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I love watching plays by Shakespeare, especially if performed by great actors. I will often go onto YouTube just to watch a scene by one of the greats — Olivier, Dench, Gielgud or Jacobi, to name a few.

And I have often pondered the effect of the language. Shakespeare was writing his plays more than four centuries ago. Needless to say, the English language has evolved quite a bit since Elizabethan times.

On the one hand, this language difference can create a barrier to comprehension for modern audiences. Although to be fair, in the hands of a great actor, Shakespeare’s prose is remarkably easy to understand.

But perhaps the very strangeness of the language is part of the appeal. All of those odd phrases and cadences create room for mystery. Audiences are, in a sense, invited to interpolate meanings of their own, in a way that might not be the case for a play written and performed in modern English.

Ironically, audiences of today may be experiencing the richness of Shakespeare’s language in a way that Elizabethans of his own day could not.

Most people don’t realize that 80% of statistics are made up on the spot.

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?