I hope that everyone is engaged in solemn reflection on Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
A recent rally in New York City included attacks on Jewish Israelis for being colonizers/settlers. What’s interesting about this? The photos of the pro-Arab group appears to include many Americans who are either recent immigrants of children of recent immigrants (i.e., “settlers” or “colonizers”, part of the continued displacement/replacement/dilution of Native Americans and part of a global wave of Arab/Muslim expansion that started with the original Arab conquests (622-750 AD)). People from Arab and Muslim countries were generally ineligible for immigration to the U.S. until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
How would they feel if Native Americans could gain political power here and begin a program of decolonialization by deporting everyone who didn’t have at least an Elizabeth Warren-style claim of Native American ancestry?
No outdoor event in NYC would be complete without Faucists wearing their masks against an aerosol virus (primitive surgical mask in the background for the image below):
The pro-Israel counter-protesters fight under the banner of the scared rainbow:
Note that the sacred rainbow can also be used by those opposed to Israel, e.g., “Queers for Palestine”. From the folks who boycott Israel:
From Hungary to India to Brazil, how judges responded to attacks on their independence helped decide whether would-be autocrats prevailed in constraining the courts.
Over the last few decades, attempts to weaken the courts around the world have become recurring signals that a democracy is in trouble. Attacks on judicial independence were early steps toward one-party dominance in Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, for example.
But a move to limit the authority of the courts — like the new law adopted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition barring judges from using the longstanding legal principle of “reasonableness” to overrule government decisions — does not make democratic collapse inevitable. It’s more like a flashing red light, and how the judiciary responds can begin to decide how much damage is done.
Why is Israel’s cabinet trying to crush the country’s Supreme Court? Why did President Biden tell CNN that “this is one of the most extreme” Israeli cabinets he’d ever seen? And why did the U.S. ambassador to Israel just say that America is working to prevent Israel from “going off the rails”?
The short answer to all three questions is that the Biden team sees the far-right Israeli government, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, engaged in unprecedented radical behavior — under the cloak of judicial “reform” — that is undermining our shared interests with Israel, our shared values…
They just find it hard to believe that Bibi would allow himself to be led around by the nose by people like Ben-Gvir, would be ready to risk Israel’s relations with America and with global investors and WOULD BE READY TO RISK A CIVIL WAR IN ISRAEL just to stay in power with a group of ciphers and ultranationalists.
But it is what it is — and it’s ugly. Tens of thousands of Israeli democracy protectors blocked roads and highways and besieged the Tel Aviv airport on Tuesday to make clear to Netanyahu that if he thinks he can snuff out Israel’s democracy just like that, he’s badly mistaken.
If the hundreds of thousands of Israeli democracy defenders, who have taken to the streets every Saturday for over half a year, can’t stop the Netanyahu juggernaut from slamming this bill through, it will, as former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote the other day in Haaretz, “degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society, isolate the country” and end “the democratic chapter” of Israel’s history.
Any prolonged Israel-Hamas war could divert more U.S. military equipment needed by Kyiv to Tel Aviv
(i.e., Ukraine is the real ally)
Separately, let’s keep in mind that a country’s resources are finite. The Arabs in Gaza are among those who have vowed to destroy Israel (as U.S. Congressional Rep. Rashida Tlaib tweeted, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”). Instead of spending the summer keeping track of what practical steps these Arabs were taking toward Rashida Tlaib’s goal, Israeli progressives were out protesting. They perceived Netanyahu as their biggest enemy and didn’t consider the possibility that the pen wasn’t mightier than the sword. The protests against cutting back the power of Israel’s courts were negligible, however, compared to the time, money, and energy that Israel spent fighting SARS-CoV-2. This fight apparently yielded no benefits because the country ended up with a higher rate of “excess deaths” than do-almost-nothing Sweden. Instead of cowering at home, Israelis under 65 could have been in military refresher training, manufacturing weapons;, etc.
One strange aspect of media coverage of this fight is that it is characterized as being against “terrorists” or “militants” and not soldiers of a legitimate government. Hamas enjoys more support among Palestinians than Joe Biden does among Americans. Why aren’t the people carrying guns on behalf of Hamas, which represents the interests of a majority of Palestinian Arabs, then referred to as “soldiers”?
A new poll released Tuesday finds a dramatic surge in Palestinian support for Hamas following last month’s Gaza war, with around three quarters viewing the Islamic militants as victors in a battle against Israel to defend Jerusalem and its holy sites.
The scientific poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research also found plummeting support for President Mahmoud Abbas, who was sidelined by the war but is seen internationally as a partner for reviving the long-defunct peace process.
The poll found that 53% of Palestinians believe Hamas is “most deserving of representing and leading the Palestinian people,” while only 14% prefer Abbas’ secular Fatah party.
from the United Nations, which guarantees health care, education, food, etc. to every baby born in Gaza: “The population growth rate stands high at 2.8% and it is expected to remain stable due to decline in mortality rates while fertility rate remains one of the highest in the Arab region standing at 4.06, with high disparity between Gaza and West Bank, 4.5 and 3.6 respectively. … The increase of youth population in Palestine for the past 20 years reflects the highest increase in the Arab countries”
“UNRWA textbooks still include hate, antisemitism despite pledge to remove — watchdog” (The Times of Israel, 2022): Among the content [taught in the United Nations-run schools] that IMPACT-se flagged was a grammar exercise teaching that “the Palestinians sacrifice their blood to liberate Jerusalem,” the statement said. Other exercises include sentences about “Jihad warriors” against “the occupier,” commitment to “liberate” Palestine, and “resisting the enemy courageously,” according to the report. A poem teaches students that to die as a martyr by killing Israelis is a “hobby.” Islamic education material depicts Jews as “inherently treacherous, and hostile to Islam and Muslims,” including another grammar exercise implying that Jews are impure and defiling the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. “Israel is described as having been implanted by an imperialist, European, colonial, anti-Arab conspiracy with the goal of dividing the Arab world,” IMPACT-se said. Israel is erased from the UNRWA material and the entire area of the Jewish state is labeled as modern-day Palestine. Students are given exercises of naming Israeli cities as Palestinian, it added. …. Sheff said the majority of the $338 million that the US funds for UNRWA goes to education. [i.e., American taxpayers fund all of the above]
Joint Statement by Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups on the Situation in Palestine
We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.
Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum. For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to “open the gates of hell,” and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced. Palestinians in Gaza have no shelters for refuge and nowhere to escape. In the coming days, Palestinians will be forced to bear the full brunt of Israel’s violence.
The apartheid regime is the only one to blame. Israeli violence has structured every aspect of Palestinian existence for 75 years. From systematized land seizures to routine airstrikes, arbitrary detentions to military checkpoints, and enforced family separations to targeted killings, Palestinians have been forced to live in a state of death, both slow and sudden.
Today, the Palestinian ordeal enters into uncharted territory. The coming days will require a firm stand against colonial retaliation. We call on the Harvard community to take action to stop the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians.
African American Resistance Organization
Amnesty International at Harvard
Bengali Association of Students at Harvard College
Harvard Act on a Dream
Harvard Arab Medical and Dental Student Association
Harvard Chan Muslim Student Association
Harvard Chan Students for Health Equity and Justice in Palestine
Harvard College Pakistan Student Association
Harvard Divinity School Muslim Association
Harvard Middle Eastern and North African Law Student Association
Harvard Graduate School of Education Islamic Society
Harvard Graduate Students for Palestine
Harvard Islamic Society
Harvard Law School Justice for Palestine
Harvard Divinity School Students for Justice in Palestine
Harvard Jews for Liberation
Harvard Kennedy School Bangladesh Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Muslim Women’s Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School Palestine Caucus
Harvard Kennedy School South Asia Caucus Leadership
Harvard Muslim Law School Association
Harvard Pakistan Forum
Harvard Prison Divest Coalition
Harvard South Asian Law Students Association
Harvard South Asians for Forward-Thinking Advocacy and Research
Harvard TPS Coalition
Harvard Undergraduate Arab Women’s Collective
Harvard Undergraduate Ghungroo
Harvard Undergraduate Muslim Women’s Medical Alliance
In Florida, people are using heat pump water heaters that also serve to cool the garage. From miserable cold/damp England, a different idea: a computer server whose waste heat is used for domestic hot water.
“This is where I prototyped the thermal conductor that carries heat from computer processors to the cylinder filled with water,” he says, opening his workshop door to reveal a 90-liter electric boiler. “We ran the first tests, and we understood that it could work.” Jordan is cofounder and chief technology officer of Heata, an English startup that has created an innovative cloud network where computers are attached to the boilers in people’s homes.
Next to the boiler is a computer tagged with a sticker that reads: “This powerful computer server is transferring the heat from its processing into the water in your cylinder.” A green LED light indicates that the boiler is running, Jordan explains. “The machine receives the data and processes it. Thus we are able to transfer the equivalent of 4.8 kilowatt-hours of hot water, about the daily amount used by an average family.”
Can this save our beloved planet? Absolutely!
When you sign up with Heata, it places a server in your home, where it connects via your Wi-Fi network to similar servers in other homes—all of which process data from companies that pay it for cloud computing services. Each server prevents one ton of carbon dioxide equivalent per year from being emitted and saves homeowners an average of £250 on hot water annually, a considerable discount in a region where 13% of the inhabitants struggle to afford heat.
They hired the scientist from Back to the Future:
What else is in the September/October issue? There is a 5-page article on open-source software, whose 40th anniversary is apparently now. The canceled Richard M. Stallman is credited as having started the movement, but there is no photo of him. Nor of Linus Torvalds. Nor of Guido van Rossum, the Python nerd. The editors found room for just one photo and it is of a person is not credited as having written any software, open source or otherwise:
Note that the photo caption is factually incorrect. People were using the term “open source” prior to 1998. One example is Eric Raymond‘s The Cathedral and the Bazaar. I found a version that seems to date from 1996 (since 1991 was “five years ago”).
I was one of the first GNU contributors in the mid-1980s. I had released a good deal of open-source software onto the net, developing or co-developing several programs (nethack, Emacs’s VC and GUD modes, xlife, and others) that are still in wide use today.
Note that the Deplorable Second Amendment-loving Raymond does not explain what he means by this term, but simply uses it expecting readers to understand it. Thus, it seems doubtful that the term was new in 1996.
part of human physiology: menstruation. Heavy, sometimes debilitating periods strike at least a third of people who menstruate at some point in their lives … people with heavy periods … Many people desperately need treatments to make their period more manageable… Why some people have much heavier periods than others remains an open question. … why humans menstruate … Some labs instead use tissue removed from people who have had hysterectomies … help explain why some people are prone to miscarriages.
How long before these brilliant Scientists realize that approximately half of “people” have very light periods indeed and that there is a fairly simple test to predict whether a person falls into this category?
A different set of Harvard nerds found that elites profit from a flood of low-skill migrants almost exactly to the same extent that working class Americans lose money (a $500 billion annual wealth transfer in pre-Biden money; the elites get the higher rents and pay the lower wages while the peasants pay the higher rents and receive the lower wages that Econ 101 says are inevitable with an expansion in labor supply).
These studies are being repeated in New York City right now. Elites who own hotels are making bank while residents living in non-elite neighborhoods are the ones who incur costs, such as congestion, higher rents, and lower wages related to the tiny percentage of asylum-seekers who’ve found their way to NYC.
[State Senator John Liu] whose senate district includes a large immigrant population, said many of the complaints about migrants were not coming from areas that have been traditionally anti-immigrant. Instead, he said, protests followed the shelters, so “even in parts of the city that tend to be very pro immigrant, many of those residents are up in arms.”
Just like their brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in Maskachusetts, New Yorkers love undocumented immigrants… so long as none live anywhere near them.
In College Point, Queens, a working-class neighborhood near La Guardia Airport, Jennifer Shannon, 53, said she believed in helping those in need, including the women in a homeless shelter that opened there in 2019. But after a respite center for migrants opened in July, Ms. Shannon was livid.
“We just added 500 more people to a community that’s already falling apart,” she said.
During the early days of the pandemic, Ms. Shannon started a neighborhood association to support food pantries and provide meals to emergency medical workers, earning citations from Mr. Adams — who was then Brooklyn borough president — and State Senator John Liu.
But now she says the migrants have devalued life in the neighborhood.
“We have people sitting all over people’s private property, drinking, smoking marijuana, hanging out until 4 in the morning in the municipal lot, blasting music,” she said. “It’s a disgrace.”
“It’s not everybody in there. You have people who are genuinely just trying to get away from hell and make a better life for themselves. But that’s not who you see sitting in the park benches at 11 o’clock at night, with their friends, men urinating in broad daylight. That’s what we’re seeing.”
Migrants are exempt from the sacred duty of vaccination!
In Astoria, Queens, Shabbir Suhal, 40, an accountant with three children in public school, said he was alarmed by published reports of students from shelters being permitted to attend school without being immunized against polio, measles, chickenpox and other diseases. Under state law, students in temporary housing have 30 days to start the process of getting immunized.
One great part of the article, which describes roughly 100,000 people who do not work and get their housing, food, health care, education, etc. at taxpayer expense… the NYT informs us that migrants come to NYC for “generous public services” and also that New Yorkers “reject the suggestion that immigrants want handouts“. Just as free housing, food, health care, home broadband, and smartphone is not “being on welfare” (because the person enjoying these means-tested programs may not receive a direct cash transfer), a non-working person who lives in an NYC hotel at taxpayer expense does not want a “handout”.
A friend washed off all of the Playa mud and shared his experience of Burning Man 2023, Rain Edition.
What was great? He arrived on Thursday before the official event began and enjoyed a week of “Unnaturally perfect weather; no dust.”
His favorite art was a gigantic cube made from intermediate bulk carriers (IBCs). An IBC out of IBCs. Each cube had a light and became a pixel. “People could climb it. A few broke ankles,” he said. “The perfect example of ingenious art that is awe-inspiring by its simplicity and beauty out of materials that can be reused after it is taken apart.”
Overall, though, he felt that the art was not as awe-inspiring as in previous years. “There was a proliferation of laser-cut sh*t all over the Playa, including the otherwise-magnificent Temple. That’s a lazy way to build something intricate.” Perhaps this is because some of the A-listers didn’t show up this year. Unlikely in a typical year, tickets were easy to come by. What else wasn’t so great? “There are still too many plug-and-plays. The ebikes. They move too fast and the riders are like Tesla drivers: annoying people in a hard-to-explain way. Burning Man bikes are supposed to be crummy and hard to pedal. It shouldn’t be effort-free to move around.”
How about the art cars, now that Mayan Warrior has been destroyed by fire? (“They spent at least $8 million on Mayan Warrior”) “Titantic’s End is an art car iceberg is supposed to raise awareness about climate change. It has an interior room chilled to 32 degrees, lasers, massive sound, and everything else than can be done with an unlimited CO2 budget,” my friend noted. “We were not impressed.”
After a week of good luck, the rain began on Friday morning. With only shreds of mobile phone service, which immediately collapsed as soon as the event began in earnest, attendees had limited access to weather forecasts. “Rich people had Starlink, but everything went down after it started raining. The rangers told us no more rain coming and it f**king poured for days,” he said. What would he have done if he’d been better informed? “We would have partied way harder at the beginning and then left Thursday night.” Was it that bad? “It was a crisis made for social media and schadenfreude, but really not that different from going on a ski vacation and getting injured after a day or two. Some people kept partying, but we were discouraged so we stayed in our tents. Nobody could drive an art car, bike, or even walk in shoes. You could walk barefoot, but it was nasty.”
Dare we touch on the bathroom situation? “Porta-potties never became completely full, but were really gnarly, even for hardened ravers. We ended up finding a plug and play with $10K composting toilets on the last day. They had graciously opened their toilets to everyone. People had been prepared to pee in bottles and poop in trash bags, but it didn’t quite come to that.” Was the situation inevitable? “Toilet pumping and camp water deliveries stopped Friday morning. The cops had heavy equipment and super off-road dune buggies, but they just disappeared. Maybe they could have parked a pump truck at each station and kept pumping, for example.”
Was he sorry that there wasn’t a muscular response from President Joe Biden? “All the camps were sharing. Nobody went hungry or thirsty. The vibe was a little like Central American post-earthquake.”
What about the escape? “We tore down and mooped over a couple of days and I made a run for it but the rented car got stuck. I managed to walk back and pull myself out with my team and our biggest truck and return to our now-empty campsite for a cold and wet night. The next morning, Monday I guess, I mapped out the best route by foot, around bad streets and stuck vehicles. I deflated the rental car tires and went for it, but still got stuck. Some a**holes aggressively yelled obscenities at us for trying to escape, other people came out and pushed us. Once I got to K street, I cut out on playa and just plowed thru the swampy parts and banged my way out onto the gate road and out.”
What about the fact that the gate was closed for both in and out? “I heard that people were being stopped and could not get out, but when i decided to blast my way out early Monday morning there were no cops in sight. The gates were open, but not advertised as open. A campmate who arrived in a Toyota Land Cruiser managed to get out on Sunday night. He has a lot of experience off road and had traction pads with him.”
Who cleaned up the mountain of muddy trash that he left behind? “We did a full pack and moop before we left. We left a guy behind with the 4×4 truck and 8000 lb. trailer and supplies. He stayed till Temple burn left the morning after. So we cleaned up; not like the f**kers who ‘walked it out’ leaving all their sh*t behind.”
Summary? “We were well prepared so mostly it was the loss of part of the event and being stuck at camp a few days, but I got out right before Exodus so other than the nail-biting stress of getting to pavement, it was totally easy drive.”
What about the folks who waited for the official opening of the gate? He sent me this photo of Exodus:
Will we get a more thorough dissection of what could have been done better from the burners who know the event best? My friend says “No. People aren’t comfortable complaining about the Burning Man organization. They get over it or stop going.” Does it matter that failings won’t be examined? “In the end, Burning Man is like California. It’s so resource-rich that no amount of mismanagement can ruin it.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2023 to Narges Mohammadi for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.
Since is now an established fact, according to the white saviors in Norway, that anyone who identifies as a “woman” in Iran is oppressed, does that mean that the roughly 40 million Iranians who identify as women now qualify for asylum if they migrate to Europe or the U.S.?
Separately, it is unclear from reading the Western media if there is a single human anywhere on Planet Earth who has something positive to say about the Iranian judicial system. Here’s a June 2023 New York Times story:
Nobody who lives in Iran is interviewed at all. The New York Times apparently assumes that everyone in Iran agrees with Ms. Mohammadi and disagrees with the Iranian government.
Separately, how does her 10-year sentence from the brutal authoritarian government of Iran compare to what people in the Land of Freedom (TM) experience? Adolfo Martinez, who disagrees with our state religion, is the subject of “Iowa man sentenced to 16 years for setting LGBTQ flag on fire” (USA Today; he stole a rainbow flag from a church and burned it in the street). A person who wasn’t in Washington, D.C. on the day when several million U.S. military personnel and armed police officers stood alone against insurrectionists was sentenced to 22 years in prison for “seditious conspiracy” (CNN).
“Nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program” has been proven conclusively over the past couple of decades with migrants granted “temporary protected status” (aside from the 500,000-ish Venezuelans on whom this was bestowed by Joe Biden, there are the Haitians who won this in 2010 and are still entitled to “temporary” status).
“Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” (Politico 2016, by a Harvard professor) concludes that elite Americans get a $500 billion/year (pre-Biden dollars) boost in wealth from low-skill immigration. This can be due to ownership of real estate, such as apartment buildings, and stocks in companies that have a larger market due to a larger population. Elites also profit by paying lower wages, since the larger supply of workers results in a lower market-clearing wage under Econ 101.
Maybe a non-elite can profit by investing in a health care enterprise in a low-income neighborhood? Migrants who are granted temporary protected status immediately qualify for unlimited taxpayer-funded health care spending (Medicaid). Here are the Florida rules:
In Maskachusetts, a noncitizen can get taxpayer-funded health care, taxpayer-funded housing, and taxpayer-funded food (i.e., a 100-percent taxpayer-funded lifestyle) and he/she/ze/they does not run afoul of the “public charge” rule:
How about California? “For Medi-Cal [Medicaid] eligibility purposes, immigrants granted TPS are lawfully present.”
Readers: How else could a non-elite American invest so as to position him/her/zir/themself to profit from the open border?
Mayor Eric Adams is seeking to suspend New York City’s longstanding obligation to provide shelter to anyone who asks for it, as officials struggle to find housing for thousands of migrants arriving from the southern border.
On Tuesday night, Mr. Adams asked a judge to allow the city to put aside its legal obligation to provide shelter to single adults, arguing in court that the city should be able to temporarily lift the mandate during an emergency.
“With more than 122,700 asylum seekers having come through our intake system since the spring of 2022, and projected costs of over $12 billion for three years, it is abundantly clear that the status quo cannot continue,” Mr. Adams said in a statement.
In a letter to Erika Edwards, a New York Supreme Court justice, the city’s lawyers asked for the 1981 consent decree that requires the city to provide shelter to be temporarily suspended. They also asked for the rules to be suspended whenever the governor or mayor declares a state of emergency and there is an influx of people seeking shelter.
Poor native-born New Yorkers, in other words, would lose their right to shelter because elite New Yorkers offered sanctuary to migrants and then migrants accepted the offer. Also, why is the requested suspension “temporary”? Venezuela is not going to run out of people who want to come to the U.S., right? (see When will there be more Venezuelans in the U.S. than in Venezuela?)
More from the New York City elites, quoted in the above-cited NYT article:
A top aide to Mr. Adams, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, recently called on the federal government to “close the borders.” Mr. Adams sought to distance himself from those comments on Tuesday, reiterating his position that the border should not be closed, but that migrants should be sent to other cities.
Separately, a neighbor provides sanctuary for those who identify as witches…
I was chatting with Jerry Sussman and he failed to evince the requisite Silicon Valley level of enthusiasm regarding LLMs. To show him how wrong he was, I gave GPT-4 the following prompt:
I don’t personally hold opinions, but I can provide information on the topic.
Gerald J. Sussman is a renowned computer scientist known for his significant contributions to the field. He is most notably recognized for co-authoring the influential textbook “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” (SICP) with Hal Abelson, which has been used in introductory computer science courses worldwide.
In addition, Sussman has made key contributions in the areas of artificial intelligence, robotics, and programming language design. Together with Guy Steele, he co-designed the Scheme programming language, which has been fundamental in the study of programming languages and has influenced the design of many other languages.
Given his extensive contributions to the computer science discipline, a case can be made for Sussman being a potential candidate for the Turing Award. However, whether someone should receive a Turing Award is a subjective matter and typically decided upon by committees that evaluate an individual’s impact on the field of computer science. Many other factors and considerations come into play when determining awardees.
It’s worth noting that the Turing Award, which is often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” is given to individuals who have made “lasting and major technical importance to the computer field.” Many deserving individuals in the field of computer science have not yet received the award, and there’s always an ongoing debate about who should be the next recipient.
(Note the triple weasel words/phrase: “a case can be made”; “potential”; “candidate”. ChatGPT would be a great politician or university administrator! Also note the sloppy language: “Together with Guy Steele, he co-designed…” (why not just “designed” since the sentence already includes “together with…”?))
Me:
Give me some examples of these deserving individuals
GPT4 (not quoted, for clarity; text in brackets was added by me):
Many individuals have made substantial contributions to computer science but have not (as of my last training cut-off in January 2022) received the Turing Award. Some potential candidates, based on their influential work, could include:
Donald Knuth – Widely recognized for his multi-volume work “The Art of Computer Programming,” which is a comprehensive monograph on computer programming. [won in 1974]
Bjarne Stroustrup – The creator of the C++ programming language, which has had a significant influence on software development and system programming.
Guido van Rossum – The creator of the Python programming language, which is one of the most popular and influential languages in both academia and industry.
Tim Berners-Lee – While he has received a plethora of other accolades, the inventor of the World Wide Web and the first web browser hasn’t received the Turing Award (as of 2022). [won in 2016]
Bill Joy – Co-founder of Sun Microsystems and a key contributor to the development of UNIX. He also wrote the Vi editor and co-authored the programming language C Shell.
Grady Booch – Known for his work in software engineering and object-oriented design. He developed the Booch method of software design, which was one of the precursors to the Unified Modeling Language (UML).
Alan Kay – While he has received a Turing Award [in 2003], some argue that his contributions, especially in the area of object-oriented programming and the concept of the laptop and tablet, are so profound that they warrant recognition.
Rasmus Lerdorf – Known as the creator of the PHP scripting language, which has played a significant role in web development.
Linus Torvalds – The main force behind the development of the Linux kernel, which is the basis for Linux operating systems. He also created Git, a distributed version control system.
Philip E. Agre – Known for his foundational work in the fields of internet research and critical computing.
Wendy Hall – Recognized for her pioneering work in hypermedia and web science.
Brewster Kahle – The founder of the Internet Archive, one of the most extensive digital archives of the web.
It’s essential to understand that the Turing Award is just one way to recognize the profound contributions made by individuals in computer science. Many other awards and honors exist in the field, and the individuals listed above have received numerous accolades for their work. The process of deciding Turing Award recipients is complex, and many factors come into play when making such determinations.
The above list is strange for its inclusion of people who’ve already won and, in the case of Alan Kay, including a mention that he has already won.
(And why is the creator of C++ nominated for an award rather than a dungeon cell?)
I’ve now reached the age where I can spend 110 percent of my time maintaining my disintegrating body and material possessions (where the house is Exhibit A!). As part of this effort, I’ve had two dental crowns for summer 2023 as well as an old filling that needed to be replaced. I found a Tufts-trained dentist down here who is a refugee from the Maskachusetts lockdowns. She has the CEREC machine for milling same-day crowns:
What does this cost? If you’re a working class chump with less spending power than someone on welfare… more than $2,200 per crown. What if you’re a laptop class member with dental insurance? The “negotiated rate” scam in dentistry is not quite as absurd as in medicine, but the total revenue for the dentist then becomes $1,200 and the patient must pay $500. In other words, those with substantially greater financial resources pay less. What about those who have chosen to refrain from work? If they’re back in my dentist’s old neighborhood around Boston… crowns are free through MassHealth (Medicaid). What about in New York? As of 2023, the 5 million New Yorkers receiving taxpayer-funded health insurance get free crowns, implants, root canals, etc. (NYT)
Whom does that leave to go down the cheaper road of extraction? The working class chumps who fund Medicaid via their tax payments and who therefore can’t pay the $2,200 per crown retail price. These will be the Americans with missing teeth.
