Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Bill Gates has been in the news lately.

“Melinda French Gates says latest allegations about Bill Gates’ antics with Epstein dredge up ‘very painful’ memories” (New York Post):

Melinda French Gates said that new details of ex-husband Bill Gates’ alleged antics with Jeffrey Epstein dredge up “very painful times” from their 27-year marriage — and have left her “so happy to be away from all the muck that was there.” … “It’s personally hard whenever those details come up, right? Because it brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage,” she told NPR’s “Wild Card” podcast on Tuesday.

“I’m able to take my own sadness and look at those young girls and say, ‘My God, how did that happen to those girls?’” she said.

There’s a video with Melinda Gates where she smiles as she talks about the “sadness”. Keep in mind that, via a personal relationship with the boss, she made more money than the entire team of software engineers who built Microsoft Windows. Perhaps this has occasioned some “sadness” among those who worked 100 hours per week?

(Also, she implies that Bill Gates was having sex with “young girls” (a “young girl” would be 10? 12?). Is there any evidence of that in the Epstein files? Epstein pleaded guilty to partying with paid women as young as 16 back in 2008, but is there anything definitive in these files or elsewhere to suggest that, post-2008, “young girls” were having sex in exchange for cash or other inducements with Bill Gates or any other Epstein friend? A lot of Americans seem to be energetic when it comes to condemning Jeffrey Epstein and his circle. They say that they’re passionate about “the victims”, but Epstein died in 2019 and any “victims” are adults today. There are teenage prostitutes working right now in various states and countries. The folks who energetically condemn Jeffrey Epstein don’t try to do anything about current teenage prostitutes. If they live in Maskachusetts, for example, they don’t lobby to raise the age of consent from 16 to 18 or 21.)

Thirty-one years ago, as an envious impoverished graduate student, I developed the Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock:

The clock had broken because the U.S. Census Bureau put in additional barriers to scraping their popclock and the sites for getting stock quotes kept changing.

I fed Antigravity on a copy of the entire tree behind my web site and, incredibly, it/Gemini was able to answer questions about AOLserver configuration, Tcl API code, relational database structure, etc. It suggested fixes to the software that actually worked, e.g.,

set population_html [exec curl -s -L \
    -H "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" \
    -H "Accept: application/json, text/javascript, */*; q=0.01" \
    -H "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9" \
    -H "Referer: https://www.census.gov/popclock/" \
    -H "X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest" \
    "https://www.census.gov/popclock/data/population.php/us"]

for scraping the Census web site.

I wonder if the page is conceptually broken. For a couple of decades, the page seemed to track reasonably well with (1) reports of Bill Gates’s personal stash, and (2) reports of total assets in the Gates Foundation (I considered them both to be forms of wealth for him since he controlled the foundation).

Right now, though, the grand total of $960 billion seems to be off the reservation (and we don’t need Elizabeth Warren to tell us how bad that is). I’m wondering if the explanation is Microsoft issuing shares like crazy to employees, thus diluting Bill Gates’s ownership percentage. The Google says that Gates is worth about $100 billion personally and the Gates Foundation total assets is about the same. That would put his total post-divorce wealth at $200 billion, not $500 billion. The Gates Foundation has supposedly paid out (“squandered”?) roughly $83 billion (mostly money extracted from American computer users and handed over to Africans without the U.S. Treasury ever collected a dime of capital gains tax). That still gets us to only about $300 billion. How did the discrepancy arise? Could it be that Gates was diversifying and paying capital gains taxes over the years, thus getting the mediocre returns of the S&P 500 instead of the Mag 7 returns of Microsoft? Or did he do what all of our other noble billionaires do and borrow against his appreciated stock to fund lifestyle? Google AI says that “he has borrowed hundreds of millions against his assets … [and] Despite using tax-efficient strategies, Gates has publicly advocated for higher capital gains taxes for the wealthy.”

Related (simple non-RDBMS web apps from the same era):

• The Game, a dating practice app
• Aid to Evaluating Your Accomplishments

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In order to be cruel to MIT students, tortured daily with math and physics problems that make them feel stupid, the flight planning lecture of our FAA Ground School class covers a hypothetical trip from MIT to Bennington College in Vermont. Every year I try to pick what seems like the easiest class at Bennington and remind them that, had they chosen a school more wisely, they could be getting credit for it. This year I picked “Ghostly Body- The Art of Absence”:

I stressed that they’d need to “develop new understanding of the presence of absence” (the class requires no previous dance experience so it is unclear what the students’ old understanding of the presence of absence might be).

Before I highlighted this as an example of the presence of absence of academic and intellectual rigor, I questioned ChatGPT 5.2: “Please explain to me your understanding of the presence of absence as it relates to dance.” What came back was, I think, worthy of a Ph.D. in Dance Theory:

In dance, the “presence of absence” names a paradox: what is not physically there can be as perceptible, meaningful, and active as what is. Absence is not emptiness; it is a charged field that shapes attention, sensation, and interpretation.

Here are the main ways this idea operates in dance.

---

1. The Body as a Trace, Not Just a Fact

Dance exists only while it is happening. Once a movement ends, it survives as afterimage, memory, or expectation.

• A lifted arm leaves a trace in the viewer’s perception even after it lowers.
• A dancer who exits the stage continues to “occupy” space through memory.
• Stillness is not neutral—it holds the residue of previous motion and the promise of what might come.

In this sense, dance is always haunted by what has just happened and what is about to happen.

---

2. Negative Space as Active Partner

Absence appears physically as space:

• The gap between dancers
• Empty areas of the stage
• The air carved by movement

Choreography often makes absence legible by framing it:

• A duet defined by distance rather than touch
• A solo surrounded by emptiness
• Movement that gestures toward, but never reaches, another body

The audience reads these voids as intentional, emotionally loaded presences.

---

3. Stillness and Non-Movement

Not moving is one of the clearest embodiments of the presence of absence.

Stillness can signal:

• Withheld action
• Resistance
• Grief or loss
• Listening or readiness

Because dance trains us to expect motion, the absence of motion becomes loud. The body remains present, but movement is absent—creating tension and meaning.

---

4. The Absent Body

Dance frequently invokes bodies that are not there:

• A partner imagined but never visible
• A former dancer referenced by repetition of their choreography
• Cultural or ancestral bodies remembered through gesture

This is especially powerful in works dealing with loss, exile, trauma, or memory. The dancer becomes a conduit for someone else’s absence.

---

5. Temporality and Ephemerality

Unlike visual art objects, dance disappears.

• You cannot fully “return” to a dance—only to documentation or memory.
• Each performance replaces the last.
• The dance’s absence after the performance is part of its meaning.

The presence of absence here is existential: dance is disappearance made visible.

---

6. Audience Perception: Filling the Void

Absence activates the viewer.

When something is withheld:

• The audience projects meaning
• Memory and imagination complete the work
• The viewer becomes a participant

What is absent invites interpretation more strongly than what is fully shown.

---

7. Philosophical Undercurrent

Philosophically, this idea resonates with phenomenology:

• We perceive bodies not just as objects, but as intentional beings
• Absence is felt through expectation and anticipation
• Meaning emerges in the gap between perception and completion

In dance, this gap is continuously exposed.

---

In Summary

The presence of absence in dance means that:

• What is missing can be felt
• What has disappeared still acts
• What does not move still speaks
• What is not shown still shapes meaning

Dance is not only about bodies in motion, but about what motion leaves behind.

If you’d like, I can also explore this through:

• A specific choreographer (e.g., Cunningham, Pina Bausch, Forsythe)
• Somatic practice or improvisation
• Performance philosophy
• Or how absence operates differently in ballet vs. contemporary dance

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At the end of last year, I wanted to clean up some mailing addresses in an Excel spreadsheet for use with our family New Year’s cards. I resent having to spend time learning any computer language other than Lisp and SQL unless that language is more powerful than Lisp and/or SQL. Thus, I’ve never become a proficient Excel programmer. Could an LLM come to my rescue?

Prompt to ChatGPT 5.2:

write a Microsoft Excel 365 formula that will take a US address and remove a trailing “US” or “US” preceded by a newline and also turn any 9-digit ZIP code into a 5-digit zip code by removing “-NNNN” where N is a digit.

Answer:

=REGEXREPLACE(
REGEXREPLACE(A1,"(\d{5})-\d{4}","$1"),
"(\r?\n)?US$",""
)

Grok’s answer:

=LET(
cleaned, TRIM(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(A1,CHAR(10)&"US",""),CHAR(10)," ")," US","")),
lastLine, TRIM(RIGHT(cleaned, LEN(cleaned)-FIND("@",SUBSTITUTE(cleaned," ","@",LEN(cleaned)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE(cleaned," ","")))))),
zipLike, TRIM(TEXTAFTER(lastLine," ",-1,"",1)),
fixedZip, IF(REGEXTEST(zipLike,"^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$"),
LEFT(zipLike,5),
zipLike),
SUBSTITUTE(cleaned, zipLike, fixedZip)
)

What’s the difference between these, other than Grok’s epic verbosity? The Grok version results in an unexplained error from Excel while the ChatGPT code works.

Advantage: ChatGPT

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