Notices by DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) (dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz), page 2

@screwtape @Screwtapello
I never got around to playing with Inform 7, but it always seemed interesting.

My college roommate co-authored Rogue while I was busy doing a DSL for writing adventure games (never finished).

Very long term interests.

@Screwtapello
By an amazing coincidence, those same words appear in the movie Alice's Restaurant.

😉

@screwtape @mdhughes
So asdf has gotten to the point where all the cool kids use it now? :)

Also how about a shortcut for (asdf:load-system :arrokoth)
ಠ_ಠ

Does anyone know what happened to the interesting site "Lambda the Ultimate"?

I used to sometimes browse it for the sometimes highly intelligent discussions, but it went down some years ago, and Hacker News says that it went permanently down about a year ago -- but I can't find any comments about why it died.

It was the kind of site where *someone* should have revived it, and it *was* kind of sort of popular.

@AmenZwa @kentpitman @screwtape
@mdhughes
@interlisp
@masinter

@screwtape @webhat
Vaughn Pratt was himself a Lisp programmer, and implemented CGOL as a Maclisp reader.

He was at Stanford and MIT, and Berkeley pre-Unix, so there's no reason to think he was aware of the 'dc' RPN arithmetic tool, and the paper you reference is earlier than HP's RPN handheld calculators, which had a very loyal following.

But was there a specific question?

P.S. "Polish notation" is the most common name (after 'postfix') for operators following operands, just as Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) is the most common name (after 'prefix') for operators preceding operands.

'The description "Polish" refers to the nationality of logician Jan Łukasiewicz' but people in the early 20th century had a tough time with Polish names so they used a nickname.

He was famous for multiple things, though, for instance continuous (real-) valued logic, which in a hypothetical infinitely precise analog computer would allow hypercomputation -- computation beyond what is possible for Turing machines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_notation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_%C5%81ukasiewicz

@mdhughes

@screwtape @mdhughes @me @sacha @cwebber
Mind you, I liked Snowcrash a lot, but it is not a very serious book. It began life as a background theme for a video game, according to the author, and when that fell through, he fleshed it out as a whole book.

It's therefore not too surprising that it has many silly aspects. But it's fun.

His later books get much more serious.

@mdhughes @screwtape @me @sacha @cwebber
Note the sartorial elegance in this 1980 photo of Steve Mann, "The Father of Wearable Computing":
http://wearcam.org/steve5.jpg
https://wearcam.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann_(inventor)

P.S. His related 2001 book "Intelligent Image Processing" was innovative; seminal; excellent.
http://wearcam.org/textbook.htm

He also wrote the 2001 "Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer" but I never read it.

P.S. I'm puzzled why the above jpg isn't showing up inline without clicking it.

@screwtape @josephholsten @smashedratonpress
I had an enlightened history teacher in high school. He started us off reading an essay called "History as a Branch of Fiction"

@smashedratonpress
Someone posted "why have I never heard of distributism?" I hadn't either; have you?

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

@screwtape
Here's some more critically important Fortran for you to interface to Lisp!

https://mathstodon.xyz/@th@v.st/113833371009333009

@screwtape @kentpitman
Substituting "humor" for "irony" in the Steve Martin quote from Roxanne (1987):

"Oh, ho, ho, humor! Oh, no, no, we don't get that here. See, uh, people ski topless here while smoking dope, so humor's not really a, a high priority. We haven't had any humor here since about, uh, '83, when I was the only practitioner of it. And I stopped because I was tired of being stared at."

Also about statistics, you may have missed my final comment on Lambda Moo:

When my research mathematician friend Arunas Rudvalis (discoverer of the Rudvalis group) switched from group theory to statistics, I asked, isn't that a much more narrow field?

He said "no, you don't get it. Take *all* of mathematics, and make all of the variables random variables. That's statistics."

(No doubt I still don't get it, but that expanded my horizons anyway.)

@kentpitman @screwtape
Huh! I did not know that.

@screwtape @shizamura @kentpitman @nosrednayduj @mdhughes @ratxue
Today I explored for the first time, just figuring I should find out how to walk to the sushi place.

First I tried to walk from the closet to the sushi place. Later I tried to find my way back to the closet from the sushi place.

I failed miserably; it was pitiable.

Teleporting solves that, though, thanks.

@screwtape @shizamura @kentpitman @nosrednayduj @mdhughes
Note that @ratxue did not turn into a link; it was missing @ mastodon.social

@ratxue

@screwtape
Not to overburden you, but they also just reposted this classic Henry Baker paper (I believe everything he wrote was a classic, actually) on the thermodynamics of garbage collection:

https://plover.com/~mjd/misc/hbaker-archive/ReverseGC.html

@screwtape @kon @prahou @ozzelot @reidrac
"Surrealistic Pillow", Jefferson Airplane, 1967.
Contains the rock classics "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7knZICgLko&list=OLAK5uy_l-I-_0YyLBUa6VOhtQ-2VbROAACQx6GPo&index=2

@screwtape
Link the compiled Fortran to the compiled Lisp. 🤨

@AmenZwa @fl @Jose_A_Alonso
"there was no type system, originally"

It is a pet peeve of mine for people to call dynamic typing "no typing".

The very first Lisp of course had cons pairs, symbolic atoms, and integers -- dynamically typed.

@screwtape @kentpitman @rwxrwxrwx
> I ran out of characters to tag you but I was waiting for this <3

It's *almost* like you're saying I'm some kind of smart ass.

> only/especially interesting for small primes

That's quitter talk!

@screwtape @kentpitman @rwxrwxrwx
More seriously, I always found it intensely annoying that fftw claimed copyright/license on generated code.

Less seriously again:

"name idea is A Worse Is Better Way Of Computing A Fourier Transform"

Not "Better is Worse"?

> PROGN...PROGN...PROGN...SETQ...SETQ...SETQ...GO #....GO #...GO #...

My mistake, worse it is. ;)

Anyway leveraging name recognition on "Worse is Better" really is a good naming idea.