Like raising dinosaurs from their blood found in amber-encapsulated mosquitoes dug up in mines deep underground, archaic software has been resurrected with modern technology because computer scientists were so excited they could, they didn't stop to ask if they should!
Any actor with even 10% of successful movies that Redford would be considered an "A" lister. Thanks for all the entertainment for 5 decades, Robert. RIP.
Of course. It's taught in both mathematics courses as well as engineering. The Fourier transform and it's digital domain cousin, the discrete Fourier transform play such a fundamental role across nearly every engineering discipline as well as physics and many other scientific areas, you cannot get through school without learning about them.
In Ed Abbey's book, Desert Solitaire, he writes about a search mission to find a lost hiker somewhere in Canyonlands National Park, who was ultimately found dead, dying of heat and/or dehydration. He goes on to give some advice if you ever get caught in a similar situation, and, unlike this man, no one knows where you are and thus no rescue can be expected. In that case, wants to congratulate you for your noble death—it is good luck to die out in the open, alone, instead of under the “leech and priest.” Your bleached bones will remain where you died for some hiker to find someday and marvel at.
Well this made my day. Randomly clicking on the covers, I hit on November 1979. It turns out that this issue had an article on software to solve SOMA cubes and Pentominoes written in 6502 machine code and Basic for the Pet PC. When I originally read this, 46 years ago, I had an Apple II+. So I made some adjustments to the code for the Apple in both the machine code and basic and got it working. That article (along with Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth) started my obsession for Pentominoes that exists today. I've taken that code and rewritten and improved it in Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, and Python. I'd copied that article and carried it with me for years until it got lost in an office move. What a treat to stumble across it today!
I own every book McPhee published and have read each one at least twice. He is, without question, the finest writer of non-fiction I know. Annals, as you may know, was originally published as 4 separate volumes, each covering a particular US region. Assembling California is my absolute favorite McPhee work. I have a layman’s interest in geology and plate tectonics that I developed specifically because of this book.
I'm currently reading Assembling California (California resident, so I've seen all the things he discusses in the book, and wondered, like why is Half Dome so big and grey??). Like you I am rapidly developing a layman's interest in plate tectonics.
In every chapter there is a passage like this:
If you could pull up an acre of abyssal plain anywhere in the world -- lift into view a complete column of the ocean floor, from the accumulated sediments at the top to mantle rock at the base -- you would find the sheeted dikes about halfway down. In contrast to the rock columns you find all over the continents -- giddy with time gaps among lithologies of miscellaneous origin and age -- this totem assemblage from the oceans tells a generally consistent story. At its low end is peridotite, the rock of the mantle, tectonically altered in several ways on departure from the spreading center. Above the mantle rock lie the cooled remains of the great magma chamber that released flowing red rock into the spreading center. The chamber, in cooling, tends to form strata, as developing crystals settle within it like snow -- olivine, plagioclase, pyroxene snow -- but above these cumulate bands it becomes essentially a massive gabbro shading upward into plagiogranite as the magmatic juices chemically differentiate themselves in ways that relate to temperature. Just above the granites are the sheeted dikes of diabase, which keep filling the rift between the diverging plates. Above the sheeted dikes, where the fluid rock actually entered the sea, the suddenly chilled extrusions are piled high, like logs outside a sawmill. Because these extrusions have convex ends that bulge smoothly and resemble pillows, they are known in geology as pillow lavas. Above the pillows are the various sediments that have drifted downward through the deep sea -- umbers, ochres, cherts, chalk. Unlike the rest of the crust-and-mantle package, the sediments may hint at the surrounding world.
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This guy basically writes in a way that transforms the book I am holding in front of my face, physically into a rock. Like some kind of magic trick. He clearly had so much fun writing this, it's amazing and very fun... if rocks tickle you even a little bit this book is worth reading.
I live in the San Jose end of the bay. We haven't had temps above mid-80s all this summer. Typically, July has at least one week of 100+ temperatures. This summer, its been mostly 70s and low 80s. I'm not complaining and we still have to get through August and September so we'll see. It is unique however. I've been living here since '78 and it is definitely the coolest summer in that time.
That brings back some memories from my early days. I worked on a project that had decided to use the newish C language for a 68000-based system. They chose Whitesmith compiler for it, probably because it was the only one available. For some reason, I was selected to attend a class on learning C and became responsible for installing the compiler and assisting the other engineers on using it. The project was ultimately successful but I don't recall what issues we had with it. I do remember contacting Whitesmith a couple of times to resolve some problems. I guess it possible I was talking directly to P.J. Plauger himself, although, at that time, I would have had no idea who he was.
I remember using that compiler for M68K in the mid-80s, cross-compiling on a DEC Vax. The debug monitor we were using only displayed hex, no disassembly. The compiler was so predictable that I could locate the memory location for any C statement easily. It made patching code in memory a simple task.
It brings back memories for me too. This compiler was my first introduction to C, before that I'd used Pascal or Fortran. I worked on Z80 but we also had a 68K project which ran Whitesmith's Idris UNIX clone before we got real System III ported
“Shoplifter, put down your packages and put up your hands. You have 10 seconds to comply!