Recently, the poet wife of a good friend left this world. She had once asked me what I missed most about my days as a lecturer. Without hesitation I said it was witnessing those brilliant moments when students suddenly understand something complex or see, for the first time, the elegance and beauty in a software algorithm. She could relate to that.
Yesterday, purely by coincidence, I decided to open my most recent reprint of Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming and start from the beginning, as I did many, many years ago. I have no idea why, but if you believe in “those kind of things” you may be stunned by the opening line from Chapter 1 (emphasis mine):
The idea of two events happening on or around the same time is a surprisingly non-trivial notion, which was brought to mind in recent hours as the world celebrated the commencement of the year 2016. At first it seems that the whole world is in unison as the clock strikes midnight, but then you are constantly reminding by the continuous news segments that earlier time zones have already celebrated the “event”. Indeed, when I woke shortly after 6am this morning, friends of mine on another continent were still waiting for their turn to celebrate.
Of course, the celebrations may extend an hour or two either side of midnight so there is certainly a sense of communal celebration if one allows [click title to read more…]
As a computer scientist, I believe myself to be somewhat competent in the ability to understand complexity, but today I was totally stumped by a communication from my bank. At first it appeared to be offering some clarity regarding a certain ordinary banking process, but quickly descended into total gibberish. I reproduce it here as a perfect example of non-communication:
Important SEPA notice for Direct Debit payers If you make regular payments to your credit card account by Direct Debit but make an additional payment before the scheduled payment date, please note: we will reduce your next Direct Debit payment by an amount equal to that additional payment IF we receive it by the [click title to read more…]
I am a little puzzled. In recent days an application that I had purchased some time ago to enable me access my personal files within my personal network informed me that an update was available. It is not the first time the application has received an update, and I had let the updates proceed because they generally corrected bugs or improved some aspect of the program.
This time was different. This time the “update” was to remove certain key functionality because of a dispute over the rights to some of the underlying algorithms.
It occurred to me that by applying this update I would then have a program whose functional ability was less than that at the time when I [click title to read more…]
I have on my phone, and several other devices, various apps (both native and Web) that provide access to several weather services. None of them are ever in complete agreement, and no matter how hard I try, I can never remember what the most recent forecast said. Perhaps the abundance of weather forecasting services has produced a kind of white noise that makes it impossible to discern what is being said. Even moments after the radio weather announcer has signed off, I find myself unable to recall any of the details. This despite the fact that the announcer has gone to the trouble of repeating the forecast in the form of overviews, summaries, detailed day-by-day predictions, plus versions for the [click title to read more…]