Long ago, perhaps before high school (1964-1968) I read a novel by Otis Adelbert Kline. It was set on Mars, a Mars similar to that of Edgar Rice Burroughs (Barsoom). The villain was Sarkis the Torturer and there was a particular scene that stuck in my mind over all the intervening decades. I recently tracked it down. The novel was The Outlaws of Mars. From Chapter XII:
Somehow Facebook led me to a gaming website to show me Adventures in Fiction: Fletcher Pratt. In fact I was interested. I have read and enjoyed several of his books. In the fantasy genre these include the Harold Shea stories, co-authored with L. Sprague deCamp and the more serious novels The Blue Star and The Well of Unicorn.
I was browsing some web sites about LLMs and found a link to The Cardboard Computer, which turned out to be about circular slide rules. I have no idea why these are are supposed to be related to LLMs or any other modern AI work, since the first slide rule was invented in 1632. I still have the circular slide rule I bought in high school (1964-68):
I found How Washington Got Hooked on Flying Saucers to be fascinating if somewhat depressing. “There is nothing new under the sun.”
This is a subject I have been watching from a safe distance for well over half a century, when I first read Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (Few books have influenced me more than this one).
I met J. Allen Hynek in my last year of high school, 1967-68, when I was a student in the Astro-Science Workshop (Still around although in a different format) at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. This program was organized and run by Hynek. Hynek was a pleasant and interesting speaker, and a good teacher, but he never spoke to us kids about UFOs.
Continue readingI started programming computers in February of 1967, when I was a junior in high school. After dropping out of grad school I began a 41 year career in information technology in January of 1977. I have seen a lot of computer languages come and go. So I read 5 Programming Languages You Won’t Likely Be Using by 2030 with some interest. The only one on the list I had ever used was Perl. It was kind of fun, but I did not get very attached to it 🙂
Meanwhile, some much older languages live on. Last year COVID-19 demonstrated how much the financial world still depends on COBOL:
Continue readingI first visited the complex plane 45 years ago, in High School. It was love at first sight, and I have been smitten ever since. Thank you, Margaret Matchett, my math teacher that year.
EDIT: I just looked her up on the Mathematics Genealogy Project. Go back three “generations” and you get to Ludwig Boltzmann, whose work has fascinated me since I first heard about it, not long after Mrs. Matchett’s math class.
Measurement and Uncertainty Smackdown. With America being ruled by the Innumerati of all political persuasions anything that helps simple quantitative reasoning is worthwhile.
The basics of this I learned in High School Chemistry (Thank you, Mr. Wheeler) and my first two years at Carleton. Of course, back then (1967-70),
….there is no reason that students in introductory courses couldn’t do the monte
carlo method.
was not quite so obvious.
Back in November our foster daughter, carpe_noctum_93, introduced me to Half Price Books. This evening we made a family visit to the Roseville store.
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Convergence 2010 — Physics and Fantasy
Notes from a panel at Convergence 2010, with web links, comments, and one smart-assed quote.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 