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Way back in 1989 Milton Friedman wrote a letter to Bill Bennett about the War on Drugs.; it’s as relevant today as then. It’s also rather amusing, given William Bennett’s troubles with another illegal vice. My favourite passage is this:

You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. You are not mistaken in believing that the majority of the public share your concerns. In short, you are not mistaken in the end you seek to achieve.

Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.

That’s it in a nutshell: the War on Drugs has caused far more casualties than simply letting drugs be would have.

A little-known fact is that when I am anointed Grand Emperor of Everything, the nations of the world will march in to offer their coronation gifts to The Procession of the Sadar. You read it here first…

Whilst looking up the proper way to lace running shoes, I discovered a page with 31 different lace-tying methods. Who knew there were so many possibilities? There’s Criss-Cross, Over-Under, Straight, Sawtooth, and on & on. Now I need to relace all of my shoes…

This comes too late for this year, but a heads-up to you veterans for next year: the Veterans’ Pride Initiative is encouraging you to wear your medals on your civilian shirt or coat on Veterans’, Independence & Memorial Days. They suggest three options: miniature medals, large medals or large medals with devices & unit awards. Hopefully such action will help instill a certain sense of national pride in and awareness of our armed forces.

The guys at the Coalition to prevent Assault Weapon Violence are keeping a close eye on assault weapons—-they’ve set up a web cam to catch an assault rifle in the act of committing crimes. None so far, but they’re still watching.

Well, the American people spoke on Tuesday, and while I can’t agree with their decision, I can understand it. The Republicans had become corrupt and no longer even paid lip service to their principles (principles which first catapulted them to power back in ’94), and many voters felt they needed to be punished. That’s understandable; however, in place of big-state Republicans we now have giant-state Democrats. For every issue on which the Republicans are wrongs, the Democrats are wronger. I won’t rule out ever voting for a Democrat, but he’d have to be better than his Republican alternative and good enough to merit my vote. For that to happen, he’d have to:

• Oppose infanticide
• Support the right to bear arms
• Support a strong & effective military
• Favour limited government

In other words, he’d be a Republican. Sure, there are pro-life Democrats; there are pro-gun Democrats; there are even Democrat hawks. But the fundamental principle of the modern Democrat party is that the State knows best, and is best-suited to address most if not all problems.

Unfortunately, this attitude seems to be that of the American people in general. How often does one hear the phrase, There ought to be a law? Far too often. No, there probably shouldn’t be another law: once they’ve outlawed rape, murder, theft & fraud the legislature can probably go home.

To judge by the Republicans of the last half-dozen years, this attitude is that of their party as well. It’s a sad thing when the party of the Contract with America becomes a party to big government, when the party which once pledged to eliminate the unconstitutional Department of Education instead more than doubles its funding.

Tuesday’s election was, I think, a vote against the Republicans rather than for the Democrats. The unfortunate thing is that the latter party is now in power, and we are all set to repeat the 1970s. We’re in the middle of a clash of civilisations—really, a war between civilisation and brutality—and very few Democrats seem to realise that, just as the many of them failed to give sufficient credence to the Communist threat in the 60s, 70s & 80s. I fear for the future of our nation.

Presenting a short parable:

The Parable of the two Programmers

Neil W. Rickert Dept. of Math, Stat., and Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Once upon a time, unbeknownst to each other, the "Automated Accounting Applications Association" and the "Consolidated Computerized Capital Corporation" decided that they needed the identical program to perform a certain service.

Automated hired a programmer-analyst, Alan, to solve their problem.

Meanwhile, Consolidated decided to ask a newly hired entry-level programmer, Charles, to tackle the job, to see if he was as good as he pretended.

Alan, having had experience in difficult programming projects, decided to use the PQR structured design methodology. With this in mind he asked his department manager to assign another three programmers as a programming team. Then the team went to work, churning out preliminary reports and problem analyses.

Back at Consolidated, Charles spent some time thinking about the problem. His fellow employees noticed that Charles often sat with his feet on the desk, drinking coffee. He was occasionally seen at his computer terminal, but his office mate could tell from the rhythmic striking of keys that he was actually playing Space Invaders.

By now, the team at Automated was starting to write code. The programmers were spending about half their time writing and compiling code, and the rest of their time in conference, discussing the interfaces between the various modules.

His office mate noticed that Charles had finally given up on Space Invaders. Instead he now divided his time between drinking coffee with his feet on the table, and scribbling on little scraps of paper. His scribbling didn’t seem to be Tic Tac Toe, but it didn’t exactly make much sense, either.

Two months have gone by. The team at Automated finally releases an implementation timetable. In another two months they will have a test version of the program. Then a two month period of testing and enhancing should yield a com- pleted version.

The manager of Charles has by now tired of seeing him goof off. He decides to confront him. But as he walks into Charles’s office, he is surprised to see Charles busy entering code at his terminal. He decides to postpone the confrontation, so makes some small talk then leaves. However, he begins to keep a closer watch on Charles, so that when the opportunity presents itself he can confront him. Not looking forward to an unpleasant conversation, he is pleased to notice that Charles seems to be busy most of the time. He has even been see to delay his lunch, and to stay after work two or three days a week.

At the end of three months, Charles announces he has completed the project. He submits a 500 line program. The program appears to be clearly written, and when tested it does everything required in the specifications. In fact it even has a few additional convenience features which might significantly improve the usability of the program. The program is put into test, and, except for one quickly corrected oversight, performs well.

The team at Automated has by now completed two of the four major modules required for their program. These modules are now undergoing testing while the other modules are completed.

After another three weeks, Alan announces that the preliminary version is ready one week ahead of schedule. He supplies a list of the deficiencies that he expects to correct. The program is placed under test. The users find a number of bugs and deficiencies, other than those listed. As Alan explains, this is no surprise. After all this is a preliminary version in which bugs were expected.

After about two more months, the team has completed its production version of the program. It consists of about 2,500 lines of code. When tested it seems to satisfy most of the original specifications. It has omitted one or two features, and is very fussy about the format of its input data. However the company decides to install the program. They can always train their data-entry staff to enter data in the strict format required. The program is handed over to some maintenance programmers to eventually incorporate the missing features.

Sequel

At first Charles’s supervisor was impressed. But as he read through the source code, he realized that the project was really much simpler than he had originally though. It now seemed apparent that this was not much of a challenge even for a beginning programmer.

Charles did produce about 5 lines of code per day. This is perhaps a little above average. However, considering the simplicity of the program, it was nothing exceptional. Also his supervisor remembered his two months of goofing off.

At his next salary review Charles was given a raise which was about half the inflation over the period. He was not given a promotion. After about a year he became discouraged and left Consolidated.

At Automated, Alan was complimented for completing his project on schedule. His supervisor looked over the program. With a few minutes of thumbing through he saw that the company standards about structured programming were being observed. He quickly gave up attempting to read the program however; it seemed quite incomprehensible. He realized by now that the project was really much more complex than he had originally assumed, and he congratulated Alan again on his achievement.

The team had produced over 3 lines of code per programmer per day. This was about average, but, considering the complexity of the problem, could be con- sidered to be exceptional. Alan was given a hefty pay raise, and promoted to Systems Analyst as a reward for his achievement.

The tale is as true today as when it was written in March 1985. It’s not productivity which is rewarded, but the appearance of productivity. And the computer world has made very few fundamental advances in the two intervening decades: we’re still using WIMP interfaces; the best text editor out there is older than I am; the best operating system in common dates back to 1969; the best free database is older than I am. We’re stuck in a 1970s world.

Monday morning I awoke to a strange odour: the smell of Bakelite, familiar to geeks everywhere as the reek emitted when the Magic Smoke™ is freed from electronics. It appears that my CPU fan failed, leading to a CPU meltdown.

I replaced the power supply, motherboard and CPU; this in turn necessitated an upgraded operating system (since the old CPU was an Athlon and the current one is a Pentium D). So I’m now running a very much nicer setup than before. Life is pretty good.

Although I am a bit sad that I'm running atop a Pentium now. Oh well.

This is the coolest game in the world: tank paintball. They’ve got some old British armoured cars with turrets fitted to fire tennis balls filled with paint. This is seriously sweet.

I recently made my first batch of kefir, a Caucasion fermented milk drink. It’s pretty cool: you add a packet of bacteria and fungi to a jug of milk, then let it sit at room temperature for a few days. The microbes multiply to sour & thicken the milk. It’s pretty tasty, and very healthy. And you just gotta love anything which involves letting milk sit on a counter for a few days…

So I had to be up in Boulder this afternoon on business, and afterwards killed some time on Pearl Street Mall. The college kids are back in town now, and for the first time they look like children. When did I get old?

Found a great list of reasons to prefer either emacs over vi, or vi over emacs. Note that recent releases of vim have added quite a few features (but of course, that begins to prove the whole point of emacs…), and it’s not nearly the primitive editor it was once; now it’s the primitive editor it is now. Emacs, of course, is not standing still: version 22 will soon be out. This years marks the 31st birthday of emacs; it’s a text editor older than I am, one which has been continually improved all that time.

It’s pretty nifty.

I’m been an avid reader of science fiction since my teens, but must admit that it’s not exactly top-notch stuff all the time. Why, imagine if all stories were written like sci-fi stories…

The Image Quiz searches Google Images for pictures related to some keyword or keywords, then displays them to you; your job is to guess what keywords were used in the search. Strangely addicting, and loads of fun.

Ever wondered how many folks in the USA have your name? Well, HowManyOfMe.com lets you search.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 69 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

At the moment there are 69 Robert Uhls out there.

Today marks fifty years since the Hungarian Uprising, crushed by the Soviet Union while the West stood idle. It’s a shameful episode in our history.

Today marks ten years to the day since I met Karen, ten years since I fell hard for her—and almost exactly eight¾ years since I recovered.

I was in Abell Library (amusingly, the library home page is exactly as it was a decade ago) that evening, and saw a guy from my wing of Baker Hall; he was studying Kafka with a pair of girls. I got to talking with one of the girls: talking, and talking, and talking. She was fascinating: religious (like me!); a fan of Tolkien (like me!); a history geek (like me!). And although far from classically lovely, there was something about her I found attractive. No doubt it was the hunter green sweater & red hair pulled into a ponytail which together gave her a faint English look. I vaguely remember, once I’d left the library and she was out of sight, leaping into the air and clicking my heels together. Yup, I was well-and-truly smitten.

Hormones exist for several purposes, many quite useful (it’d get quite cold here in Denver without the beard I possess courtesy of some hormones which started their work almost twenty years ago), but they serve one end which is quite pernicious: they addle the brain. Our minds rely on our brains to process data for us; the brain is the mind’s calculator, its web browser, its interface to the body and through the body to the outside world. Under the influence of hormones the brain’s workings are confounded and the mind no longer perceives the truth. This is a good thing for the species as a whole, for otherwise no-one would marry. Women and men are fundamentally incompatible, and only through intoxication—whether by chemical or biological means—can we persuade ourselves otherwise. Eventually we sober up, but by that point it’s too late: we’re married, with children and mortgages and throw pillows and curtains and sleeping next to someone whose vocabulary possesses sixteen different words for the colour white.

It’s amusing how hormones persuade us that the object of our affections is exactly what we want. If one wishes an active mate, his brain fails to perceive that his beloved would really rather stay at home and read a good book; his hormone-addled brain sees the two skiing trips and the disused bicycle and ignores the bookshelves and the literary reviews. Likewise the girl who wants a scholarly young man: her hormone-intoxicated brain sees only the unread copies of Aquinas, Newton & Gould (inherited from his flat’s former owner) and completely overlooks the football jersey, the Playboy centrefolds on the wall and the C average. Hormones are brain damage.

In my case I had been taught to put friendship and intellectual & philosophical similarity at a premium and discount physical attraction—and I was only to happy to perceive exactly that. Why, Karen & I were practically identical! We read the same books; we thought the same things; we could sit and talk for hours (over twelve hours in one memorable instance). Why, we agreed on everything. Well, everything important. Well, almost everything important. And I could convince her on the outstanding issues. And besides, we were so similar on the big political issues of the day, e.g. we both opposed gun control. Even the fact that she wasn’t a classic beauty was a mark in her favour, for it proved that this was an authentic love. Hormones are brain damage.

In reality, we were similar insofar as we were both intelligent, quirky, middle-class, American teenagers of the 1990s who had both read the books that intelligent, quirky, middle-class, American teenagers read back in the 1990s. Sure, she wasn’t fanatically anti-gun, but that’s hardly rare in Texas. While we did have interests in common, we came at them from different angles and for different reasons: the boy who reads about Sts. Nicholas & Alexandra because they are the Royal Martyrs has little in common with the girl who reads about Tsar Nicholas & Tsaritsa Alexandra because they were famous historical failures. Hormones are brain damage.

But my hormone-addled senses convinced me that dating Karen made sense, that it was a logical, rational thing to do. There was one hitch, though: she had a boyfriend—but he went to a school roughly six hours away. I figured that I had a pretty good chance; after all, don’t most high school relationships break up once they become long-distance in college? I’ve often wished that he’d gone to Austin College as well, for then it’s likelier that I’d have given up. Instead, I persisted for over a year, in defiance of all logic & reason. Hormones are brain damage.

Karen is blameless in all this: she mentioned Scott the evening we met and never led me to think she would break things off with him. If anything, she was very clear that they were quite fond of one another and that she & I had no romantic future. Despite the evidence, I was convinced that I could somehow win her affections. Hormones are brain damage.

I was a lovesick pup for month after month; I spent every possible minute with her; I bored my friends with talk of her; I spent the summer break of ’97 pining after her; I contacted her immediately after she got back on campus; in short, I made a complete and utter ass of myself. I alienated my friends and neglected my studies. Hormones are brain damage.

It’s odd how quickly these things can start & end. I fell for Karen in an instant, and I fell away almost as quickly. I still remember the day: it was the end of the 1998 Jan Term (very possibly 23 January, which would be nicely symmetrical) and my best friend Phil & I were sitting in his dorm room polishing off a magnum of hard cider we’d made. I can still see the winter sun slanting in through the blinds, and can still remember saying, You know, I don’t think I’m in love with Karen anymore. It was as simple as that, like a light switch being flipped on.

For a time after my brain cleared I strongly disliked her, although it wasn’t really her that I hated; it was the error of which she reminded me. Eventually that shame subsided and we became decent acquaintances. Karen’s married to Scott now, with one son and another child due in a month or two, and I’m quite happy for them.

I wouldn’t have things turn out any other way. Karen & I would have been a big mistake even if she’d be amenable: we’re just not anywhere a good match, but hormone-drunk I was convinced we were. Hormones are brain damage.

Before America entered the Second World War, Great Britain had 3,000 spies in the United States, all working to turn public opinion in favour of the United Kingdom. Quite a story.

Wikipedia is available in Latin. Great resource if you’re learning that language, or want to hone your skills.

A girl in Scotland threw a bottle into the ocean and it arrived in New Zealand, making the journey at an average clip of 369 knots, which is completely absurd. Is it a hoax? Did someone pick it up in an æroplane somehow? Strange story—one wonders what the truth of it is.

I just watched the first Christmas episode of Moonlighting, from way back in 1985. At the end the camera pans out of the scene to reveal the entire studio & its crew, all singing The First Noël. It’s striking how much our culture has changed: in 1985 one could make a Christmas episode featuring a religious song; nowadays one cannot even refer to the Christmas season, but rather to some absurd holiday season. It’s sad how low we’ve sunk in a mere 21 years.

My brother Tom sent me a of his ship entering San Francisco Bay for Fleet Week. It’s a pretty cool shot.

After attending Stephen’s boot camp graduation, we headed down to Dallas for my mom’s family reunion. It was good to see my various relatives again. We’re an odd lot: highly intelligent, highly excitable, more than a little weird. The high point was the presentation to Granddad of an album of photos & reminiscences of his life. He’s done a great deal of good for many people, but naturally I’m most grateful for the fact that he married my grandmother and begat my mother.

After San Diego & Dallas the return to Colorado was a bit of a shock: in our absence the temperature had dropped into the 30s and it seemed that winter was truly upon us. It’s warmed up since, but one can tell that it is on its way. Late fall and early winter are the finest of times, and I’m eagerly looking forward to them.

This past Friday my kid brother graduated from US Marine Corps boot camp at MCRD San Diego. Our family (save for Tom & Em, who are deployed on their respective ships) flew out for the ceremonies and so forth associated therewith. We’re all very proud of this newest young Marine. God grant that his career will be successful and safe.

Sorry about the recent outage here at Octopodial Chrome. Something went wonky with my DSL bridge last Wednesday and it took until today to get a replacement (gosh, ain’t overnight delivery over a weekend fun!). Things hsould be up & running fine now, though.

The experience has led me to re-evaluate my Internet approach. Expect some changes in the semi-near future…

I just saw Un long dimanche de fiançailles (A Long Engagement), an excellent French film about a young woman trying to find her fiance—supposedly slain in the Great War. It’s a top-notch film; if your eyes are able to read the subtitles in the final scene then you have a lump of ice where your heart should be.

The Royal Society has released its Philosophical Transactions and Proceedings since 1665 online. Want to read Newton or Priestley in the original? They’re there. They are free until December, so archive as many as you can.

Here’s the Complete List of Pirate Laws for your reading enjoyment. Just remember: a pirate does not use the word Fabulous. Ever.

This article on pirate radio is great: when FCC agents raided radio free Santa Cruz, several hundred protesters gathered, including the city’s mayor. The FCC agents’ cars had their tyres slashed and then the police gave them parking tickets. Grass roots government at its finest.

Well, after decades of faithful service the F-14 Tomcat retires today. These are the planes made famous in Top Gun; they were one component in the shield which defended us from the now-defunct Soviet Union and prevented World War III. And now they’re fading into the sunset.

I want a little hobbit cottage like this.

I just got back from seeing Top Gun on the largest screen in all Denver. It was incredible to see again in a theatre—well worth the princely sum of $5 a ticket. I highly recommend it, should you get the chance.

So I watched Batman, for probably the first time I a decade and a half. Back in ’89 when it came out my father heard something on the radio about—unfortunately he mis-heard DC (as in DC Comics) as Disney and thus he took his family to see a Tim Burton film.

At the time, I thought that was about the coolest thing ever. My parents would normally have never allowed us to see anything like that, and I’d have been the laughingstock (as usual) of the kids at school. But instead I was one of the guys, for a brief moment. It was pretty sweet.

Seeing it now, though, I have to admit that it is bewildering why any sequels were made. It’s just not a very good film: too juvenile for adults; too adult for children. It’s not at all believable; in fact, it’s really a stupid film.

On the way home after church on Sunday I stopped off at my local homebrew shop to pick up the ingredients for a Scotch Ale. The folks next to me at the grain mills were a nice young couple looking about college age or slightly older. I ended up in line behind them, and as we were chatting (the store was busier than anyone had ever seen, so there was plenty of time for talk) it turned out that they’d never done an all grain batch before. I and the fellows behind me noted with some surprise that they were about to buy around nine pounds of barley and no extract.

Those of y’all who’ve never brewed before (poor souls!) probably don’t know that there are different levels of brewing one can do. Most folks start out with hopped extracts; these are barley syrups with hops already added—the brewer simply mixes with water, boils and adds some yeast. The next step up is to use unhopped extracts and add hops of one’s choosing. The step after that is to steep ground barley (or other grains) in warm water to extract some desired flavour, then to add extract and hops. This is where a lot of folks end up stopping for awhile, as it requires no extra equipment and is fairly simple. It’s relatively expensive, though (extract isn’t cheap to produce or transport) and doesn’t give one very good control over the final beer.

The most advanced sort of brewing (and that done by almost all commercial breweries) is all-grain brewing. One takes ground grains and mashes & lauters them. Mashing is the process which converts the starches in grain into sugars; lautering is the process of straining the sweet sugar water from the spent grains. Both of these steps require a certain amount of skill and special equipment. One has to calculate the right amount & temperature of water to add in order to raise the grain to a temperature where the right enzymes can go to work and one has to lauter the mash so that the wort is relatively clear.

In effect, this couple was going from buying freeze-dried coffee to green coffee beans—and they didn’t realise it! Fortunately, it’s not that difficult a process, but to leap into unsuspectingly is…mind-boggling. We did our best to give them a brief overview of the process and point them to some good resources and I hope that they were successful, but I fear that they might have had one rotten Sunday evening.

Seen on the profile of bookstopshere, a LibraryThing user with whom I share a number of books:

It is often much harder to get rid of books than it is to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again… The truth is that in the end, the size of a library does matter. We lay the books out for inspection like a huge exposed brain, offering miserable excuses and feigned modesty… There is a moment, however, when we have accumulated so many books that they cross an invisible line, and what was once a sense of pride becomes a burden, because from now on space will always be a problem.

Carlos Maria Dominguez, The House of Paper

Very true. Don Aslett once pointed out that books are really clutter, read a few times but taking up space forever. What he failed to note is that books reveal who someone is. Also, a smoking room unlined in books is hardly a smoking room at all.

Well, I’ve gotten all but one of my bookcases into my LibraryThing book catalogue—435 books so far. I’ve one bookcase, several boxes and a few loose books and I’ll have a complete list of all the books I own (and so will anyone who visits my LibraryThing profile. It gives a pretty good idea of who I am & what I’m interested in.

Well, I left my Common Lisp blogging software project lie for long enough; about a fortnight ago I started working on it again. It’s now in a workable condition, and is faster than my current blogging software. I have two more plugins to finish porting and then I’ll be able to convert Octopodial Chrome over to it. How cool will that be—running my blog on my own hand-written blogging tool.

Today I learnt about something I’d never heard of: the springhouse (sometimes written with two words, as spring house, others with one). It’s a small structure you build—generally of stone—over and around a spring. At its simplest, it just fills a cistern and keeps it in the dark so that algæ doesn’t grow. But it can also be used to fill a trough running the perimeter of the building; the cold spring water constantly running up from the spring, around the room and out of the springhouse yields a constantly cool room; a low-tech refrigerator. If you’re lucky you can even use the coolness to chill another room where you can work during the summer.

If I ever buy a piece of land, I think it definitely needs to have a spring. I’d love to build a springhouse.

Dr. Ian Walker conducted an experiment which showed that drivers are twice as likely to pass too close when a cyclist wears a helmet—at an average separation of 3¼ inches. The theory is that perhaps they consider helmeted cyclists to be more predictable. Or perhaps they are less afraid of hurting someone wearing protective gear. The researcher was struck twice, both times whilst wearing a helmet, out of 2,500 passes.

Yet more evidence that helmets can be bad for your health.

Almost a century ago Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii developed a colour photography technique and travelled throughout Russia taking pictures. Now, there are some pictures of the same places 94 years later. It’s interesting to see how little certain things can change.

Found this great bit of advice from a guy in his fifties to a guy in his twenties. If this doesn’t make you laugh, you have no soul.

What if Noam Chomsky & Howard Zinn provided a commentary track for The Fellowship of the Ring? You can really imagine them blathering on like this…

A fortnight ago I’d a spill on my ride in to work. While making a right turn my rear tyre went out from underneath me, and I discovered that it’s very difficult to ride a unicycle when one’s a few feet behind, rather than above, it. I went sprawling and my glasses, hat and backpack went flying (how does a backpack come off of both arms?). It was the worst accident I’ve ever had: banged up my left knee, right thigh, right elbow, right ribs, and both hands & palms.

I’ve not ridden my bike since the parking lot of the bike store after it was supposedly fixed (the mechanic believed it was due to loose cranks, but I just don’t see it). To be honest, I’m rather afraid of riding thing. One of these days, maybe, but for now I’m happy walking.

Two police officers were killed and one wounded whilst on a charity bike ride. A truck struck the van alongside, which then struck them. Considering that it’s a four-lane highway, it’s hard to imagine any justification for truck driver to have hit the van, which was prominently marked Caution Cyclists Ahead. Ironically, the ride was meant to raise money for the families of officers killed in the line of duty.

Fr. Aris Metrakos has an article about American Orthodoxy and both its positives and negatives. Interestingly, Fr. was a naval aviator before attending seminary and receiving Holy Orders.

Google offer a searchable database of products, services and so forth; I’ve submitted my books in a bid to see if they make any money. The books are:

G.K. Chesterton

Alarms & Discursions

What’s Wrong with the World

Christopher Morley

Shandygaff

Booth Tarkington

Penrod (hardcover)

Penrod (softcover)

We’ll see if they sell or not. It’d be kinda cool if they did.

Apparently Steve Irwin died from a ray’s sting off the coast of Australia. What an ignominious end!

I just ran across Craig Finseth’s book The Craft of Text Editing. It’s a kind to implementing a text editor, given the knowledge current as of 1991 (which, sadly, hasn’t progressed a bit—the old text editors are in many cases far more advanced than the modern ones). An essential read if you’re looking to write an emacs-like editor.

Psychology Today has an article about how we’ve become a nation of wimps due to parents who obsess over making life as easy for their children as possible. Cellphones don’t help, either. Read on so that your children will be among