Monday Links from Nowhere In Particular vol. LIV

[NickFitz]

Dear Nik - Happy New Year !

Thanks again for these fascinating posts - sorry I couldnt catch this on Monday ...the old TARDIS (c) has been playing up recently - sadly the long-awaited TARDIS upgrade from this unreliable Model20 didnt happen - still keep these Monday gems coming !

Many Thanks and Keep up the Good Work

My favourite was the WormWorld saga - Time Is - Not What you Think It Is.

If you havent read it - do try - its wll worth a browse.

Cheers AJP, and Happy New Year to you too

The WormWorld Saga is indeed excellent, and I'm looking forward to the forthcoming chapters

[AlfredJPruffock]

Dear Nik - Happy New Year !

Thanks again for these fascinating posts - sorry I couldnt catch this on Monday ...the old TARDIS (c) has been playing up recently - sadly the long-awaited TARDIS upgrade from this unreliable Model20 didnt happen - still keep these Monday gems coming !

Many Thanks and Keep up the Good Work

My favourite was the WormWorld saga - Time Is - Not What you Think It Is.

If you havent read it - do try - its wll worth a browse.

[d000hg]

Anything. That article on Feynman is wonderful, and it's time I read his autobiographies again.

[d000hg]

I'd just like to have worked with Feynman, on anything.

[mudskipper]

I know what you mean.

On day 1 of my HNC in Computer Studies, they came in and said they were doing a new course in Software Engineering. Instead of building a dentist database, we'd be doing real time modelling of traffic systems and programming robot arms. I signed up like a shot! Really enjoyed the course, then spent the rest of my working life building databases...

[RichardCranium]

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - "One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, 'That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.' For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company." W. Daniel Hills describes Feynman's involvement with the 1980s parallel computing project, which continued until his death.

Oh, how I ache to have worked in such an environment.

Massively parallel computers, natural language interpretation, neural networks, weather modelling. All stuff I wanted to get into when at college.

Not pissing about with automated paper record systems in RDBMS databases. "We have an exciting and challenging project. We're upgrading Oracle." Whoopy-f**king doo. And how, exactly, is that going to change the world for the better? Just put the CD in and run the script, FFS.

No wonder I find work so dull.

I get more satisfaction plotting SETI@home and Einstein@Home data packet crunching progress in a spreadsheet than I do from my work. At least that feels like I'm doing something worthwhile.

Once upon a time I was a tulip-hot technical problem solver. We built systems that nobody had ever done before, and sometimes did things others said couldn't be done. Now all that energy and imagination and creativity goes into getting business cases approved by beancounters and trying to convince salaried corpses to do some of the job they're paid to do.

Oh God, this industry has become torpid.

I'm all depressed now.

[chef]

Fantastic, cheers Nick. Perfect reading for my morning commute to school..

Chef

[NickFitz]

Crikey, is it Monday again already? Better waste some time:

• A Viewer's Companion to 'Citizen Kane' - Roger Ebert tells you all the things you didn't realise you needed to know about Orson Welles' classic. "Yes, you can see right through the eyeball of the shrieking cocatoo, in the scene before the big fight between Kane and Susan. It's a mistake."
  
  
• Betting on the Bad Guys - "When I heard that BP was destroying a big portion of Earth, with no serious discussion of cutting their dividend, I had two thoughts: 1) I hate them, and 2) This would be an excellent time to buy their stock. And so I did. Although I should have waited a week." Dilbert creator Scott Adams expounds his theory of unethical investment.
  
  
• You Ask, We Answer: Why Do Some Songs Fade Out At The End? - "Who created the idea of songs fading out and why? It seems a rather odd concept—that a song would not end definitively, but rather fade away into silence. That's not how songs are played live; why is it accepted for studio recordings?" NPR asks a number of music industry luminaries for their thoughts on the matter.
  
  
• The Redmond Reality Distortion Field - "Sometimes I get asked 'What the hell were you guys at Microsoft thinking when you did [insert action/product/initiative]?' It's not exactly our fault. The answer is the Redmond Reality Distortion Field." Stephen Toulouse explains why Microsoft sometimes comes up with really dumb ideas.
  
  
• Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine - "One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman, I mentioned to him that I was planning to start a company to build a parallel computer with a million processors. His reaction was unequivocal, 'That is positively the dopiest idea I ever heard.' For Richard a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right. Either way, he was interested. By the end of lunch he had agreed to spend the summer working at the company." W. Daniel Hills describes Feynman's involvement with the 1980s parallel computing project, which continued until his death.
  
  
• Who Is 'Parked Domain Girl' and Can I Marry Her? - "We've all been there. You're typing in a domain. Your finger slips. You end up with that cute blond college student staring at you and before you know it, you've nearly forgotten what site you were trying to visit." Chris Menning tracks down parked domain girl.
  
  
• What Your Computer Does While You Wait - "This post takes a look at the speed – latency and throughput – of various subsystems in a modern commodity PC, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 3.0GHz. I hope to give a feel for the relative speed of each component and a cheatsheet for back-of-the-envelope performance calculations. I’ve tried to show real-world throughputs (the sources are posted as a comment) rather than theoretical maximums." A thorough analysis by Gustavo Duarte. In one clock cycle of a 3 GHz processor, light travels about 4 inches, which puts a lot of premature optimisations into perspective.
  
  
• The Year of Practical Thinking - "They say you learn something every day. In 2010, I decided to put this to the test, and write down the one thing I learned each and every day of the year." Giles Turnbull shares a year's worth of acquired knowledge.
  
  
• The S stands for Simple - "There has been a long running debate in the Application Platform Services Group here at Burton Group between the REST people on one side and the SOAP people on the other. For the most part it mirrors the external debate. In one recent exchange, while discussing the complexity of SOAP and the web services framework, the SOAP side said, “Before all of the WS-* stuff, SOAP was actually simple. That’s what the ‘S’ stood for.”" An amusing take on the never-ending development of the Simple Object Access Protocol, by Pete Lacey.
  
  
• The Wormworld Saga - Chapter 1 - "When you recall the past, can you always distinguish which memories were real events and which were dreams or fantasies?" The first chapter of a beautiful online graphic novel by Daniel Lieske.

Happy invoicing!