09w02:2 Shakespeare's Blog II Posted January 6th, 2009 by timothy. 0 Comments Goodreads | 2009 week 02 number 2 (Shakespeare’s Blog II) January 6th Walking over crisp snow to my ordinary I saw her. She is either newly back or newly up from a sickness. To such as her our cold must be all agony. She was all mobled up at the window, he tawniness flat and dull in this snowlight, and I felt pity. I cannot believe that she is more than mocked at by the Inn men for her colour, I cannot believe that she is of that Clerkenwell tribe. She is brown not negro. Boldly I waved my hand passing, but she did not see or she ignored. And so back to rhyming away at the lover’s scenes, wooden wooden wooden but there i sn o time for re-working. Well, I put the bad harvest in Oberon’s speech and the thought for a fancy I would give my dark one in the window a womb rich with Titania’s young squire. I do but beg a little changeling boy to be my henchman. (Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p. 144-145)
09w02:1 Edsger W. Dijkstra Posted January 4th, 2009 by timothy. 0 Comments Goodreads | 2009 week 2 number 1 (Edsger W. Dijkstra ) Edsger W. Dijkstra | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra “Dijkstra was known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen. The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with EWD as prefix. Dijkstra would distribute photocopies of a new EWD among his colleagues; as many recipients photocopied and forwarded their copy, the EWDs spread throughout the international computer science community. The topics were mainly computer science and mathematics, but also included trip reports, letters, and speeches. More than 1300 EWDs have since been scanned, with a growing number also transcribed to facilitate search, and are available online at the Dijkstra archive of the University of Texas.” Edsger W. Dijkstra | University of Texas http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ Video and audio page: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video-audio/video-audio.html NPR interview (1995) http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/video-audio/EWDonNPR.mp3 Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 (the above three videos can be downloaded directly from here : http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/videos/noorderlicht.mpg 300 MB Quicktime MPEG) On the fact that the Atlantic Ocean has two sides | Edsger W. Dijkstra (1982) http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD611.html (Scanned PDF version) “A very useful measure is —called after its inventor— the “Buxton Index”. John N. Buxton discovered that the most important one-dimensional scale along which persons are institutions to be compared, can be placed is the length of the period of time in the future for which a person or institution plans. This period, measured in years, gives the Buxton Index. For the little shopkeeper around the corner the Buxton Index is three-quarter, for a true Christian it is infinite, we marry with one near fifty, most larger companies have one of about five, most scientist have one between two and ten. (For a scientist it is hard to have a larger one: the future then becomes so hazy, that effective planning becomes an illusion.) […] My overall impression is that along this scale —which is not entirely independent of the Buxton Index— Europe, for better or for worse, is more Platonic, whereas the USA, and Canada to a lesser extent, are more pragmatic. […]The third phenomenon that goes hand in hand with a greater pragmatism is that universities are seen less as seats of learning and centres of intellectual innovation and more as schools preparing students for well-paid jobs. If industry and government ask for the wrong type of people —students, brain-washed by COBOL and FORTRAN— that is then what they get.”
09w01:1 Shakespeare's Blog I Posted January 4th, 2009 by timothy. 0 Comments Goodreads | 2009 week 01 number 01 (Shakespeare’s Blog Part I) January 4th Madness madness all madness. After H departed there comes Dick Burbage all hotfoot and sweating spite of the bitter cold with loud news that the Men are commanded to play at the wedding of the Earl of Derby and H’s cast-off Lady Liza. Things so coincidentally chiming ring like matter of a comedy, yet life is so, often grossly so, so that a playmaker feels himself to be a better contriver than God or Fate or who runs the mad world. The madness is in the brevity of the time. At the Court of Greenwich but three weeks from now. Well, let us lie back on the bed unmade for more to coincide, for H knocked books from my shelf and one was Chaucer that opened at the duc that highte Theseus and weddede the Queen Ypolita, and the other was this fire-new marriage-song of Edm. Spense with his Ne let the Pouke, nor other evill spirghtes, Ne let mischievous witches with their charmes, Ne let hob Goblins, names whose sence we see not, Fray us with things that be not And so I lay on my back a space and watched the fire sink to all glowing caverns and it was like a dance of fieries, I would say fairies. And then came the name Bottom, which will do for a take-off of Ned Alleyn, so that I laughed. Snow falling as I sat to work (I cannot have Plautus twins for most will have seen C of E but I can have the Pouke or Puck confound poor lovers) and the bellman stamped his feet and cursed, blowing on his fingers. Yet with my fire made up I sweated as mid-summer, and lo I got my title. (Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p. 144)
