The Glorious World of Software

A ways back, I was programming the simple time-and-date software for a standalone utility computer.  This was a one-program computer that did a  specific set of functions 24 hours a day, every day, without a human operator.  But it needed to synchronize with others like itself scattered across the earth, and so it needed to deal with local time, global time, timezones, daylight savings, and slightly broken clock circuits.  I got it running pretty quickly, but the thing was never done.

It was hard for me to explain the never-ending nature of the situation.  If I'd had this film, I could have shown it around and we all would have been a lot happier.

Few of you are computer programmers or scientists.  Yet many of you have become curious about these things that are so helpful yet so infuriating.

Most descriptions of this sort of stuff are all techno-babble.  Or just babble.  But I think you will find this very interesting.  It's about fitting the mess that is humanity into the rigid categories of the computer.  Let me know if you like it.

Computers and networks are now culture, not just machinery.  Yet, the makers and users of culture are frequently baffled by the culture of their own society.  This video describes some of the madness.  Note that they use the word 'code' to mean software.

Computerphile and Numberphile are channels on YouTube that provide explanations that entertain.  Highly recommended.

The truth, by the way, is even worse than the movie shows.  Here is a timezone map for antarctica:

They can't be serious.

Are Jews Intelligent?

There's a rumor floating about that Jews are intelligent.  Here in Jerusalem, I have found that I can disprove this theory to any Israeli with only 3 words: Government of Israel.

For those of you not yet convinced, I have come across gob smackingly powerful evidence of Jewish dumbness:The Association of German National Jews.  This group existed from 1921 to 1935,  and its goals were "The total assimilation of Jews into the German Volksgemenschaft, self eradication of Jewish identity, and the expulsion from Germany of the Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe."

Many years before, the German writer Friedrich Schiller penned this immortal description:

Against stupidity, the very gods
Themselves contend in vain

Gay Divorcee

In one of the blogs I read, I remember stumbling across a sort of tongue-in-cheek curse, to the effect that we should look forward to a series of painful and possibly vicious divorces, among the gay marriages then sweeping the nation.

The idea of the blogger, who is painfully and expensively divorced from a number of women, is that the other kind should have to suffer as he does.

I also remember this quote from the singer Rod Stewart: "I'll never get married again — I'll just find a women I don't like and buy her a house!".

Well, push has come to shove.  The penny has dropped. The poop has impacted the rotary ventilator, truth and consequences.  We have a famous Gay Divorcee in the Episcopal Bishop (!) Gene Robinson.

Celluloid Prophecy?

 So does his shocking pink shirt connect to his shocking pink condition?:

Gay Priest - Now Single

Perhaps not so famous.  Perhaps he will now search for men he doesn't like, and buy them houses.  Appropriately for clergy, he wrote a sensitive and literate essay to nearly explain his decision.  Significantly, it is published on the website The Daily Beast.  Any guesses on who the beast might be?

Schadenfreude: The satisfaction or pleasure felt at someone else's pain.  Probably a sinful pleasure.

Meow and Megadeaths

In the mists of time gone by, I had a cat.  She was forced on me, against my will, by a malevolent friend, when she was just a kitten.  No, my malevolent friend wasn't a kitten, you fool, the cat was.

So the (non-malevolent) kitten was on my lap, and a neighbor asked me the name of the cat.  I asked the cat her name.  She lied and said: "Meow".

I explained that her name was Meow.

My neighbor retorted: You mean Meow Tse-Tung!   Now the name of the Chinese leader at the time was Mao Tse-Tung, and I thought this hilarious.  And so the innocent cat was named.

The media had, at that time, been making some noise about Mao and his Little Red Book.  Some friends even bought a copy, which I borrowed.  It was meh.

Decades went by.

More recently, scholars have been allowed into the archives of the Chinese government and Communist Party.  One in particular, Frank Dikötter, has been summing up the number of excess deaths caused by the policies of the government and the Party.  The records were quite detailed.  The sum is something in the neighborhood of 60 million dead.  This is a very bad neighborhood.   The genocide of the Chinese exceeds the death toll of Hitler's holocaust, and of Stalin's crimes.  If Dikötter is correct, Mao was the worst mass murderer in the miserable and inhumane history of humanity.

Therefore, I owe my cat an apology.  She did nothing to deserve such shame.  She was a good cat.  But she is now in kitty heaven, and I don't know if she can hear me.  Still, I must apologize.  Sixty million times.

The genocide of the Chinese has some parallels with Stalin's crimes.  In both cases, the socialist/communist revolution took over and installed an economic plan that did not work.  Lots of projects fail.  But in a one-man dictatorship, the dictator tends to get very angry when big projects fail.  And when the failure threatens to undermine the very ideas the dictator believes in, it seems to set off some kind of psychic explosion.  Bloodshed follows, as the commander desperately tries to get the command economy working.

This structure does not match the holocaust of Hitler.   He killed because he wanted to.  It was not a means to a goal.  It was the goal.

Can You Read Latin?

A three-hundred year old book has been found with a census (of some kind) of old Palestine, the Holy Land.

You can read it (in Latin and Greek) on Google Books, or at Archive.org.

The author, Adriaan Reland, either went to the Middle East himself, or stayed home in the Netherlands, depending on where you read about him.

I can't find the translation, but another blogger says he stumbled onto the book in a bookstore, and it verifies the claim that there were extremely few Arabs in Palestine in 1695.

Also, not one place-name in Israel is linguistically Arabic, and there was no Palestinian people or nation.

I wish I could read Latin.

Here, read the blog yourself.

Update:  Apparently nobody has actually read the book.  I find that this makes me very skeptical.

Exploding Head Syndrome

Today I learned that Exploding Head Syndrome is a thing.  This is not the news I was looking for.  Here, read even more.

I myself had something just like it.  It was caused by the crew remodeling the apartment of my upstairs neighbor.   At 8 AM.  But when they finished, I was cured.

Foolishness

Just to prove that there is really no limit to the foolishness of humanity.  We have Tiny Hamsters eating Tiny Burritos.  Actually, just one hamster, two burritos.

Fiddling While Rome Burns

I've been fiddling around with this blog a bit.  I've changed the look, some colors, some backgrounds.  Let me know if you like it.  Or not.