Notices by Jack Rusher (jack@berlin.social)

Scene: A man, on the 7th morning after heart surgery, rests in bed. He is experiencing obvious pain and sadness. Beside him is his partner, caring for him.

“Are you thirsty?”
“Yes, very.”
“Then why didn’t you ask me to bring you something to drink?”
“I hate myself right now.”
“I don’t like to hear that!”
“Being weak and dependent is very hard for me.”
“But what if the situation was reversed? If I asked for water, what would you do?”
Man begins crying.
“I would bring you a river.”
“See?”

Relatedly, I was talking with a doctor at the German Heart Center this week about how good (well trained, compassionate) the individual doctors and nurses in the German healthcare sector are, but also how terrible all the bureaucracy is. She basically said: “Good people trapped in a bad system? That’s Germany…”

Also: almost all nurses were either Turkish-German or foreign (Swiss German to Brazilian to Ukrainian); head of physical therapy was a gay Italian who spoke German so badly we often used a mix of English and Italian; guy who pushed my wheelchair between parts of the hospital was from Ghana; doctor who did my exit paperwork was a Dos Santos from Argentina.

One question I carried away from this experience: have any of those “Ausländer Raus” AfD types ever been inside a German hospital?

Doug McIlroy — Unix pipes, diff, spellchecking, macro pioneer whose work fed into Hart's impementation of Lisp macros, &c, &c — on driving to MIT from NJ to hear McCarthy give a talk on Lisp in 1959.

@schmudde All respect to him, but I don’t like seeing this BBS claim repeated. Five years earlier (1973) a group of Bay Area radicals created the first BBS in a Berkeley record store:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Memory

“One iteration requires 110 logic gates, which were partitioned across 66 Escherichia coli strains, requiring the introduction of a total of 1.1 Mb of recombinant DNA into their genomes.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-024-01730-1

Periodic thread of what I think of as extremely Berlin moments:

Stopped at a red light on my bike while riding home from the gym yesterday, I hear a familiar beat slowly coming into audio focus behind me. Smiling, I look back to see a tall person of indeterminate gender piloting a speaker-laden cargo bike containing an extremely chill golden retriever. All three of us seemed to be bobbing our heads in unison to The Prodigy’s Firestarter.

Later in the day, while walking home with groceries from the nearby market hall, I see two skinny 20-something lads struggling to hand transport a very tall potted plant. Once I’m close enough I see that it’s a very healthy, leafy, and productive Cannabis plant (newly legal to grow for personal use). After our paths cross, I smell it for the rest of the block.

Today, while walking home from picking up fresh produce from a farm share delivery point, I met two women outside my building on stilts. They amiably agreed to pose for a photo.

I’ve finally convinced @inconvergent, one of my favorite computer artists, to bring his Lisp-powered creations to Mastodon. Follow him! https://mas.to/@inconvergent/112728097375506693

A reminder for anyone struggling with craft that Rembrandt once drew a woman with three arms. Het Ledikant, 1646.

@blaine @boris “I’m going to put world-readable bytes on the public Internet and feel betrayed if the ‘wrong people’ read them” is quite a take… 🙄

@nobodyinperson @SReyCoyrehourcq @khinsen I have code (including data analytics code) in C, Common Lisp, and scheme that runs exactly the same after 30+ years, Clojure after 15 years, R after 20+ years. The Python ecosystem is almost uniquely awful for backwards compatibility.

Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, when the latter requested a debate.

https://www.openculture.com/2017/02/bertrand-russells-artful-letter-refusing-to-debate-british-fascist-leader-oswald-mosley-1962.html

In September, a bunch of us took a 3-day train ride from Seattle to St Louis for the last edition of Strange Loop. This video documents that journey, which we called the Trainjam.

Featuring @neauoire @spiralganglion @avi @akkartik @pvh @disconcision @aconbere @mkvlr @unkai
@mattwynne @blaine
(and a couple whose Masto handles I couldn't find.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qVT0URkkGE

“The [automatic machine/artificial intelligence] is not frightening because of any danger that it may achieve autonomous control over humanity... Its real danger is the quite different one that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the human race.”
— #NorbertWiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 1950

This 1957 photo from the construction site of the Atomium looks like a still from the greatest sci-fi film never made…

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope.html

/cc @jstepien

“To handle a problem with 12 or 13 billion variables would take about 30 billion seconds, or roughly a thousand years.

Naturally, I have a reason for mentioning 12 million variables…”

https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/

@faun @neauoire They didn’t know of each other’s work until a few years after they’d published independently on Algorithmic Information Theory. Kolmogorov acknowledged Ray’s priority in a paper in the late 60s.