Pi Day 02012 Plan

I’ve been celebrating Pi Days since 02005 and I’ve come up with Pi Day 02012 Plan. My goal is to celebrate Pi Days up through 02016 and then self publish a book documenting my Pi Day experiences.

It Has Been 196 Days Since My Last Posting

The last time I posted to this blog was 196 days ago on 2/13/02011.

These days I do most of my blogging using multiple Twitter accounts (@nanogoo, @mathbabbler, @compufoo and @yottagoo), Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. In addition, I currently have 533 postings on my four-year-old AzCentral.com blog.

I did a quick review of the postings made to this blog and I am motivated to keep it alive.

Hyperlinks To All of My Blogs

Philomath

Philomath was Dictionary.com’s “Word of the Day” on 8 February 2011. A philomath is a “lover of learning.”

The following pictures were taken at Arizona State University located in Tempe, Arizona.

Pondering…

student –> 21st Century Educational System –> philomathian

Note: Somebody who is a philomath is not necessarily a polymath. A polymath is somebody who is “guru” is numerous disciplines.

The Future of CPSR

I knew it was only a matter of time before I received the following email message.

From douglas@publicsphereproject.org Sat Feb 5 09:08:15 2011
To: cpsr-members@lists.cpsr.org
Subject: The Future of CPSR

This issue seems like an appropriate follow-up to the recent sad news about the death of Gary Chapman, CPSR’s first executive director.

This note is primarily addressed to people who have been involved with Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, although, in keeping with CPSR’s “big tent” approach, we are certainly interested in hearing from anybody who is interested in the future of CPSR and the further exploration of issues that CPSR members have focused on.

As many of you may have heard or suspected, there is a high probability that Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility will cease to exist in the near future. [...]

The CPSR.org website gives the appearance that CPSR started dying during the spring of 2008 (e.g. the last “Recent News” was on 18 February 2008). The last “annual appeal” and “end of year campaign” were 2006 and 2007, respectively.

It seems ironic that CPSR is preparing to go belly-up just when we have supercomputers with practically infinite storage capable of executing more than two quadrillion arithmetic calculations per second piping data/information into high-performance visualization systems. The computing roadmap is for exa-scale computing by 2018-2020 and historically the computing roadmap has been extremely accurate. Exa-scale computing is frighteningly powerful and socially responsible computing is more important than ever.

It seems ironic that CPSR is dying just when the “Digital Divide” is wider than ever; electronic voting systems remain mostly proprietary and capable of stealing elections; net neutrality is an issue that’s beyond the understanding of most of us; educational systems think “learning about computing” means learning how to simply be a user of “apps” even though “program or be programmed” is more true than ever; RFID e-product codes and sensor data are getting piped into HPC systems; robots are being equipped with artificial intelligence capabilities; too few cybersecurity gurus are being groomed; there remains a huge dearth of women in computing; etc. etc. etc.

It seems ironic that CPSR is dying at a time when we continue to be led by 18th century political dinosaurs who scream about the importance of SCREAM (Science, Computing, Robotics, Engineering, Art, Math), yet are luddites of the highest order.

What am I going to help keep CPSR alive? Nothing.

Miscellaneous Geekiness on 11/01/10

Binary date and time… If we’re naughty and use a 2-digit year, then 11/01/10 (today) is a binary date. In the DD/MM/YY format 01/11/10 is palindromic. [Note: DD/MM/YY format is popular outside of the United States.] I’m looking forward to 11/10/10 and 11/11/10, which will be the last binary dates until 01/01/11.

Pi sighting… The Arizona Republic reported that Arizona has “3.14 million registered voters.” 3.14 is Pi rounded to the nearest hundredth.

Nano moment… I watched “The Tingler” on Halloween. During the movie Dr. Chapin said he was going to inject himself with “100 micro milligrams” of what I think was LSD. “The Tingler” was made in 01958. If it had been made in 02010, Dr. Chapin might have said he was
going to inject 100 nanograms of drug.

Tweet milestone… On 02010.10.30 my @mathbabbler tweet counter hit one kilotweet. It took 509 days to reach that milestone.

Date and time I told them so… Last week during my “Computing Science for Non-CS Majors” course I giving an overview of the functions that come with STDC (Standard C) Library. I mentioned that C and C++ don’t provide direct support for date and time processing, but that the STDC Library comes with a collection of date and time functions. I told that class that I would be covering some of the date and time functions because programming date and time is hard. Today, on 1 November 02010, @slashdot tweeted the following.

iPhone Alarm Bug Leads To Mass European Sleep-in http://bit.ly/achGOD

Three Tweets by @compufoo

On 25 October 02010, the @compufoo Twitter account had 515 tweets, 21 followers, and was following zero.

The @compufoo Twitter account was setup to support my “Computer Science For Non-CS Majors” class. I asked the students to follow @compufoo, but I did not require them to do so. More than half of the students were not Twitter users; consequently, only about half of the class started following @compufoo.

The following are the last three tweets tweeted by @compufoo prior to writing this blog posting.

[02010.10.25] Computing students should follow Dan Reed. RT @HPCDan HPC and the Excluded Middle http://bit.ly/dj0B8s

Dan Reed is a supercomputing guru. In 02006, President George W. Bush appointed Dan Reed to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

[02010.10.25]“Dawn of a New Day” by Ray Ozzie http://goo.gl/ti6w via @robinwauters & @techcrunch

On 18 October 02010, Ray Ozzie — one of the creators of Lotus Notes — stepped down as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect.

[02010.10.23]What will the Internet look like in 10 years? http://www.isoc.org/tools/blogs/scenarios/

The Internet Society (ISOC.org) is a non-profit that was founded in 01992 to “provide leadership in Internet related standards, education, and policy.”

We Solve For ‘x’ In This Class

I had an Intermediate Algebra class on 11 October 02010 that started at noon. Prior to class I had read a press release from Geron Corporation announcing the “enrollment of the first patient in the company’s clinical trial of human embryonic stem cell.” I made mention of this historic moment near the start of the class and I had to immediately change the subject. We solve for ‘x’ in this class.

Prior to this embryonic stem cell moment, I had presented the QOTW (Quote Of The Week).

The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate. I have tolerated a lot — Doug Engelbart (01925-)

I briefly mention how the way we use computers today can be attributed to Doug Engelbart’s work back in the 1960s. I also mentioned that Engelbart is alive and still working on his lifelong dream of augmenting human intelligence.

Student: What do you mean by augmenting human intelligence?
Me: Make all people equal when it comes to IQ.
Student: What?!?!? How do we do this?
Me: Well, one example, the Googlers want a Google object implanted in our brains.
Student: What?!?!? Won’t we be like robots?
Me: We solve for ‘x’ in this class. Search Google for site:wired.com bill joy future and read Why the future doesn’t need us.

Prior to this embryonic stem cell moment, I mentioned that is was nice having two binary dates in a row. Yesterday was 10/10/10 and today was 10/11/10. Next month will be fun because we have 11/11/11 and 11/11/11 will be the last binary date until 1 January 02100. I wasn’t able to move of this topic until I pointed out the blasphemy of using a 2-digit year.

Me: I should be shot for using a 2-digit year. If anything, we should be using a 5-digit year.
Student: 5-digit year?!?!?!?
Me: Yes. 2010 is really 02010. But you don’t want to start using a 5-digit year because that will put you completely out-of-sync with the rest of society.
Student: Nobody uses a 5-digit year.
Me: We solve for ‘x’ in this class. Visit http://longnow.org

At the very start of class (i.e. prior to this embryonic stem cell moment), I mentioned that The Simpsons last night was a mathy episode (Lisa coached baseball using statistics/probability) and I tweeted about it.

At this point the energy level of the class started its fall to zero because it was time for us to solve for ‘x’.

According to Slate.com: Two Is the Magic Number

Two Is the Magic Number is a Slate.com article by Joshua Wolf Shenk
that “introduces a series on creative pairs.”

The phrases “two is the magic number” and “creative pairs” prompted me to write this blog posting.

The computing world has had its fair share of creative pairs. Some examples that immediately came to mind: Hewlett and Packard; Thompson and Ritchie; Jobs and Wozniak; Brin and Page.

The following is from Ken Thompson’s 1984 ACM Turing Award Lecture titled Reflections On Trusting Trust.

“That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty. In the ten years that we have worked together, I can recall only one case of miscoordination of work. On that occasion, I discovered that we both had written the same 20-line assembly language program. I compared the sources and was astounded to find that they matched character-for-character. The result of our work together has been far greater than the work that we each contributed.”

Brian Kernighan’s story about the creation of awk has to do with two being the magic number.

“awk dates from, I think, 1977. It’s by far the biggest software project that I have been involved with. There were three of us in that, and that’s completely unworkable. Somehow, it’s much easier working with two rather than three. It’s harder to split things. There’s more divergence of opinion, sometimes that’s good because it means that the more things there but sometimes it means that it’s not as cohesive as it might be. On the other hand it was very very nice to work with Al Aho and Peter Weinberger so I had no problem with that.”

I had an Kernighan-awk-like experience while working at Discount Tire Company. Steve and I were the two “store system” programmers and our work-lives were good. It was easy to split the interesting work. Later, the company felt a third programmer was needed and almost immediately after Cliff’s arrival the quality of our work-lives took a hit. I failed at mentoring Cliff and splitting the interesting work three ways. After a short span of time Cliff got frustrated and left the company. After Cliff’s exit, Steve and I returned to our pleasant work-lives.

One last item about “creative pairs” and two being the “magic number.” Pair programming became popular about a decade ago. Pair programming in a nutshell: Two programmers share one keyboard. If the pairings are made correctly, then the quality of the software increases with no decrease in productivity.

Shenk’s Slate.com article contained the equation “1 + 1 = Infinity” and in some instances it just might be true.

Chapters 0-2 of “Go To” by Steve Lohr

I was moving some books from one pile to another pile and one of the books was Steve Lohr’s Go To (published in 2001). Instead of tossing the book into a new pile, I decided to give it a quick re-read and it has been an enjoyable allocation of time.

From the front cover: Go To is “the story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts–The Programmers who created the software revolution.”

On the back cover is the following quote from then Boston Sunday Globe: “Go To is an enlightening read and does a fine job of demonstrating the power of imagination. If you can imagine it and code it, you can indeed change the world.”

Page 5: Lohr quoted Maurice Wilkes: “By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared.” Later, while laboring on his first non-trivial program, Wilkes remembered that “the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent finding errors in my own programs.” In a nutshell, creating non-trivial programs has gotten easier over time, but it’s still hard.

Page 6: Lohr wrote about Robert Bemer. I know Bemer as the father of the ESC key, but during the 1950s he was a manager at IBM. During the 1950s, the computing world was focused on hardware instead of software, yet Bemer need programmers and they were not easy to find. Lohr used the following Bemer quote: “I once decided to advertise for chess players because I thought they would be pretty good programmers.” In April of 2006, John Seely Brown wrote an article for Wired News titled: “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!”

Page 7: Lohr describes programmers as the “artisans, craftsmen, brick layers, and architects of the Information Age.” Although Lohr wrote this in 2001, it’s still true a decade later.

Page 8: I liked how Lohr described software as “the mediator between man and machine.”

Page 9: Lohr wrote about Donald Knuth. I introduce Knuth to my students in the CS1 class as being one of the greatest computer scientists alive today. [And I always show them Knuth's collection of Diamond Signs.] Lohr quoted Knuth saying: “There are a certain percentage of undergraduates — perhaps two percent or so — who have the mental quirks that make them good at computer programming…. The two percent are the only ones who are really going to make these machines do amazing things. I wish it weren’t so, but that is the way it has always been.”

Page 11 is the start of chapter 2 titled Fortran: The Early “Turning Point”. When I mention Fortran during class, I usually mention the following: Fortran (formula translation) was created by John Backus and it was born in 1957 (the same year as my birth and the same year the Russians launched Sputnik). Lohr quoted Ken Thompson stating: “Ninety-five percent of he people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran. It was a massive step.” These days Fortran remains popular thanks to supercomputing. For example, a student might write programs in Fortran if they take a scientific computing class at Arizona State University (this was true a couple of years ago). I searched my website for Backus quotes and found the following: “Conventional [programming] languages are basically high-level, complex versions of the von Neumann computer.” Backus died in 2007 and that is when I posted the quote.

Pages 20 and 21: Lohr gets into the topic of number systems. From base-10 (decimal) to base-2 (binary) to base-8 (octal) to base-16 (hexadecimal). [Note: I wrote this at 10:14am MST on 31 August 2010. At about 3:30pm MST on the same day, I covered the topic of number systems in my CS1 class.]

Page 23: Lohr quotes Grace Hopper saying, “There had to be an interface built that would accept things that were people-oriented and the use the computer to translate to machine code.” [hint: compilers]

Page 24: Lohr mentions how Fortran had a goto statement. A decade later, in 1968, Edsger Dijkstra wrote a paper titled “Go To Statement Considered Harmful.” Lohr shares Dijkstra’s observation that the “quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of Go To statements in the programs they produce.” One of the things I have learned while helping others learn about programming is that if you teach them goto, they will use it. With respect to goto, I’m okay with people using it, but I don’t program it directly. [Note: goto comes in handy when you write programs that write programs.]

Page 35 is the start of chapter three titled “The Hard Lessons of the Sixties: From Exuberance to the Realities of COBOL and the IBM 360 Project” and chaper four titled “Breaking Big Iron’s Grip: Unix and C” begins in page 63. I’ll add a hyperlink to “Chapters 3-4 of Go To by Steve Lohr when I get it completed.

KKK (Kapor, Kurzweil, Kay)

02010.08.26: Day two of the Introduction to Computer Science class.

[Note: This posting uses 5-digit years.]

Rewind three weeks…

02010.08.03 at 2:10pm @mkapor tweeted:

I’m grouchy that so few people (except us old-timers) have even heard of Ted Nelson http://bit.ly/cGbsWC (Wikipedia bio)

Observe: Mitch Kapor hyperlinked into the Wikipedia.

02010:08.03 at 2:11pm @mkapor tweeted:

All of the web is in essence a pale shadow of just one of Ted Nelson’s dreams. Now do I have your attention?

Hmm… Who is Mitch Kapor?

2010.08.03 at 2:15pm @nanofoo in reply to @mkapor:

I’m going to make sure my CS1 students learn a bit about Ted Nelson this fall. They’ll come in knowing Gates & Jobs, but not Nelson.

@nanofoo never got reply from @mkapor, but @rossk did…

02010.08.03 at 2:48pm @rossk in reply to @mkapor:

where should the Nelson-newbie start?

02010.08.03 at 8:07pm@mkapor in reply to @rossk

Read “Computer Lib” by Nelson. Also see the Wired article on him for a dissenting view

Mitch Kapor did not provide his followers with hyperlinks, but here they are: Computer Lib/Dream Machine (dot-pdf) and Wired.com: The Curse of Xanadu

---

This posting uses 5-digit years and that is because I am a member of the Long Now Foundation. [Follow on Twitter @longnow.]

In 02002, Mitch Kapor made the first Long Bet (By 02029 no computer – or “machine intelligence” – will have passed the Turing Test.) with Ray Kurzweil. Hmm… Who is Ray Kurzweil? [Follow on Twitter @KurzweilAINews.]

02010.08.25 at 12:00pm @compufoo tweeted:

I agree with Ray Kurzweil that “exponential growth is the reality of information technology.” #future

I learned a lot from reading reading Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.

In a nutshell, Kapor and Kurzweil are futurists whose last names start with the letter ‘K’. There another futurist whose last name starts with the letter ‘K’ and that is Alan Kay. In the Introduction to Computer Science we use the C++ programming language. C++ supports object oriented programming (OOP) and Alan Kay is considered one of the fathers of OOP.

Alan Kay was once quoted saying: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

The following picture of the Foundation Building at Arizona State University was taken during early August of 02010.