relief.)
"His dissertation is the sort of work you don't expect to see these days;
in it he has definitely demonstrated his complete capabilities."
(And his IQ, as well.)
"He should go far."
(The farther the better.)
"He will take full advantage of his staff."
(He even has one of them mowing his lawn after work.)
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection
of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
-- Jules Henri Poincar'e
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Chapter 1
The story so far:
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot
of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams?
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
"What is the Nature of God?"
CLICK...CLICK...WHIRRR...CLICK...=BEEP!=
1 QT. SOUR CREAM
1 TSP. SAUERKRAUT
1/2 CUT CHIVES.
STIR AND SPRINKLE WITH BACON BITS.
"I've just GOT to start labeling my software..."
-- Bloom County
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they
serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have
no legitimacy.
-- Albert Einstein
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
People seem to think that the blanket phrase, "I only work here," absolves
them utterly from any moral obligation in terms of the public -- but this
was precisely Eichmann's excuse for his job in the concentration camps.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
Systems have sub-systems and sub-systems have sub-systems and so on ad
infinitum -- which is why we're always starting over.
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...