Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

The November 19, 2007 New Yorker magazine carries an article by Tom Reiss entitled “Laugh Riots” (abstract). It is about a guy whose father is black and who leads a public life based on a black identity. Said black father is from Africa and split up with his mother when the public figure was an infant. The guy was raised by his white mother. The guy gives public talks to thousands of people and attracts an audience where people of nearly all creeds and colors get together and feel inspired. He has been a recent candidate for presidential office.

Who is this French Barack Obama? He goes by the single name of Dieudonné. What is his message that unifies the bourgeoisie and Muslims from the exurban slums surrounding French cities? That all of their problems can be blamed on (1) the 500,000 remaining French Jews who control French media, finance, and politics, and (2) Jews in Israel and the U.S. who control the rest of the world’s media, finance, and politics.

More: Wikipedia as usual.

[Speaking of the Jews in France, I recently finished Suite Francaise, an interesting book by a Russian-French Jew. The novel, which has no Jewish characters, starts with the defeat of the French in June 1940, which terrifies folks into fleeing Paris, and then the first year of the German occupation and Vichy government, to which her characters gradually adapt. The book is worth reading despite its being part of an unfinished multi-novel set. The author, Irene Némirovsky, was killed by the Germans in 1942.]

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I went to the National Gallery (U.S.) yesterday and revisited the Hopper show that had started at the Museum of Fine Arts. Looks even better when you don’t have to pay $20 to see it! The more interesting show is Turner, with more of his paintings assembled in the U.S. than ever before. It is worth seeing the 30-minute film down in the basement before you visit the show.

The movie made it clear just how much more patience an artist needed to have in the old days. Turner dreamed of visiting Italy, for example, but the Napoleonic Wars prevented him from reaching that country until he was age 44. Turner often said that his only secret was “damned hard work”.

What modern artist is most comparable to Turner? You might think it should be Thomas Kinkade. Both work in landscape and have tried to elevate it to a higher status than formerly accorded. Kinkade sometimes visits galleries and adds “sparkle” to his paintings while buyers wait. Turner, I learned from the film, would go to the “varnishing period” just before a show at the Royal Academy. While other artists were merely applying some clear varnish, Turner would add the final touches of white and yellow to bring out the light in his paintings. So Kinkade is America’s Turner.

Who is Britain’s Turner? Damien Hirst! It is true that Turner never tried to exhibit a dead animal. On the other hand, both were the leading and highest priced British artists of their respective days. Speaking of prices, a recent New Yorker magazine talked about some simple spot paintings that Hirst (or his assistants) had done recently. Each sold for $1.5 million and nearly 1000 have been made. So Hirst’s sales from just this one series have totaled nearly $1.5 billion. Turner died, at the age of 76, after six decades of painstaking work and laborious travel, in 1851. According to the film, his estate was worth $8 million in current money.

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New Yorker magazine arrived today, but I demonstrated my appreciation for fine literature by opening the Robinson Helicopter Company’s newsletter first. For folks with Robinsons on order, the exciting news is that HID landing lights are available as an $850 option (only took them about four years to catch up to Cirrus!). The newsletter relates the interesting statistic that the people of traffic- and crime-plagued Sao Paolo, Brazil keep more than 1000 helicopters busy shuttling among approximately 250 helipads and heliports.

The most bizarre note concerns a couple of guys who decided to fly a Robinson R44 from California to Scotland. They made it over the North Atlantic, completing the 7,000 mile trip in 16 days. Most shocking to me is that they chose to do the trip in a helicopter without pop-out floats (a helicopter ditching is followed within seconds by the helicopter sinking like a stone; an airplane by contrast will float for a few minutes).

Details: http://www.maverickmccann.com

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New on my site, but not written by me: Cessna Mustang Review

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A father wrote me asking for advice on where to send his son for an undergraduate Computer Science degree. I mentioned Olin College or a smaller liberal arts school with a good CS program so that the kid would have some friends who weren’t CS majors. I cc’d Shimon Rura, a graduate of Williams College, for some perspective on the liberal arts school choice. Shimon was a powerful advocate for Williams (aside from the high cost) and also said some interesting stuff about Olin:

“What has really blown my mind are the people I’ve met from Olin. I’ve met them at geek events I’ve organized, such as BarCamp Boston (an ad-hoc tech conference) and DevHouse Boston (a weekend of free-form hacking). They’ve all had great ideas for fun/useful stuff to build, and have been able to work in teams to build the stuff they envisioned. Though they were always younger (around 19), they were clearly able to work among and talk with people much older. And they were not novices; they answered a lot of technical questions. Plus they showed up early and helped make sure all the equipment worked. If I had to hire a software engineer right out of college, I would look at Olin graduates. The best graduates, however, would probably want to start their own company rather than working for someone else. Since the most difficult task in starting a company is finding good co-founders, attending Olin would provide a young programmer with a big head start.”

Perhaps we should not abandon all hope of a useful undergraduate CS education…

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One of the hackers/company owners at the conference I attended in California said something that interested me: “When I get a resume, the first thing I do is type the person’s name into Google. If nothing comes up, I trash the resume without reading it.”

This employer assumes that any competent programmer has left some trace of him or herself in version control trees of open-source software, question and answer forums, and other repositories accessible to Web search crawlers.

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Greetings from sunny Santa Cruz, where traffic moves at an average speed of about 5 mph on the freeways (took 2.5 hours mid-day to drive down here from Berkeley, 75 miles away). One fellow here said that car accidents account for 4 percent of U.S. GDP and that the cost of an accident was the single largest component of the per-passenger-mile cost of driving.

Thoughts? Sources?

http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov/portal/nhtsa_static_file_downloader.jsp?file=/staticfiles/DOT/NHTSA/NCSA/Content/PDF/810837.pdf tells us that approximately 43,000 Americans were killed by car crashes, but doesn’t calculate the cost.

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The Stata Center at MIT, an office building for computer science researchers, has been in the news recently due to a spat between MIT and the architect. What’s it like to work in the building? Here’s an excerpt from a mailing list discussion… (reproduced with permission from the author, who continues to work in the building and wishes to remain anonymous)

The Stata Center sux big hairy green rocks from the coast of Maine. Far too little storage space (while there are vast volumes of what is presumably architecturally interesting open space — that are unreachable by humans), every group walled off into pod spaces, most support staff are stuck out in open space rather than the offices they had in Technology Square [Ed: the former location of the lab; a vanilla 1960s box of an office tower; referred to as “tech square” or “NE43”], most grad students have to sit around in open space areas (rather than having offices — shared offices, but at least with closable doors and some amount of personal storage), many grad students are offered lockers — as in, the sort they have in high schools — to store their stuff in. Graduate students tend to take over various conference rooms to hack in (on their laptops).

The building is so convoluted that people not familiar with it need trained native guides to find their ways around — hardly inviting to visitors.

The research pod areas are bad in two ways: lack of natural communication between groups even on the same floor (amplifies the tech^2 problems of vertical communication), and lack of a natural way to expand and contract office space used by a group as the research funding ebbs & flows.

I was always told that What We Wanted was something with -somewhat- more
public space than tech^2, and openable windows. What we got, instead, was
an Architect’s Signature Building. It sucks.

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Folks: Friends of mine are blessed with 13-year-old triplets. Two of the 13-year-olds want to learn some computer programming. They are non-nerds. Their mom asked me what would be the best computer language for them to start with. [As an aside, I should note that being asked questions like this is probably a sign that one needs to get out more…]

To start the discussion rolling, my first thought was Visual Basic. The learners have Windows machines and VB will enable them to control what is happening on their desktops.

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A friend recently purchased a vacation house and is furnishing it. He sent me an instant message: “I made up a nice AR15 and put it in the new house in a wall safe. A house is not a home until the rifle is there.”

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