I had never heard of Alisa McCance, and I’m sure that McCance and Widdowson’s The Composition of Foods Sixth Summary Edition is an exceptionally fine compilation of whatever it is that it’s a compilation of. But no one carries the McCance name like Shaun McCance.
Just doing what I can.
Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy a few years back offered an interesting history lesson, the story of the intriguing case of Loving v. Virginia. Richard Loving (great name, huh?) had married Mildred Jeter in the District of Columbia, but when they moved to Virginia, they were charged with a crime.
Why?
Richard was white. Mildred was black.
God, the judge lectured them, had most surely intended the races remain separate, as evidence by the fact that He had plopped them down to begin with on separate continents.
One is tempted to laugh at the judge. The sentiments he voiced, however, decisively shaped peoples lives and were by no means idiosyncratic. A Gallup Poll indicated in 1965 that 42 percent of Northern whites supported bans on inter-racial marriage, as did 72 percent of southern whites.
This happened in 1967. At the time, 16 states had laws prohibiting inter-racial marriage.
Picked up Spencer Weart’s history of climate science at the library over the weekend. It’s a fine read. Like a good and serious historian of science, he makes clear that there are no “aha” moments, just a lot of stumbling around, with progress only possible once the ground has been prepared.
The issue of Lisp is, I think, an empirical one.
Back when GNOME made the move away from Sawfish for Metacity, at about the same time Sun came aboard, one of the wingnuts on Slashdot made a pejorative comment about the Sun programmers, questioning their abilities if they couldn’t handle the Lisp required to maintain Sawfish.
The thing is, most everyone learned Lisp in school, right? And pretty much no one uses it now, right? I was reminded of this by a comment today from Joel Spolsky:
I think that if you try to ignore the fact that millions of programmers around the world have learned lisp and don’t prefer to use it, you’re in the land of morbid cognitive dissonance. And this attitude that “lisp is only for leet programmers so it’s good because only l33t programmers will work on our code so our code will be extra good” is just bullshit, I’m sorry. Plenty of brilliant programmers know lisp just fine and still choose other languages. Most of them, in fact.
I’ve always had a soft spot for Lisp since I wrote a piece years ago about Greg Chaitin, the mathematician. Or is he a computer scientist?
I was sort of star struck, and we had coffee at a place across the street from the university, and he tried to explain to me randomness and halting and incompletness. And he told me that there was nothing quite so elegant as a Lisp. In retrospect, trying to write about mathematics was a fool’s errand, and I don’t try it much any more. Words can never do justice to the scribbles Chaitin sketched out for me as he explained to me the incompleteness of the real numbers – proved it for me, right there on a coffee-stained table. (I still love that juxtaposition, the purity of the ideal of the incompleteness of the real numbers on a coffee-stained table. The place is a pawn shop now.)
I didn’t really know anything about computer languages then, and I imagined a Lisp as a shining city on a hill, a place where the purity of the ideal was made tangible, incarnate in code. And I suppose that’s still what Lisp is, but down here by the docks where the work gets done, people seem to have set aside the beauty of Lisp for what must apparently have been more practical concerns.
So the bike’s sitting in the garage with a flat. The front yard’s torn up from the plumber’s backhoe. And Lissa’s lying in the bedroom with a face full of stitches from dental surgery.
But the toilet now flushes, and I just heard Lissa in the kitchen, rooting around for something to eat. I just need to pick up some tubes and a new back tire and I’ll be set. Mmmm. Kevlar.
So in honor of Luis’ birthday, yesterday I closed a bug.
And we’re not talking about something cheap and easy, like using the dupfinder to zap one away. No, this bug required me to actually apply a patch. (OK, it was a patch submitted by a user, but still….)
Happy birthday, Luis.
update 2/29: In which I update based on Malcolm’s helpful proofreading
As pointed out elsewhere here in the comments, Mark Boslough written an excellent summary of RS 2477 on the Enter Stage Right web site. It explains how this antiquated federal law is being used by the off-road big-tire people to try to enforce their “right” to tear up other people’s land:
Use of RS 2477 is not just a theoretical threat. My family found out first-hand that the threat is very real. Off-road organizations are actively promoting it as a means of creating recreation areas on private land.
In my other blog I linked yesterday to an account written by Nat Cobb of his cross country Tour of Hope adventure. I promised Dano I’d run down the story I wrote last fall about Nat. Here it is.
“This thing is freakin’ sick!” Seems like there’s only one way to stop that boy:
So the inevitable plumbing adventure we’ve dreaded is now under way here at Casa Heineman-Fleck. It started late last week, and finally came to a head Saturday. Water currently arrives fine, but is not really capable of leaving. This means trips to our neighbor Alison’s, or to the YMCA for a shower, or to Mom and Dad’s. For our plumber, Mike, this is fabulous – not so much because of the financial benefit, but because it means he gets to rent a backhoe.