![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Today's my 200th essay, (200 essays, maybe twelve all that interesting). Still, seems fair to take a little stock:
|
Honest, |
||||
I must say it's good casting, particularly for |
I kind of knew this already. |
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
In other news I gave my first lecture, on the faintly philosophic topic ``why do we write computer programs'' -- as opposed to building physical models or custom circuits. My claim: programs are conveniences helping us to understand what (we think) we've told the computer to do and to experiment with those instructions, and as a consequence good code is written for humans to read and adapt. Seven students (of about 150) said they don't get it. It's going to be a fun term. This is a reason I only do ``why'' in the first class and ``what'' and ``how'' the rest.
Trivia: Two-fifths of U.S. soldiers headed to Europe in World War I travelled through Hoboken. Source: New Jersey: America's Main Road, John T. Cunningham.
Currently Reading: The Seedling Stars, James Blish. It's a set of four stories about the genetic-engineering of humanity to live on all the worlds of the galaxy, so old that I believe the chronologically first story was written before the link between genes and nucleic acid was clear. The first story in sequence is of the Adapted Men made of ice who settle Ganymede (which, in the 50s, had some water, useful chemicals, and basic life-forms). The second sees humans made into lemur-like creatures grabbing an existence out from under the dinosaurs of a Mesozoic rain forest on Tellura. Third, one of Blish's first and best stories, is of microscopic humans on Hydrot and their two-inch wooden ``spaceship'' ... impossible yet compelling. Fourth, an afterthought, is about the adaptation of humans to live on the desiccated far-future Earth, and the seal-men of Altair recognizing this will have social consequences for the all-too-smug Basic Humans. Everything great, and little of what was repugnant, about John W. Campbell-era science fiction.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 07:43 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 09:51 pm (UTC)The strangest thing is, having met you and your incredible feet in real life, I can still see Tracey Ullman as you.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 07:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 10:05 pm (UTC)The lint I can take. It's the zeal with which you hawk playing Go that gets me.
Reminds me, though, I need to dig up Robert Benchley's essay about Esperanto for you.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 10:32 pm (UTC)(I'm enthusiastic. And my wife has learned that she just needs to wave a shinie in front of my eyes to get me enthusiastic about something else. Convenient, ain't it?)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 08:14 am (UTC)I know; I've watched ... I just was imprinted very early on by you. But raw enthusiasm at least makes for a sequence of interesting months ...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 08:28 am (UTC)When I get enthusiastic about something, I hope that others will share my enthusiasm. As I've aged, I've learned that's usually not true.
In some ways, I've never gone beyond the "look; I have a pretty!" phase of development... though I hope I do understand the word "no".
Again, please forgive me if I annoyed you.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 09:04 am (UTC)Oh, no, you never annoyed me. Honest. I've occasionally thought I was caught up in a whirlwind I didn't understand, but I was never bothered by it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 10:41 am (UTC)BTW, am I merely listening too closely to the neutrinos ricocheting around the cavity passing for my brain, or did you mention, at one point, the possibility of the Zoo gaining red panda residents?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 10:16 pm (UTC)I'm pretty sure Famke Janssen was a guest on the first Late Night with Conan O'Brien taping I ever saw -- I'm rather sure I saw her demonstrating how to kill Conan with her thighs. It's hard to get too confused about such things.
I don't specifically remember anything about the Singapore Zoo getting red pandas, although I forget a lot of things that go on around here. It's also been two months (!) since I last visited, too.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 01:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 08:19 am (UTC)Ah, there we go. That, plus the coatis, will make Ross Park a world leader.
I thought of something Porsupah might have had in mind -- I picked up Royce and Porsupah beanie babies from the Singapore Zoo; maybe she was thinking of that.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 04:16 pm (UTC)Your class sounds interesting as well as the question of why we write computer programs. I agree with you in your claim. Programs are realizations of philosophies to handle complexity.
I suppose the naive view is that computer languages have 'abilities' that others do not, or that 'objects' are somehow 'better.' I suppose that is true in a superficial sense, but it all gets compiled to a lot of binary data regardless of the language.
-- Jacob
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-13 10:34 pm (UTC)Thank you ... the course is a freshman-level lecture introducing C and mathematical programming, so there's quite a few students who haven't touched a computer except to listen to MP3s and swap instant messages, of course. Unfortunately a ``why'' topic is probably better addressed when students have more background in the material, but I won't have time to give an hour to it later on (we have very few class-hours), and I always try to make the first lecture light on testable material. (Plus I was jet-lagged and couldn't do something serious.)
As for programming -- well, I fit into that school of thought that says if you don't understand a page of code at a glance, then you don't understand it at all and probably haven't programmed it successfully. I'm also of the school that says anything before about the fourth rewrite is useless, and before the sixth should be looked at dubiously. I won't be very successful trying to teach that right away, but I can at least try to teach the approach of ``think very carefully about exactly what you want to do'' and then ``what design will make that easiest to do''?
If I'm successful, years from now one or two of these students will think, ``Gee, he was right after all.''
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 01:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-14 08:21 am (UTC)Really, is there any other reaction to the idea of raccoons in foam wrappers than to be more cheery?