Archive for 2009

09w05:1 Alan Kay: "The Computer is an instrument whose music is ideas".

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Face to Face: Alan Kay Still Waiting for the Revolution | Lars Kongshem (April 2003)
http://content.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5&print=2
“Q: You often say that the computer revolution hasn’t happened yet. What do you mean by that?
“A: If you look with a squinty eye at most of personal computing today, you’ll see we’re basically just automating paper—using digital versions of documents and mail. But as was the case with the invention of the printing press, the interesting thing about the computer is that it allows you to have new ways of representing things, new ways to argue about things, and new kinds of fluencies. Most schools define computer literacy as being able to operate Microsoft Office and maybe do a little web design. They’re missing the point. That’s like saying, “If you know which end of a book to hold up, and you know how to turn to Chapter Three, then you’re literate.” Literature is first and foremost about having ideas important enough to discuss and write down in some form. So you have to ask, “What is the literature that is best written down on a computer?” One answer is to make a dynamic simulation of some idea that you think is important, a simulation that you can play with and that you can learn from. […] You can put a piano in every classroom, but that won’t give you a developed music culture, because the music culture is embodied in people. […] If you don’t have a teacher who is a carrier of music, then all efforts to do music in the classroom will fail—because existing teachers who are not musicians will decide to teach the C Major scale and see what the bell curve is on that. The important thing here is that the music is not in the piano. And knowledge and edification is not in the computer. The computer is simply an instrument whose music is ideas. […] If you take all the anthropological universals and lay them out, those are the things that you can expect children to learn from their environment—and they do. But the point of school is to teach all those things that are inventions and that are hard to learn because we’re not explicitly wired for them. Like reading and writing. Virtually all learning difficulties that children face are caused by adults’ inability to set up reasonable environments for them. The biggest barrier to improving education for children, with or without computers, is the completely impoverished imaginations of most adults.”

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09w04:2 Shakespeare's Blog V

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January 20th

Today I pierced that fastness. The bit-and-piecing of the play goes on in rehearsal but, hearing the set speech I have given Theseus on the lunatic the lover and the poet I, standing hand-rubbing oldly as Philostrate, was of a sudden filled with lunaticloverpoet’s pride. I marched bold as a soldier to her house in the afternoon, there being no performance, and knocked and said to the maid, a long-nosed girl, that Master Shakespeare was come to deliver somewhat to her mistress. Her mistress, says she, is occupied and cannot be seen, mayhap she herself can take. I say no, I am here on the Lord Chamerberlain’s behoof and will not bandy with servants. And she she she comes into the hallway to ask who is here. She sees me and says: Well, come in and let us know what is your business. So I leftright leftright to a fair panelled room and we sit. The somewhat I have for her is but a cordial summons to tomorrow’s Romeo. Is Master Burbage in it, she would know, and I say aye. Ah, she is sorry then but she is promised abroad. You have then, madam, a large acquaintance in London? Oh, I am invited much. For mine own part, madam, I find a poet’s life a surfeit of clawers and rubbers. I was but saying a week gone to my near friend Harry Wriothesly, the Earl of Southampton that is … He is a friend, you say? The Earl of Southampton is your friend? Oh, I have earls and dukes enow as friends; I was saying but this morning to Duke Theseus …

You speak English prettily, madam. What, though, is your native tongue? Say somewhat in it. She says (I write it on my tablet): Slammat jalan. What means that, madam? It is what we say to one who is leaving, it means: let your journey be safe. And so I am gently dismissed. But I kiss that wonder of a warm tawny hand before leaving.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p. 146-47)

09w03:2 Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold: The Case of Israel

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Chronicle of a Suicide Foretold: The Case of Israel | Immanuel Wallerstein
http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/249en.htm
“The three-element strategy of Israel is decomposing. The iron fist no longer succeeds, much as it didn’t for George Bush in Iraq. Will the United States link remain firm? I doubt it. And will world public opinion continue to look sympathetically on Israel? It seems not. Can Israel now switch to an alternative strategy, of negotiating with the militant representatives of the Arab Palestinians, as an integral constituent of the Middle East, and not as an outpost of Europe? It seems quite late for that, quite possibly too late. Hence, the chronicle of a suicide foretold.”

09w03:1 Shakespeare's Blog IV

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January 13th

So cold and kibey a day that I laugh in scorn of our trade that we represent midsummer, all leafy and flowery. She has kept indoors, her house all muffled up with shutters as it too feels the cold. I am sick of these sugar rhymes. I dream after dinner (a drowsy one of fat pork and a pudding) that I am ass-headed Bottom in the bower of a tiny golden Titania. Thou art as wise as thou are beautiful. The mirror shows bad teeth and beard fast graying, a wormy skin. Old dad.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p. 146)

09w02:4 Shakespeare's Blog III

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January 9th

At the Theatre in the mornings they are rehearsing already in their several groups, for that is the one way to deal with short notice, to write a play soft-jointed and separable out. And it was without the walls that I had the good chance to see her and, my heart beating unwontedly, even to address a word. I was leaving for my lodging and her coach was coming by. Then a gentleman appears from Spitalfields way and his horse slipped and slithered in all the foul slushy snowbroth so that her own two took fright and the offside reared and whinnied. It was I that nimbly darted, though panting much after, and seized his head, saying calming words. Her coach-man got down and first her maid put out her face from the coach and the she on the other side, drawing aside her veil to see what was the matter. And so I went up and doffed my hat and bowed.

-All is right now. That horse slipped, see. He had ridden on and all is well again.

-I am beholden. I thank. Wait, I will give …

-Ah, madam, no. I am a gentleman. I am Master Shakespeare of the Theatre there.

-You are there? You are of Master Burbage’s company?

How knows she of him? Her voice is prettily foreign. She cannot say th or w. I tank. Bwait, I bwill geef … I drank in her goldeness.

-You have seen Master Burbage act then, madam?

-Him I did see in Rish Hard de Turd.

And so I smiled, saying:

-The play of which I myself am the author. You are welcome any time at the Theatre. I will be most happy to offer you what hospitality the house affords.

But she smiled queenlily, saying:

-I tank you. Now must we on.

So saying, she bade her coachman continue on their way and left me there standing in the dirty snow. And I was aware that H has said no more of the £1000 and I remain the writing hack whom they will welcome as a whole shareholder can I but find the money.

(Anthony Burgess, Nothing Like The Sun, p. 145-146)

09w02:2 Shakespeare's Blog II

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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

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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

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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)