Letters to the editor, January 2009This a traditional letter column. You are encouraged to write a letter of comment on anything that you find worthy of comment. It will (may) be published in this column along with my reply. As editor I reserve the right to delete material; however I will not alter the undeleted material. E-mail to me that solely references the contents of this site will be assumed to be publishable mail. All other e-mail is assumed to be private. And, of course, anything marked not for publication is not for publication. Oh yes, letters of appreciation for the scholarly resources provided by this site will be handled very discreetly. This page contains the correspondence for January 2009.
From: Anielka Briggs Found you through Fatmouse Absolutely hilarious. Well done! Thanks. A chap named Steve Witham found it for me, or else wrote it – I’m not sure which. According to Google there are only two copies of the Kult of Hamstur on the web, mine and one in the Tom’s Hardware forum. The only connection that I can see is that I’m into software and Tom is into hardware. Make of it what you will.Return to index of contributors
From: Robert G. Smith The biggest skyrockets you can buy are 16 ounce. Bigger ones are made up to what’s called 6 pounders. The engine is 18 ” long & 2 ” wide and has about 125 grams of propellant. They are really mean ! Of coarse they are illegal under Federal Law. Also some rocket nuts make sky rockets that are 2 1/.2 feet long and 6 inches wide (engine size). I believe they are 50 pounders. They were sold to the public at the time of Teddy Roosevelt. At that time also were 18 inch long firecrackers that contained black powder. The fireworks industry , after WW I (one) limited the size of rockets and salutes to the 6 pound size and salutes were cut down to 8 inch by 1 inch. Then in 1966 the child protection act cut the sizes down way more. Apparently amateur rocketry was a casualty of the reaction to 9/11 for a while. I don’t know if that has been straightened out or not. Be that as it may, thanks for the information.Return to index of contributors
From: meyerink Investment: HGUE.OB Open: 24 cents rose 10%! Soon: $1.26 Many admire terseness in prose this is pushing it. I gather that “Investment” is a huge obstretician (I assume HGUE is a typo for huge), that “Open” is selling 24 cents roses at 10% off, and that “Soon” is offering hamstur food at $1.26 a bag. Then again, this may be a coded message from Those Who Must Not Be Named that went astray.Return to index of contributors
From: Anthony R. Lewis, PhD, FN I believe the Jed Rothwell who sent you email 9 January is one of my third cousins. However, none of my relatives lives closer to you than Sioux Falls. My understanding is that everyone outside of South Dakota is a relative of yours.I believe Alice did not do the dust jacket design for Yes this August. So that’s the sort of thing that you believe. I suppose everyone is entitled to a belief system of some sort or another.Return to index of contributors
From: Peter Neilson My Dear Harter! It is interesting that you discovered that my unwritten book, “Yes, This August,” appears to be a rework of “Not this August” by C K Kornbluth. Being unread in the genre, at least compared to you and to Dr. Lewis, I’ve not cast eyes upon Kornbluth’s story. But I find it particularly touching that you did discover I’m borrowing from the works of C K Kornbluth, not the more well-known C M Kornbluth. You have a most discerning eye, except of course for typos.
There are several other authors from whom I’ve also not quite borrowed.
Kyril M Cornbluth All of them have a tremendous advantage over C M Kornbluth in that they have not died. Unfortunately, George Flynn would never have approved of any of them, at least without checking primary sources.
Without much wax, Thank you for calling this to my attention. The problem is that I was thinking of the Russian version of the the Kornbluth novel and erred in my transliteration of the Cyrilic Cyril. In deference to the spirit of George Flynn, I will correct the matter fifthwith.Return to index of contributors
From: Jed Rothwell That is a thought provoking web page on the story “Cold Equations.” Thank you.I recall being struck by the story myself, but something about it did not sit well. In my case, thinking about it years later, I realized that it is technically wrong and morally wrong because anyone engineering a vehicle like that will realize that mistakes occur, and you must have a margin of error. No airplane pilot will fly with less than 10% to 20% extra fuel (depending on how far he or she is going, and whether it is over land or sea). A margin of error would be needed not only for stowaways, but also for rough weather inside the atmosphere of the planet (assuming it has an atmosphere), or for computer glitches, overshooting the runway, cargo placed in the vehicle accidentally, or cargo weighed wrong. For example, during the Berlin airlift someone mistook steel mesh for aluminum mesh, and loaded a DC-3 with far too much weight. (The airplane made it.) Many have raised this point, but it is not quite fair. The fuel margins for spacecraft are much lower than those for aircraft.> > In real life, of course, even now in the 21st century we have automated, > computerized cross-checks and robots, alarms, and cameras to prevent this > kind thing from happening. I assume the mass of the spaceship would be > determined by some means, perhaps when it is first launched. If the mass > of a single person would be enough to endanger it, the cross-check would > have to be sensitive enough to detect that mass. Just so. Even today, though, the automation doesn’t catch everything. An alarm can fail if no one listens; a camera can fail if no one watches – this even though they work properly.It is surprising how technologically backward most sci-fi writers of the 1950s were. They did not anticipate the benefits of automation, which is odd when you think about it. The classic example is Asimov imagining that people would still be doing manual machine language compilation years in the future. (Von Neumann complained about the first compiler, saying it was a waste of computer resources and the job should be left to grad students.) Actually he was talking about the first assembler. I don’t recall Asimov writing about doing manual machine language compilation, but that’s not surprising; he wrote so much.In my opinion, the only author of that era who really understood the future in depth was Arthur C. Clarke. His book “Profiles of the Future” (1963) predicted many of today’s technologies. He would have known that this accident would be impossible, I think. I’ve read it many times; I still have it around here somewhere in the midst of my clutter of books. I will agree that Clarke had a better sense of the potentialities of technology than most.Clarke was my mentor and friend — and friend of thousands of other people! I worked with him on the last edition of “Profiles” which is published only in the UK, I am sorry to say. For more information on that, see: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJreviewofpr.pdf See also this e-book, recommended by Clarke and many distinguished professors: http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm Return to index of contributors
From: Peter Neilson Precode – code already executed prior to execution of san program. The code in a precode section is defined as having been executed in the past. If such code was not actually executed or defined as specified, its inclusion in a precode segment predefines it and preexecutes it. The only communication between the precode segment and any other part of a san program (or indeed with anything else at all) is via side effects. The precise mechanism, given that san currently lacks the needed super-global scope that would be required, is still unspecified, but may yet appear on an ad-hoc basis. Precode code is controlled by two constructs, beenthere and donethat. beenthere Syntax: beenthere year The beenthere construct sets the time of preexecution. No granularity finer than a year is supported. The year is an integer in BCE-CE form, using + (or no sign) for CE and – for BCE, with 0 and years equal to or greater than the present year disallowed. donethat Syntax: donethat The donethat construct contains the section of code that is to have been preexecuted. Example:
precode
beenthere 1983
donethat
# (Code necessary for writing of book "Yes, this August" goes here.)
Work currently contemplated for future includes writing an actual
donethat section for the book mentioned in the above example.
Bugs: (1) No provision has been made for reconciling the ambiguities inherent in the adoption of the Gregorian calendar and the related change in the starting date for each year. Confusion is expected. Use cal 9 1752 for a well-known example. This bug is not expected to affect work currently contemplated. (2) The obvious companion segment, postcode, remains unspecified. This will have been an excellent suggestion, keeping in mind that a file can contain multiple precode segments, all of which are potentially selectable in configuration segments. The important thing about precode segments is that the donethat code is not executed as such; rather its existence establishes that it has been executed. This is an important feature; the implication is that the results of a computation requiring an arbitrarily large amount of time will be immediately available as precode.Return to index of contributors
From: Tonya Hayes We are trying to find the name of the author who wrote, “Just a mother”, it’s listed on your website as “Most Dangerous Animal”. Are you the author? We are requesting permission for this material to be used in a college course pack this Spring. Please advise and we will submit a formal request. I’m sorry, I’m not the author and I don’t know who the author might be. It has circulated in email for years. I did some google searching. I believe that it first appeared on the web in 1998, already author unknown. The only attribution I have seen is to a “Dan Miller” on three pages but I am almost certain that this is incorrect – particularly since one of them claimed that he copyrighted it in 2008.Return to index of contributors
From: Peter Neilson The san threading engine writeup is missing from cri_a/san even though your new front page suggests it should be present. I did not find it under some other name or lying on the road somewhere behind the san. I dunno, I just checked it and it seems to be there. It is dated January 1, 2009, so it must have been there on the 4th. I will grant that you might not have seen it on the 4th, but that must have been in some version of reality that is now null and void.Return to index of contributors
From: tenesha (no content) I gather email evaporates when it is in the system too long.Return to index of contributors
From: Anthony R. Lewis, PhD, FN Okay, you had to mention no Yellowstone eruption. See http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1869313,00.html?cnn=yes I don’t worry about Yellowstone erupting; if it does happen in my lifetime it will only be in my last hour.Return to index of contributors
From: Peter Neilson Mr Harter! Some time ago you reviewed the book “Door Into Winter” by A. R. Lewis, which he had at that time not written. He still has not written it. Since it is now actually winter, it might be a good time for writing, since he would have at hand the substances to be described, and would not need to rely on a perhaps faulty imagination. Do you have any preferred methods for causing the unwritten books of your reviews to come into existence? I’m thinking that I’ll be roasting next August, and could use a cold tome or two. P. Neilson I appreciate your desire for a cold tome. Quite apropos of nothing it occurs to me that people who put their money in their refrigerator are keeping their cash in a cold cache. Have you considered the possibility of combining your library and your meat storage locker? … continued on next rock … Richard, some words were missing from your reply. I’ve pasted them in (using *marks*) below, in memory of Dr. Flynn, who also would have corrected them. Richard Harter wrote: I appreciate your desire for a cold tome. Quite apropos of nothing it occurs to me that people who put their money in their refrigerator are keeping their cash in a cold cache. Have you considered the possibility of combining your library and your meat storage locker? The corrections have been incorporated into the official record. Since truth is retroactive there never was an error. None-the-less the report of the corrections remains as a trace of what might have been. (See Derrida for details.)Return to index of contributors
From: Angela
hi hi 2 you I am really charming and cute; how perceptive of you to recognize that.Return to index of contributors
From: Peter Neilson Three of December’s Humors were ones seen elsewhere, likely in Joe Ross’s forwardarium. The one about deer was, however, so original that it seems well grounded in fact. I know that South Dakota has people in a wide arrangement of mental faculties, from those so stupid that they allow people to charge 30% or more interest on credit cards to those so smart that they know how to collect that very interest. The poor deer-catching soul’s brain nearly farted its way out of its temporary container. Was that an actual South Dakota cattleman’s account, or did it come from elsewhere? It is too ghastly to be total invention. Oh darn. I just Googled some of the text. It was everywhere. Your Humor is stealing from its virtual Milton Berle collection again. Earliest version I found was last January, claiming it was from a farmer somewhere in Kansas. That’s even further than Nebraska. The truth is that most of the Humors come from the JR forwardium. I’m lazy; I confess it. If I were more energetic I could steal from various witty authors, but that would mean a certain amount of work on my part to disguise the purloining. … continued on next rock … Just checked with Snopes. They have tracked a somewhat different version back to Feb 2007, and feel, as others and I do, that the known facts of deer behavior fit well with the content of the story. Its status is “undetermined.” They suggest the author has reason to prefer anonymity. And well he should. I suspect that something of the sort happened and the narrator provided details that added verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative. Reality is so often unaccomodating to the needs of art; it is the duty of the story teller to set things right.Return to index of contributors
From: Logi Martee
hoho,
i think ive been good i hope any way Your love will make me ill, right?Return to index of contributors
From: Peter Neilson In and around your lettercol http://www.tiac.net/cri_c/letters/2006/let06jul.html we spoke of Ershov’s mushroom quote from around the time of Dijkstra’s anti-GOTO considerations. The search for “A P Ershov” + mushrooms works, yielding not only our correspondence, but Ershov’s paper. The ACM has recently seen fit to make the paper, complete with mushrooms, available on line. See http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/810000/808460/p371-buda.pdf?key1=808460&key2;=9464437021&coll;=&dl;=ACM&CFID;=15151515&CFTOKEN;=6184618 Of particular interest is his suggestion for constructing traps for similar types of errors that may have occurred elsewhere in the program, suggesting a forest of error space, rather than (or in addition to) source-code space. The article also contains the infamous reference to Brooks’ “Mythical Man Mouth”. Very interesting. The project itself is the clunky sort of thing that they did back in those days – and still do, for that matter.Return to index of contributors This page was last updated January 17, 2009. |