It has been far too long

I am sorry that I have not posted for a long time... I have been busy writing, and hope that you will get to see more of my work eventually. I cannot promise anything about the blogg at present, but I will see what I can do.

Meanwhile, I am glad that my little adventure yesterday went well; alas that it was far too short. But I am grateful to our Lady of Perpetual Help for assistance, to Pierre Duhem and Stanley Jaki and Cardinal Newman and GKC... and perhaps I will be able to report on that episode eventually.

In other news, there are several non-fiction books brewing, and two of my friends have urged me to get busy with a certain one... According to one of these individuals, "it will set the computing world on its ear when they read it." Oh, THAT one... yes, it has some exciting bits, and a most unexpected result. But I cannot say more on that just now. There may also be some Jaki stuff coming, and that will be very interesting, as well as something about science and the rosary. Very high tech, almost as tech as the one about... uh... that problem.

For now, enjoy Paschaltide, and be reassured that the next installments of the Saga are growing...

Prayer To Thwart and Defeat Hackers

O dear Saint Margaret Clitheroe, by your valiant silence you protected holy priests of One True Church of Jesus Christ from the malevolence of evil men and even more evil rulers. For your love of Jesus and of the Holy Church of Rome, and by your intercession with our Lord, preserve the secrecy of all information, especially in electronic form, and protect it from malevolence, and obtain the grace for us to better understand and use these tools to glorify God and for the good of our neighbors. O Jesus, Master and King of the Universe, in Whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, may our words be Yes, yes, and No, no, that we may further Your Holy Will in all we say and type and double-click and do. For You live and reign with the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, Ond God, forever and ever. Amen.

GKC on Mothers

I happened to be browsing through a number of nearly forgotten links and found a blogg called Amongst Lovely Things which talks about God and prayer and READING and Chesterton and - ah - other lovely and important things. The most recent posting was about mothers, for Mother's Day, and though I don't really have time for making an adequate reply in a short posting, I will try to say SOMETHING. And the easiest is simply to appeal to AMBER for assistance and see how often Uncle Gilbert mentions "mother". (Yeah, something no "search engine" on THIS planet is competent to do, heh heh) It looks like he uses the simple word "mother" somewhere over 900 times... of course there are also instances such as "mother's" and "grandmother" and other variants. (Shh, don't tell GurGle, or BNIG, but I know how to SPELL automata theory, which means I actually can handle such riddles. What fun they are missing.)

But even if you have visited the Kingdom of Wisdom via the "Phantom Tollbooth" and feel the tension between King Azaz and the Mathemagician, you will not doubt prefer some WORDS about mothers, not some numbers. Hee hee! Very well. Here is just one very special bit from GKC, about a very special Mother:

If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas. Yes it is obviously bound up with what is supposed to be a controversial aspect (I could never at any stage of my opinions imagine why); the respect paid to the Blessed Virgin. When I was a boy a more Puritan generation objected to a statue upon my parish church representing the Virgin and Child. After much controversy, they compromised by taking away the Child. One would think that this was even more corrupted with Mariolatry, unless the mother was counted less dangerous when deprived of a sort of weapon. But the practical difficulty is also a parable. You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in midair; indeed, you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all. Similarly, you cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:303]

With prayers for all mothers who read this, and all the mothers of all who read this.
(Written on May 13, which is the feast of that above-mentioned Mother.)

Sorry, I cannot omit posting this also...

A Little Litany

When God turned back eternity and was young,
Ancient of Days, grown little for your mirth
(As under the low arch the land is bright)
Peered through you, gate of heaven - and saw the earth.

Or shutting out his shining skies awhile
Built you about him for a house of gold
To see in pictured walls his storied world
Return upon him as a tale is told.

Or found his mirror there; the only glass
That would not break with that unbearable light
Till in a corner of the high dark house
God looked on God, as ghosts meet in the night.

Star of his morning; that unfallen star
In the strange starry overturn of space
When earth and sky changed places for an hour
And heaven looked upwards in a human face.

Or young on your strong knees and lifted up
Wisdom cried out, whose voice is in the street,
And more than twilight of twiformed cherubim
Made of his throne indeed a mercy-seat.

Or risen from play at your pale raiment's hem
God, grown adventurous from all time's repose,
Of your tall body climbed the ivory tower
And kissed upon your mouth the mystic rose.

[GKC in The Queen of Seven Swords]

Problems? Where's Professor Harold Hill when you need him?

Problems, my friend - I say we've got problems. Big, big problems. Right here. With a capital P that rhymes with C that stands for Computers.

So, knowing the "Little Red Hen" Principle as I do - that if one needs something done, one should do it one's self - I announce this fascinating new series, "Case Studies in Computer Science." After all, I know the author, and someone with a doctorate in computer science who's worked in the field for over 30 years ought to be able to explain what problem-solving is all about!

The first volume is called The Problem with "Problem-Solving Skills" - and it ought not take Professor Harold Hill to give one of his mile-a-minute lectures to explain that! Yes, that famous Music Man gets to play a brief passage in the work, along with a huge cast of characters, not all of whom are ASCII characters, hee hee: Winthrop Paroo, Aquinas, Henry of Langenstein, Robinson Crusoe, Hugh of St. Victor, Boethius, Milo (from The Phantom Tollbooth), Gauss, Jaki, Babbage, Captain (ahem, Admiral) Grace Hopper, Seymour Cray, Danny Dunn, Rovol of Norlamin, the Abominable Snow Monster of the North - and eight Russian dolls...

Very tech, very bizarre, and a pleasantly curious selection of strange problems and even stranger solutions. Insifde you will learn some of the things you can add to your own toolbox of "problem-solving skills" even if you aren't a computer scientist.

See here for details, or http://www.DeBellisStellarum.com.

I've heard that a future volume is going to explain how the author has obtained all the primes up to 14 trillion, and has managed to store all of them in just under half a terabyte; apparently the files aren't Lempel-Ziv compressed, either. (Treeks? I guess so.) Apparently that's not the only cool thing, but I'd rather know about those recursive dolls on the front cover.

All right, one more hint. Supposedly he's going to reveal the answer to a problem confounding mathematicians for centuries: Since "number theory" is the Queen of Mathematics, what is the Led Zepplin of Mathematios? Hmm...

A Medieval Man, hence always a century or more in advance of things

I have been dealing with Chesterton's writing in exquisite detail (down to the smallest part of a letter as it says in Holy Writ) and he never ceases to stun me with his amazing insights, fruitful analogies, and wise guidance, even in the most technical of matters - like about how the binomial theorem proclaims the glory of God, the importance of three-sidedness to triangles, or the role of Charles Babbage in Western culture - but even in the popular sense of technology. He was the first to have his own Blogg, as I have been proclaiming for some years (since this blogg was founded, in fact), and he gave all bloggdom that very penetrating justification for existence:

This paper exists to insist on the rights of man; on possessions that are of much more political importance than the principle of one man one vote. I am in favour of one man one house, one man one field; nay I have even advanced the paradox of one man one wife. But I am almost tempted to add the more ideal fancy of one man one magazine ... to say that every citizen ought to have a weekly paper of this sort to splash about in ... this kind of scrap book to keep him quiet.
[from G.K.'s Weekly April 4, 1925 quoted in Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 497]

There is also this, which ought to be inscribed on every cell phone of the cosmos:

I have often thanked God for the telephone.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:112]

But today... ah, today! I was hunting for a quote for a dear friend, and found this utterly remarkable commentary on - ah - I believe the term is "Photoshopping" - that is, altering photograph(s) for the sake of commentary, humor, or malevolence. But read it for yourself.

...I am not ignorant of the advantages of our legal forms, and that I do not entertain a vulgar prejudice that lawyers are leeches, I think that most sensible men must have been coming of late to feel that the routine and method of our Law Courts needs a great deal of revision. There has been much discussion in the papers about the case of Miss Gertie Millar, who brought an action upon the ground that no one had a right to sell a realistic and apparently homogeneous photograph in which the head belonged to one person and the body to another. And the Court decided, it appears, that people have got a right to sell a realistic and apparently homogeneous photograph of which the head belongs to one person and the body to another. The decision certainly sounds very queer. Sketches, drawings, coloured pictures, would not, of course, come into the question; they are obviously fictitious, and therefore cannot be anything more than insults. But a photograph can be made to look as if it were the complete representation of an actual person who at some time stood as though before the camera. That is the whole point of a photograph; it is the only reason that anybody wants a photograph. And it certainly seems alarming to say that this thing which professes to be realistic can be made up lawfully of any combination of heads and arms and legs. There is nothing to prevent my drawing a picture of Dr. Clifford with a devil's tail, or Mr. Blatchford with donkey's ears, or the late Sir Wilfrid Lawson as a crawling serpent, after the simple manner of the more popular valentines - that is, there is nothing to prevent me, except my own feelings of respect for all those three persons. But is it also true that I can exhibit in my shop-window a row of ordinary photographs of ordinary bishops, putting among them a convincing photograph of Dr. Clifford in full Roman canonicals and inscribed with the words, "The Growth of Ritual among Nonconformists"? Can I really exhibit a photograph headed in large letters "The Conversion of a Sceptic, " and exhibiting a fine view of the interior of Westminster Abbey, with a figure kneeling with clasped hands, upon which figure I have arbitrarily placed the head of Mr. Blatchford? Should I have been within my rights if in the lifetime of Sir Wilfrid Lawson I had exhibited a photograph of him sprawling across the bar of a pot-house and drinking the health of the barmaid in hot Scotch? In all these cases it seems to me that a photograph would come under something of the nature of libel, because a photograph, by its own photographic nature, claims to be a real scene.
[GKC ILN Feb 23, 1907 CW27:402-4]

About a different sort of memory...

Yes, I was in my lab 12 years ago, and saw it on dozens of TV screens.

Here is a slightly fictional recounting of what it was like.

As Father Brown said, "I am never surprised at any work of Hell."

Recurring to a Great Memory...

In between other chores and writing duties, I have been playing with the non-recursive traversal of a binary tree - oh yes it can be done - and other oddities as I proceed in my new NON-fiction series Case Studies in Computer Science. Those topics will be part of the introductory volume, The Problem with "Problem-Solving Skills".

In future volumes you'll hear about:
(1) rRNA sequence analysis and strings with WILDCARDS, being a retelling of my doctoral work with some interesting new stuff;
(2) the tech side of local ad insertion, the philosophy of which is discussed in my Subsidiarity;
(3) and a very curious and difficult problem I faced in 1978... which sometimes reveals more than one is expecting.

Meanwhile, since we crossed from August into September, I felt I ought to repost this interesting little document again. Yes, I firsdt posted it in 2005, in memory of a great thing now vanished into history, and many good friends.

Do stay tuned - the release of the long-awaited novel about Joe Outis and his job in the Control Room of AC&TG is approaching!

The Legend of Lance the Bird

In memory of the species
Lancenidifactor retefrangens
- the net-breaking big-dish nest-builder -
that built a nest in our satellite dish...

The legend lives on
From the field-techs on down
Of the place owned by Harold Fitzgerald.
The inserters they say
Will make the spots play
While the cue-tones remain unimperilled.

In a corporate park
In the light or the dark
In the farmlands just east of West Chester
There's a small high-tech firm
Nothing more than a worm
To a bird that they call "big-dish-nester."

This place you will find
An unusual kind
Doesn't make DNA or steel girders,
The commercials you see
On your cable TV
Are played back on their own ad-inserters.

To do this they send
To each cable headend
The commercials wove in MPEG flannel,
A scheduling list
By which they insist
On the spot and the time and the channel.

A signal they get
Makes ads play on your set
The cue-tones that start things in motion -
All sent with a swish
By a satellite dish
Out in back of their place in East Goshen.

The signal comes then
To BENS, YORK and KENN
And the ads play (it's ever so thrilling)
Then there's just one more bump
The logs go back through PUMP
And the whole thing is ready for billing.

And spots they will make
To sell wood or cake,
Take photos of cars and of houses,
The time in a box,
Crawling weather and stocks,
Birthdays wishes for friends or for spouses.

By night and by day,
Close attention they pay
If something goes wrong or is needed:
When red comes they dialed
To CAR, TORD and WILD
Thus "who watches the watcher?" is heeded!

So they sell Land Rovers
At the CHESes and DOVErs
And the plaque-on-the-wall-singing-fishes;
And things were quite well
Till the day I must tell
When that bird came to nest in their dishes!

This bird was a pest -
Just building a nest
At the transmitter dish's main focus:
No one could foresee
That this fowl thing would be
The straw in the blockage that broke us!

They saw it fly past,
Now slower, now fast,
Carrying straw that's so meager
It piled sticks and twine
On the satellite line...
Soon the signal began to get weaker.

CNN missed a cue,
Then Headline missed too
Then Ferry and Pump stopped their sending -
The control room guy said,
"Hey - the whole field is red!"
(Could it be all the systems were ending?)

Nextels tore the air:
"Beep-beep: hey, Pete, you there?"
Joe P. Ann and Scott were alerted...
They hung up some owls,
Brought in cats with their howls,
But the bird still remained undiverted.

Then "Control-room-guy Joe"
Interrupted: "I know!
'Hey bird, come out of your bower -
That dish is your tomb!'"
To the transmitter room
He ran - and he turned up the power!

So the whole gang did feast,
(No, no, not on roast beast)
But on microwave-turkey-like dinner;
All the field-techs and ops
Said, "Hey Joe, you're the tops -
Of the dish-game you sure are the winner!"

Now Traffic with CAM
Builds a schedule in RAM
Stargate puts it on HOME then for sending.
Starburst follows Pump's wish
Through Gilat to the dish
Ferry takes to the engines unending.

Tapes piled high in lots
Are converted to spots
(When VidLib is down it's impeded.)
Then Pump will extend
A multicast send
So the spots will get out where they're needed.

And Cue 2 and Cue 1
Also add to the fun
UDP (tripled to avoid botching)
And the engines send back
(Through HOME runs the track)
UDP also makes lights for watching.

But those ads must be bought:
Logs to Stargate are brought...
With billing comes payday and resting;
And no one will doubt
That our signal goes out
If the dish is still kept free from nesting.

The legend lives on
From the field-techs on down
Of the place owned by Harold Fitzgerald.
All birds, stay away!
'Cause the cook's in today...
Thus the cue-tones remain unimperilled...

Nov/Dec 2000