I close the first round of CS101 articles with some of my very favorite CS jokes. Sure, they’re esoteric, but they’re also really funny. Thing is, you may have to trust me on that.
I have a sign in my cube:
It garners two reactions. Some people just walk away puzzled. Some people look puzzled for just a moment and then they crack up.
I recently mentioned a parable about grains of rice and a chessboard. If you were industrious enough to try your own interweb search for [parable 64 squares grains] you might be ahead of me. Or you may have known the parable already. For the rest of you, here’s the deal.
Stripped of the narrative, it’s about taking a chessboard and placing a single grain of rice in the first square (in some versions, it’s a grain of wheat). In the second square, place two grains of rice—double the amount in the first square. In the third square use double the grains of the second square. For each square on the chessboard, use twice as many grains of rice as used for the previous square.
I’ll come back to the punchline, but I stripped the narrative. Let me fix that.
As a quick Sideband sidebar to the Star Trek holodeck article just published, I want to mention a metaphor I use to refer to a common science fiction fan phenomenon. The metaphor has a label: “Star Trekking it.”
A while back I mentioned another metaphor: “doing a Boston.” This is like that. It’s a specific reference applied to a general situation. In this case, the metaphor is a general idea in a specific context: explaining away ridiculous stuff in Star Trek.
And make no mistake, Star Trek needs plenty of explaining!
Imagine standing on a very tall hill in middle of a thick forest. Your hill is tall enough to take you above the trees; when you look out over the trees, you can see for miles around you. Ahead you can see another hill sticking above the trees; this is your goal.
You want to reach that hill.
A question arises; you are asked, “How long will it take to reach yon hill? What will you need along the way?”
A recent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic set off “Ah! Yes!” bells today. It explains graphically and precisely why I’m so allergic to trendy:
from SMBC by Zach Weiner
Or as great Groucho Marx so famously put it, “I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.”
Some things are so cool that you just have to participate in the whole viral, retweety, rebloggy, “did you see this” thing and pass it on to everyone you know. As I’ve said before, I’m not normally a big fan of advertising (lies, more lies and damned lies), but sometimes they really do hit it out of the park:
The ship sailed when I was moved to rant about cable news, but I originally had some idea that Sideband #32 should be another rumination on bits and binary (like Sidebands #25 and #28). After all, 32-bit systems are the common currency these days, and 32 bits jumps you from the toy computer world to the real computer world. Unicode, for example, although it is not technically a “32-bit standard,” fits most naturally in a 32-bit architecture.
When you go from 16-bit systems to 32-bit systems, your counting ability leaps from 64 K (65,536 to be precise) to 4 gig (full precision version: 4,294,967,296). This is what makes 16-bit systems “toys” (although some are plenty sophisticated). Numbers no bigger than 65 thousand (half that if you want plus and minus numbers) just don’t cut very far.
I had a small dinner party last night so that some friends could come over for some ‘za and beer and catch up on the latest antics of Nancy Botwin and company on Weeds. Per the old saying, “A good time was had by all.” Or to put it less passively, “As usual, we had a blast! (And that Nancy… craaaaaaa-zy!!)”
However, in the course of conversation I realized not everyone knows about the magic behind our north star (Polaris by name) and found myself taking the virtual podium to explain. It’s one of those things that’s common knowledge to many but may come as a complete surprise to others.
So, for those of you not familiar with the navigational magic behind the north star, here’s the deal.
In this morning’s article, I tried to explain my way of answering a question that may not be objectively answerable. I intend at least one more article along this path as I attempt to apply my answer to various kinds of art or not-art. That will come later, but considering the question brought to mind a discussion I had long ago with someone. The long and short of it is that (a) I was a jerk and (b) I was wrong. Completely wrong.
It’s funny how things stick with you. A single conversation held roughly three decades ago remains a focal point in my thoughts (albeit not a huge one). I remember where I was sitting; I remember where he was sitting. That’s actually saying something, as my memory for past events is infamously awful. Maybe it was the weight of the error never fully acknowledged that gives it such sticking power. If so, perhaps this semi-public confession will redress matters.
My culpa was to accuse a friend, whose life and work was art, of not being an artist.
Warning: This is a 100% pure foul-mouthed rant…
You’ve been warned.
It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to watch any of the cable news networks. I used to watch Fox just to see the other point of view, but their lies and bias were finally more than I could stomach.
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