Notices by Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social), page 4

Saw this recently; as it pulled away, it emitted a mighty ROAR, too. Jurassic Pahk, as they say around here. #RIpix

Baseball's parent, cricket, has entered the chat.

Tennis is funny. Most players are lean, mean, sinewy machines, and then there's Rohan Bopanna, who looks like your typical uncle who plays at the Bangalore Club. Who just happens to be world #1 at doubles. With the funniest LinkedIn.

My colleague Amy Greenwald just sent me this talk slide. It's from Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an *economist*.

We have so won.

(I mean, I have *thoughts* about this content and his course slides, but also… We have so won.)

@tealeg It's okay, we've already contributed massively to bringing down the economy in other ways. (-:

1/ I have a story about WordStar from the mid-80s. I was in high school, and was blown away by it. Not just because it was fast, light, and good, but also because my BASIC brain *could not figure how to represent the data in a word processor*. I was OBSESSED about this. ↵
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/06/wordstar_7_the_last_ever/

2/ Hope came from an unexpected quarter. My school bought 2-3 machines from a local company. The machines had almost nothing: like CP/M, a BASIC interpreter, and…their rudimentary clone of WordStar! Someone working a few blocks from my school had written a word processor!!! ↵

3/ Now, how was I going to get them to talk to me? Here, it helped that they were alums, and it was the kind of school (SJBHS in BLR) whose alums were called Old Boys, if you catch my drift. So I wangled an invite to their offices. They were very nice. ↵

4/ I finally popped the big question: in effect, how do you represent the data in a word processor? I didn't know big-O or anything, but I had big-O intuitions that told me it couldn't possibly be any of the BASIC representations I could come up with. ↵

5/ Frustratingly, they just kinda' clammed up, going into "trade secret" mode, like I was competition. I knew it couldn't have been written in BASIC, but they wouldn't even tell me whether they'd written it in Pascal or Assembly (the only other things that seemed plausible). ↵

8/ And that's how the penny dropped: why they hadn't been willing to answer any questions, tell me which language, give me any sense of how to store the strings—anything else. They just let me believe they'd written it, and its trade secrets were just too great to divulge. •

7/ I went to school and spent some time working through everything in that clone word processor. Then I edited the actual WordStar binary. And … it was a perfect match. I showed my friends "my" WordBlah (whatever it was called). ↵

6/ Many months later, I had learned to read DOS's .COM format. A dumb-ass prank we'd play was to take a binary and change all the strings to something else that was no longer than the original. And then, from somewhere deep in my consciousness came an idea. ↵

@tealeg To be fair, all the software I grew up around in India was pirated, because nobody could afford a license for anything. But at least we didn't change the names and call them our own!

Professors giving instructions: I shall tell my students exactly what to do and they had better do it.

Professors following instructions: hahaha, nice try, but why don't I just make up my own and sow chaos.

I'm not referring to any Dagstuhl event, of course.

Imagine designing a feature so awful and unwanted that random doctor's offices are getting yelled at and are having to put in defensive "please don't blame us" messages.

6/ Eventually she made her way to the Bronx, and now lives in Providence. She's strong of body and mind. The "1000 Year" Reich lasted ~13 years; that 7yo escapee has now lived ~13 times as long. The best possible response to pure evil. •

3.2/ His bravery was of course not rewarded, and he paid for it in many ways. He didn't ask for credit, either. He was only recognized near the very end of his life. He is apparently the only Japanese person recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations. ↵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiune_Sugihara

3.1/ How did they get out? A Japanese diplomat in Lithuania saw what was happening. He put humanity ahead of the fact that he worked for an Axis power, handing out as many visas as he could. Thousands of Lithuanians, Poles and *Slavs owed their lives to him. ↵

2/ She grew up in Poland. They escaped in late 1939, fleeing mainly the Russians. Wait, Russians?!? That's right, today I met with a living witness to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. (Link if you don't know what that is.) ↵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pact