Author: admin

Today I spent quite a bit of time tracking down a software bug. The bug was puzzling because as far as I could see it was completely impossible — there was no way it could exist — yet there it was.

Then at some point I realized that if what I was looking at was impossible, then I must be looking in the wrong place. So I started looking in completely different places, and eventually I found the true culprit — and promptly fixed the bug.

I realized at that point that Sherlock Holmes had figured all of this out a long time ago. He said, and I quote “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

I am pretty sure he was talking about debugging computer programs — or something very much like it.

I got together today with a dear old friend whom I had not seen in decades. We spent hours happily catching up and remembering old times together.

And at some point it occurred to me that a time machine is not just something that you find in science fiction.

The other day I wrote some software to solve a specific problem. But then I asked myself “what next”?

And I realized that what I really wanted to do was make it generic. That is, I wanted to take the most interesting part of it — the core algorithm — and turn that into a software library for solving lots of other problems.

That meant a bit of rewriting of the code. But once that was done, I had a shiny new toy to play with, which I can now use for lots of different things.

And maybe that’s the best part.

Sometimes, the most productive thing you can do is nothing at all.

I wonder if
sometime in the future
people will pay good money
for the privilege of spending
large amounts of time
with no access to
the internet

I started my day this morning using one of those fancy automated coffee machines that serves coffee / espresso / Americano / latte / cappuccino at the magical press of a button. Somebody just needs to put the whole beans in the top, and every once in a while remove the used coffee grinds.

As I was taking my freshly brewed Americano from the machine, I turned to a man who was also standing by the machine, and I told him “In the future, these machines will go to the store and buy the coffee beans for you. And whenever necessary, they will even throw out the used coffee grinds.”

The man nodded in agreement. “It is my dream,” he said.

Today in history, exactly 446 years ago, construction began on Pont Neuf in Paris, France, when King Henry III laid its first cornerstone. I have an odd history with this bridge.

The first time I went to Paris, I made a point of walking all the bridges. Some of the bridges seemed relatively new, but it was obvious that Pont Neuf was a very old bridge — clearly older than all the others.

I made some assumptions based on the French I had learned in school. I assumed, given its name, that at the time of its construction Pont Neuf was the ninth bridge over the Seine.

Of course I wondered what had happened to the other eight bridges. And the entire idea of Pont Neuf being the ninth bridge seemed ironic to me, since it was now quite evidently the oldest bridge in Paris.

Eventually I took the time to do the proper research, and I realized that I had not even begun to understand the irony of the situation. From the French, as it was spoken in 1578, “Pont Neuf” actually translates to “New Bridge”.

One thought that came to my mind about today’s verdict is that in order to become a U.S. Citizen you need not to have been convicted of a felony.

So if enough voters remain fanatically devoted to their Befehlshaber, we may end up with a situation where a convicted criminal presides over a system of government that excludes convicted criminals from its citizenry.

Is that irony? Or does it just mean that our nation has completely lost our way?

Now that climate change — in the form of major hurricanes, tornadoes and other natural disasters — has reached the point where it is regularly killing significant numbers of Americans, I suspect that weather modification is going to go through a resurgence. The technology has been around for decades in various forms, but the priority has not been there to make it a focus of large scale spending as part of capital infrastructure.

Just as we have large systems in place to prevent disastrous natural forest fires — mainly by strategically artificially setting artificial fires — we will start to do large scale interventions on weather systems. At some point, as the technology improves, we might even begin to systematically change the temperature of various regions.

I envision a day when someone might visit a city, breathe in the fresh air, and say “I am so glad they turned on the air conditioning.”

One of the central utopian tenets of Star Trek is the development of a universal translator. A technology that instantly and seamlessly translates between spoken languages is clearly good for peace and understanding between peoples.

Last night I attended a dinner between people who did not share a common language, but who were highly motivated to communicate with one another. Everyone took out their smartphones and started typing and speaking into them, attempting to create sentences which conveyed their intended meaning.

The process was not smooth. There are subtleties of meaning and emotional nuance which are well beyond a machine’s ability to understand or express.

While observing this process, part of my mind was imagining a “realistic Star Trek”, where universal translation does not go smoothly, and opportunities for misunderstanding lurk around every corner.

I realize that would not satisfy Star Trek’s prime directive to portray a utopian future. But it sure would lead to some interesting dramatic situations.