Author: admin

I started writing Java applets on the Web in 1995 as soon as that became possible, but stopped cold turkey in August 2013, after Oracle (which had acquired it as part of Sun Microsystems) stopped allowing the general public to access unsigned Java applets. That summer I completely switched over to Javascript and WebGL for both my research and teaching, and have never looked back.

But until then, Java was revolutionary in its effect on scientific communication. For the first time ever, anybody anywhere could access interactive computer graphics from a Web browser.

This was a radical reframing that had a profound and lasting effect on the way we think about interacting with computers. Oracle may have effectively killed the Java applet, but it couldn’t stop the revolution that James Gosling’s Web-friendly language had started.

We now take for granted that from any Web browser you can interact with your computer or phone in all sorts of rich and powerful ways, but that was not always so. Today being the 30th anniversary of the first public introduction of the Java programming language, let’s take a moment to appreciate its profound influence.

Yesterday the President of the United States hosted the President of South Africa and his entourage to the White House. Once the guests had arrived, our president spent much of the time, while the cameras rolled, expounding an idiotic “theory” that thousands of white South Africans were being killed en masse by black South Africans.

I am sure our president isn’t actually stupid enough to believe this thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory. In fact, if history is any guide, the very stupidity of the accusation is its greatest strength.

He was essentially enacting a modern equivalent of the “Blood Libel” — the accusation dating from the Middle Ages, and running up to the 20th century, that Jews used the blood of Christian children to make their Passover matzoh. Of course that accusation was false, and in fact absurd, but that didn’t diminish its underlying power.

The first rule of successful authoritarian take-over is to remove actual truth from the conversation. And the optimal strategy is to replace facts by blind stupid hate. In fact, the stupider the better.

I wouldn’t be surprised if our president were to invite the Prime Minister of Israel to the White House next week. Just so he can explain to Mr. Netanyahu, while the cameras roll, how terrible it was that the Jews persecuted all those poor Germans about 80 years ago.

There are particular combinations of names that for the true fan will instantly invoke the name of a particular songwriter. To others these name combinations will mean nothing at all.

The true fan will instantly recognize “Terry and Julie”. The fan of a different songwriter will recognize “Brenda and Eddie”.

There are many such examples. But I think my favorite songwriter mentions a lot more name combinations than anyone else.

There’s “Rose and Valerie”, and “Vera, Chuck and Dave”. Not to mention “Desmond and Molly” or “Phil and Don”. The list goes on, and I just love it.

I find A.I. to be useful as a starter kit. For example, I can ask it a question about a particular software package, and it will give me a working example of how to use that package.

For me this is useful because it is essentially a starter kit. I never end up using any of the code that the A.I. generates, but I find it extremely helpful to have a working example as a reference when I write my own code.

This parallels what people report in their use of ChatGPT. Good writers don’t actually use any of the actual prose that ChatGPT spits out, but they often find it helpful as a reference.

I wonder whether this will be the way that people who generally know that they are doing employ A.I. You would never allow it to substitute for your own work, but it’s nice to have a working example to refer to, just as it’s nice to have a dictionary or encyclopedia at your fingertips.

What is it about Monday songs? It seems that most of the sad songs that are about a day of the week are about Monday.

There are too many to list here, but you know what I’m talking about. After reading this, one of those songs is probably playing in your head right now.

Regardless of the genre or the era, songwriters seem to really hate Mondays. Or is it that songwriters just really love weekends, and hate to see them end?

I’ve been watching the war of words between the Boss and the aging six year old who once pretended to be a boss on TV. A number of commentators have been criticizing Bruce’s recent statements, accusing him of diving into politics.

But isn’t this an important part of why millions of people have loved him for all of these decades? The poetry of the man’s lyrics is inherently political. His songs speak truth to injustice, standing up for the dignity of individuals and urging respect for the working class.

I found his recent words decrying our nation’s recent political slide into intolerance and authoritarianism to be thoughtful, articulate, and well reasoned.

In contrast, that petulant six year old sounded, well, like a petulant six year old.

Somebody asked me recently what I would say in celebration of Alan Kay’s birthday, which happens to be today. This was my reply:

Somebody once said that if you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

One great thing about hanging out with Alan Kay is that I can always be sure I am in the right room.

There is a theory that our entire reality is actually a simulation. In that view of things, nothing we experience is actually real — it is all software running on a big computer somewhere, and so are we.

But of course that begs the question — who is running the simulation, and for what purpose? Actually it begs many questions.

When you really think this theory through, isn’t it just a way to put a technological sounding gloss on religion?

I’ve noticed a very specific narrative pattern that continues to recur. It shows up not only in fiction, but in real life as well.

In the movie Braveheart, there is a shocking moment when the king murders the lover of his son the prince by hurling him out of a window. Up until this scene, the film makes it very clear that the prince’s lover is strong, intelligent, highly competent, and has excellent judgement.

It is therefore understood that with his lover by his side, the prince would have been able to rule as a wise and effective king. By removing his partner, the king has rendered his own son ineffective.

The prince’s lover was killed precisely because he was the smartest person in the room. In the king’s mind, by definition, a natural leader who is homosexual cannot be allowed to exist.

Quite similarly, there is a shocking moment in Schindler’s List when Jews in a concentration camp are being put to work on a construction project. One of the Jews, a young woman, informs their Nazi overseers that they are planning the project all wrong.

Before being sent to the concentration camp, she explains, she had been a civil engineer. She tells them how they would need to proceed to do the project effectively.

The Nazi commandant immediately takes out his gun and shoots her dead. Then he informs his underlings to do the project the way she had instructed.

The young engineer was killed precisely because she was the smartest person in the room. In the commandant’s mind, by definition, a natural leader who is Jewish cannot be allowed to exist.

We have recently seen this pattern repeated, with remarkable fidelity, in real life. General Brown was fired as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff precisely because he was the smartest person in the room. In the mind of the person who fired him, by definition, a natural leader who is black cannot be allowed to exist.

In all three of these cases, the discerning observer understands that things will end very badly for the fool who has removed the smartest person from the room.

I’ve been doing the NY Times Spelling Bee pretty much every day for the last several years. For the most part it has been a faithful companion — challenging to my brain, while soothing to my nerves.

But today there was a surprise. To get a perfect score, I believed that I needed to find 41 words (and 207 points), as you can see in the screen capture below left.

Yet after I had entered 40 words (and accumulated only 193 points), the app declared that I had found all possible words, as you can see in the screen capture below right, which is showing the first 24 words out of 40.

The missing 14 points would have come from two things: 7 points for finding a seven letter word, plus an extra 7 points for that word being a pangram (a word that uses all seven letters).

As you can see in the image to the left, there are supposed to be three pangrams. But the app told me that I had achieved a “Queen Bee” — a perfect score — even though I had found only two pangrams.

Somehow there is a discrepancy today between the instructions and the game itself — something I had never encountered before. I had often wondered whether something like this could ever occur in Spelling Bee, and now I know.

Frankly, I feel cheated. It’s like going bowling and being told that you’ve just bowled a perfect strike. But you know, in your heart of hearts, that you only knocked down nine pins, because the headpin was missing.