Tunny Machine Back in Action!

If you're a technology history junkie like me, you probably know about the Tunny machines.  They were an important part of the Bletchly Park efforts that decoded Nazi messages.

The British National Museum of Computing has recently finished building a complete, working replica of a Tunny machine.  In the course of doing so, they've now documented exactly how it was built (this documentation didn't exist before they started their work).

This is something I would really like to see.  Next time I'm over in England, I've got to make a point of seeing this museum (I've never been there)...

Lunokhod I Lives Again!

Well, sort of.

This Soviet achievement in 1969 was completely overshadowed by the American achievement of putting astronauts on the moon.  The Soviet moon rover was, however, quite a technical feat in its own right.

Clearly, though, the Soviets needed a dose of design talent.  Lunokhod's “washtub look” would have made Stalin quite happy.

While Lunokhod's electronics failed a long time ago, the device itself was recently located by imagery satellites in lunar orbit, and a scientist has now succeeded in bouncing light off the retro-reflectors mounted on Lunokhod's back.  With its location now precisely known, Lunokhod's retro-reflectors have now become an important part of a modern science effort.  Not bad for a 42 year old piece of space junk!

Geek Humor...

If you're a developer, this is very funny stuff: how to write unmaintainable code.  A sample:

Recycle Your Variables

Wherever scope rules permit, reuse existing unrelated variable names. Similarly, use the same temporary variable for two unrelated purposes (purporting to save stack slots). For a fiendish variant, morph the variable, for example, assign a value to a variable at the top of a very long method, and then somewhere in the middle, change the meaning of the variable in a subtle way, such as converting it from a 0-based coordinate to a 1-based coordinate. Be certain not to document this change in meaning.

2012 Is Going to be an Interesting Election Year!

Sign outside Clovis, New Mexico:

Forth...

Here's a discussion about Forth, a programming language blast-from-the-past for me.  There was, in the late '70s, a period of time when Forth was the only high-level langauge for microcomputers that actually worked reasonably well for real-world projects.  I used it fairly extensively on Z80s, and a bit less on several different Intel single-chip solutions.  I liked it a lot - it was very light-wieght, lent itself very well to a serial terminal development environment, and let me build up a library of “stuff” that I could use as tools in different environments.  Turbo Pascal was the first practicable alternative I found to Forth, and that wasn't useful in embedded systems.  Forth and assembler were the only languages I ever used in that world...

62% Top Marginal Tax Rate?

This is so depressing...

Sad...

Spirit abandoned...

Aging Geek...

Debbie and I are very tired and sore this morning, after spending the weekend working on our pine trees.  We've got about two-thirds of the work done now, and the part that we've finished looks great.  There's a large pile of pine brush in our front yard, ready for burning next weekend.  We burned yesterday, but because we can only burn from 8:15 am to 10:00 am, we couldn't get all that much done.  The pile grows larger.

Meanwhile, we exercised – hard – virtually every muscle in our aging bodies.  We're paying for it this morning!  Oh, the aches and pains!  Sure will feel good when this goes away...

Amazing Gymnast...

My mom sent this video to me, with a forwarded note that this was the granddaughter of Nadia Comanecci, the amazing Olympic gymnast.  Nadia, who won her Olympic gold medal in 1976 at the age of 14, has one child (a five year old daughter) at this writing.  This is actually a video of Boyanka Angelova, an accomplished gymnast who is completely unrelated to Nadia.  But who cares?  It's amazing, and beautiful!

UNIX Tools...

An interesting collection...

I Gotta Get Me...

...one of these.

Human Stupidity...

An excellent essay.  Here's one fragment, titled “The Power of Stupidity”

It is not difficult to understand how social, political and institutional power enhances the damaging potential of a stupid person. But one still has to explain and understand what essentially it is that makes a stupid person dangerous to other people - in other words what constitutes the power of stupidity.

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behaviour. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit's actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit's actions, his nasty manoeuvres and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy. Because the stupid person's actions do not conform to the rules of rationality, it follows that:

a) one is generally caught by surprise by the attack; b) even when one becomes aware of the attack, one cannot organize a rational defense, because the attack itself lacks any rational structure.

The fact that the activity and movements of a stupid creature are absolutely erratic and irrational not only makes defense problematic but it also makes any counter-attack extremely difficult - like trying to shoot at an object which is capable of the most improbable and unimaginable movements. This is what both Dickens and Schiller had in mind when the former stated that "with stupidity and sound digestion man may front much" and the latter wrote that "against stupidity the very Gods fight in vain."

As I said: excellent!

This is How to Make a Public Service Commercial...

Our Galaxy...

Reader Paul H. sends this along, I suspect thinking that I might have missed APOD because of our user conference.  This time APOD has more than just a pretty picture – it links to this interactive sky survey, which is sort of like having an excellent pair of binoculars and a perfectly clear sky, from the comfort of your chair...

Americans vs. French...

Peggy Noonan, totally resonating with me:

America was immediately sympathetic to the underdog. The impulse of every media organization, from tabloid to broadsheet to cable to network, was to side with the powerless one in the equation. The cops, the hotel's managers, the District Attorney's office—everyone in authority gave equal weight and respect to the word of the maid. Only in America (and not always in America) would they have taken the testimony of the immigrant woman from Africa and dragged the powerful man out of his first-class seat in the jet at JFK.

In France, the exact opposite. There, from the moment the story broke, DSK was the victim, not the villain. It was a setup, a trap, a conspiracy. He has a weakness for women. No, he loves them too much. Hairy-chested poseur and Sarkozy foreign-policy adviser Bernard-Henri Levy sneeringly referred to "the chambermaid," brayed about DSK's high standing, and called him "a friend to women." Jean Daniel, editor of Le Nouvel Observateur, sniffily asked why "the supposed victim was treated as worthy and beyond suspicion."

Why wouldn't she be treated as worthy, buddy? One is tempted to ask if it's the black part, the woman part or the immigrant part.

As David Rieff wrote in The New Republic, to French intellectuals, DSK deserves special treatment because he is a valuable person. "The French elites' consensus seems to be that it is somehow Strauss-Kahn himself and not the 32-year-old maid who is the true victim of this drama."

Americans totally went for the little guy. The French went for the power.

Much more, on different topics, in her whole piece...

Rumors of My Demise...

...are slightly premature.  I wasn't amongst the departed, I was just busy. 

For the past three days, I've been part of the team at my company putting on the Knowledge11 User Conference.  It was a fantastic experience, but exhausting.  My own participation is typical; over 100 of our employees were there.  I gave two presentations on my own, one presentation as one of a group of presenters, and was a moderator in two roundtable discussions.  All of these were well-attended, and very intense experiences.  I learned a lot, and hopefully so did the customers who attended.

But the best part of the experience, by far, was the one-on-one meetings I had with customers.  The roughly dozen pre-arranged time slots were all booked before the convention even began, but we managed to put together about two dozen more meetings ad hoc.  All told, I had 38 organized meetings with customers, and probably half that again that “just happened” in the hallways (and in one case, the restroom!).  Even after a night of sleep, my head is still spinning with all the things that I learned, and ideas that I got from our customers.

Part of me wishes that these events happened more than annually, and part of me is glad I have a whole year to rest up for the next one.  Except...I don't.  We have a second event happening later this year in Europe.  Woo hoo!

Carl Sagan's Words of Wisdom...

Via Paul H.



Science's “Great Communicator” is much missed in these parts...

Seriously Geeky...

What if you wanted to run Linux right in your web browser?  How would you do it?

Well, of course what you would do is to write a JavaScript emulation of an x86 processor and its peripherals, then port Linux to that.  Or at least that's what Fabrice Bellard did, just for fun.  Be sure to check out the technical notes.

Awesome, dude!

Map of the Universe...

Extra gigantic sized!

I Need One of These!

Very clever – and beautiful – demonstration of the relationship between a pendulum's length and it's oscillation period...