Folk Songs

Stuff I wrote long ago:

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From, obviously, the days before 1/1/2000: COBOL Lizards Ever since I was a young boy I've heeded coding's call. From APL to Fortran, I must've used 'em all. But I've never seen anything like this In any function call. Those funky MIS guys Sure wrote some strange COBOL. It's utterly unpredictable, Immune to any test. JCL starts it running, And it just does the rest. ABENDS every Thursday, It's out to break my balls. Those creepy MIS guys Sure wrote some mean COBOL. Why do you think it does it? I don't know! What makes it so slow? Don't have no specifications, I must be in hell. It's all one giant module, Debugged by sense of smell. Aren't even any comments, No comments there at all! A plague on all your houses, And your silly-ass COBOL! They were COBOL lizards, There's got to be a twist! COBOL lizards, At least it isn't Lisp! Even SmallTalk would be better, Than this undocumented crap. Written fifteen years ago, And dumped into my lap. It's not Y2K compliant, It's about to hit a wall ... Those goddamn MIS guys, Sure wrote some bad COBOL.

From a time when I managed development of a multi-platform product: Buy A Sun When I find myself in tons of trouble, There's a thought that always comes. I'm sick of all this nonsense, Buy a Sun. And when the console's frozen, And the cursor doesn't blink, And smit is therefore useless, Then I think: Buy a Sun, buy a Sun, buy a Sun, yeah, Buy a Sun. AIX ain't Unix, buy a Sun. Now, when they say "multi-platform," Then I know we're in for fun. We run on thirty systems, Buy a Sun. DEC wouldn't know a driver If it bit 'em in the ass, And did someone mention Sequent? Thanks, I'll pass. Let it run, let it run, let it run, yeah, Let it run. Then I can ship this puppy, let it run. When things that worked this morning, Stop working overnight, And we know that nothing's different, And a checksum says we're right, It's then I type init 6, Having first su'd to root, And I hold my breath in horror, Let it boot. Let it boot, let it boot, let it boot, yeah, Let it boot. HP is purely evil, let it boot. Now, I've read of web performance 'Til my eyes begin to run. "Cellular" my fanny, Buy a Sun. How many of my users, Need to render in 3-D? When IRIX dies at midnight, They'll page me. Buy a Sun, buy a Sun, buy a Sun, yeah, Buy a Sun. Not sexy but they're stable, buy a Sun.

NOMINATIVE DETERMINISM

A little something from November, 2000:

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Ann Arbor: New Scientist magazine has for many years and with tongue in cheek promoted the idea of nominative determinism, meaning that your name somehow influences your profession if not your destiny. People around the world send them examples like "Doctor Payne" and "Judge Hanger" and so on. Now that you know that, let me tell about a story from this morning's Free Press.

Seems that the US Marshal's service has raided a house in Palmer Woods and seized vast amounts of high-end consumer goods, aiming to auction them and pay off, in part, the debts to society of the house's owner. They found 911 purses; 606 pairs of shoes; 165 pairs of boots; an entire room full of costume jewelry; $125,000 worth of Baccarat, Waterford and Lalique crystal; a baby grand player piano; couches, chairs, stereos, big-screen televisions, artwork, a jukebox -- and furs: leopard, coyote, mink, fox, sable, chinchilla, snake, lynx, rabbit, lamb, beaver, weasel, and raccoon.

So what? So this lady was an Imelda Marcos wannabe -- what's interesting about that? Well, suppose I told you that she's in jail in Chicago for stealing federal money that was supposed to pay for feeding low-income children at her chain of day-care centers. And her husband wasn't on hand to argue with the Marshals, since he's got his little problems, too -- he's awaiting trial for allegedly having killed his third wife.

Again, so what? Well, how about if I mention the woman's name? Marie Antoinette Jackson-Randolph.

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Traditional Medicines

As some of you know, I'm not a fan of traditional medicines, holistic approaches, homeopathy, power-tool-based therapies, and so on. They strike me more or less the same way that plain old faith does -- it would be so nice if it worked, so people tend to transpose hope with conviction. And when conviction sets in, rational thought tends to move out. Recently, China has given us a great example of this process. See New Scientist, #2629, 10 November, 2007, pp 59. (I'd provide a better link, but you have to be a subscriber to get to the full content.)

Zhang Gongyao, a philosophy of science academic at a Chinese university, published an article calling for the removal of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) from the public health system over the next five years. He called it a hoax and a superstition.

TCM, if you're not familiar with it, is one of the world's health-belief-sets that focuses on balance within the patient, specifically yin/yang and a form of energy called qi. It also uses a range of vegetable and animal substances, some of them from endangered species.

The response was loud and extensive -- even the Chinese government was displeased. But nevertheless, it plans to spend 130 million dollars on a study of TCM and its effectiveness -- not, admittedly, a real double-blind study with the potential to prove anything conclusively, but still 130 mill worth of poking around under the hood of this ancient set of practices. Problem is, those who already believe that TCM is effective have an out: since TCM deals with the dao ("the way and order of the universe," as the article described it), it can't be evaluated scientifically, says one supporter. Sigh.

As a vaguely related addendum, here's an article on Wired about the top 10 gadget scams. Amusing.

The University of Michigan

Looking over some old Wood-Charles posts, I note how many fictional U of M departments I seem to have invented. Given that tomorrow the school will be shutting down the town for the annual fiasco known as the Ohio State game, seems like a good time to compile a partial list of the various academic organizations I attributed to our ivy-covered sheltered workshop here.

• the University of Michigan's Coloquium on Things We Can Get Somebody to Pay Us to Study
  
• the University of Michigan's Office of Shameless Opportunism.
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S DEPARTMENT OF STAYING UP ALL NIGHT GIGGLING
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CENTER FOR MAKING THINGS UP AS THEY GO ALONG
  
• the University of Michigan's Centre for Having Too Much Time on Its Hands
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CENTRE FOR WORRYING ABOUT THINGS LIKE THIS
  
• THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S CONSORTIUM FOR CUDGELING OTHERS INTO SILENCE WITH NITPICKING AND AD HOMINEM ABUSE
  
• HE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN'S INSTITUTE FOR FINDING NEW SOCIAL PROBLEMS TO STUDY, EVEN IF WE HAVE TO MAKE A FEW UP
  
• The University of Michigan's Department of Hosting Expensive and Probably Useless Conferences
  

I don't really know why I spent the time to pull this together, but there was probably a reason of some kind.

Oddly disappointing

So I spent a whole day this week, running around a huge hospital campus, getting a range of tests that my insurance company wanted (they'll regret it when they see the bill, I'm sure). They tested my heart function, my lung function, and xrayed every bone in my body (almost literally). Today, we had a brief de-brief with my doctor, and the executive summary was, "looks good."

What? An entire day of being jabbed with IVs (my forearms look like I've been assaulted by a porcupine), taking long walks down tiled corridors (a thing I've hated since elementary school), and getting nothing else useful accomplished, and they didn't even find a little dysfunction? I'm not a candidate for a triple bypass? Good news, I guess, but somehow also oddly disconcerting.

Anyway, this presumably clears the way for the big transplant thing in December. After that, we just keep an eye on things, says the doc.

It's Back ...

Absinthe, that is.

Foreshadowing the BitTorrent Scandal

This week, we learned that Comcast may have been discriminating against peer to peer traffic via BitTorrent. The following old Wood-Charles article, from Lord knows how long ago (note coy references to defunct ISPs like Prodigy and defunct browsers like Mosaic), shows that it ain't a new issue.

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COMMERCIAL PROVIDERS SLUFF OFF LOAD

ANN ARBOR: INFOWORLD COLUMNIST ROBERT X. CRINGLEY REPORTS THAT TWO OF THE MAJOR COMMERCIAL INTERNET ACCESS PROVIDERS ARE EXPERIENCING DEMAND SO FAR AHEAD OF CAPACITY THAT THEY RESORT TO CREATIVE, SOFTWARE BASED SOLUTIONS TO HANDLING IT. THE PROVIDERS WHICH SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS (EXCEPT THAT ONE ISN'T BOSNIA-OFF-LINE AND THE OTHER ISN'T A CHILD PROGENY) DO THINGS LIKE, RESPECTIVELY, CLOSING OFF ACCESS DURING PEAK HOURS AND DOWNGRADING CONNECTIONS FROM 9600 TO 12OO.

NOW, A NEW APPROACH IS EMERGING FROM ANN ARBOR'S OWN MARMOT NET. MARMOT NET IS THE WORLD'S LARGEST, LEAST-EXPENSIVE PROVIDER, HAVING (ACCORDING TO ITS FIGURES) 12 TIMES MORE USERS ON LINE AT ANY TIME THAN COMPUSERVE AND MSEN PUT TOGETHER. THIS DESPITE A HARDWARE BASE CONSISTING OF A 2400 BAUD ZOOMODEM AND A FIVE-YEAR-OLD TOSHIBA LAPTOP. HOW DOES MARMOT COPE WITH LOAD? "LIKE THE OTHER PLAYERS, WE HAVE RESORTED TO SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS," SAID A MARMOT NET SPOKESFOOL. "WE QUIETLY DOWNLOAD A PROGRAM ONTO YOUR HARD DRIVE THE FIRST TIME YOU LOG ON. THEN, ANY TIME IT DETECTS UNACCEPTABLE DELAYS IN SYSTEM RESPONSE, IT TAKES OVER AND ACTUALLY BEGINS SIMULATING INTERNET ACCESS LOCALLY. IT'S COOL. WE CAN GENERATE ABUSIVE MAIL FROM GRUMPY ETHNIC TYPES, UNSOLICITED ADVERTISING FROM LAWYERS, INACCURATE TECHNICAL INFORMATION FROM NEWS GROUPS, AND EVEN SHOW WHAT APPEARS TO BE MOSAIC, ENDLESSLY SPINNING ITS LITTLE WORLD THINGY. AND OF COURSE, MAILING LIST TRAFFIC FROM THE ANN ARBOR COMPUTER SOCIETY IS ALWAYS GOOD FOR KILLING TIME AND CONVINCING USERS TO LOG OFF."

Loonies in the news

So what is up with the Zoe's Arc people? In case you missed it, this is the French NGO that took "donations" from people to "foster" Darfur orphans. But, somehow, when they actually went into the region to gather up the suffering children, what they came up with seems to have been Chadean non-orphans, mostly, whom they are aledged to have suckered into their cars (I'm not kidding -- this is what the Chadean authorities claim happened) with offers of sweets and schooling. They were busted trying to fly a large number of kids out of the country (Chad, not the Sudan), and so far, it's taken a visit by Nicolas Sarkozy himself to get even a few of the do-gooders sprung and back out of Dodge. Bizarre.

Life, as a character in Once Upon A Time in America says, is funnier shit.

Syllables Lost

One of our local FM stations, based at one of our local universities (we have several) employs a handful of professional broadcasters and another handful of fumble-mouthed halfwits. One of these has somehow managed to stay on the air for a couple of years, doing nothing, far as I know, but the mid-Saturday morning station breaks. He has many, many annoying mannerisms, but the greatest of them was his pronounciation of the word "currently," as in "currently at W***, it's 27 degrees." When he began his career, the best he could do was "curly." But now, after substantial practice (and I like to think, at least some coaching or coursework) he's gotten it up to "currnt-ly." Perhaps this year, we'll earmark our pledge to buy him a vowel.

Crying Sumo

I didn't dream it! I thought I might have, but it turns out there really is such a thing as "crying sumo" wrestling. Here's more.