Found this while spring-cleaning:
Must have got this on my first day at Google, 12 years ago!
Resolved not to hold on to things out of pure nostalgia (or there would be more of them than ones I use), so it’s off to the “Goodwill pile” now for this T-shirt.
An account of “Linus-as-Martin Luther” from an article in Salon, 25 years ago:
Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like Luther, his journey began while studying for ordination into the modern priesthood of computer scientists at the University of Helsinki — far from the seats of power in Redmond and Silicon Valley.
Also like Luther, he had a divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put ordinary folks in a direct relationship to a higher power — in this case, their computers.
Dissolving the programmer-user distinction, he encouraged ordinary people to participate in the development of their computing environment. And just as Luther sought to make the entire sacramental shebang — the wine, the bread and the translated Word — available to the hoi polloi, Linus seeks to revoke the developer’s proprietary access to the OS, insisting that the full operating system source code be delivered — without cost — to every ordinary Joe at the desktop.
While the rise of Linux no doubt played a central role in the last two decades, the “programmer-user distinction” hasn’t gone away as the author’s (or an early SVLUG zealot’s) giddy excitement would suggest. In fact “free software” was largely co-opted by the cloud giants of today — they wouldn’t exist without it.
Something fascinating from an “amateur analysis” of the moon’s orbit — the sort of thing I’m sure a lot of people wish they did but never do.
In other words, the Sun exerts more than twice as much gravitational force on the Moon as the Earth does. Asimov argued that this means the Moon is really orbiting the Sun, with some perturbation by the Earth, and that’s why the Moon’s path looks like a slightly wobbly circle around the Sun.
We might look upon the Moon, then, as neither a true satellite of the Earth, nor captured one, but as a planet, in its own right, moving about the Sun, in careful step with the Earth. To be sure, from within the Earth-Moon system, the simplest way of picturing the situation is to have the Moon revolve about the Earth; but if you were to draw a picture of the orbits of the Earth and Moon about the Sun, exactly to scale, you would see that the Moon’s orbit is everywhere concave toward the Sun. It is always “falling” toward the Sun.
P.S. the link to the Asimov book is here.
A very memorable song from “You’ve got mail” (about 25 years ago):
I understand why people want all five — now. I want all five! But they involve trade-offs, which too few of us want to acknowledge or debate. In an energy war like the one we’re in now, you need to be clear about your goals and priorities. As a country, and as a Western alliance, we have no ladder of priorities on energy, just competing aspirations and magical thinking that we can have it all.
For all these reasons, I think it no longer makes sense to cling on to the GPL and copyleft. Let them go. Instead, I would encourage you to adopt a permissive license for your projects (e.g. MIT, BSD, Apache 2.0), and then focus your energies on the things that will really make a difference to software freedom: counteracting the monopolising effects of cloud software, developing sustainable business models that allow open source software to thrive, and pushing for regulation that prioritises the interests of software users over the interests of vendors.
Recently started reading “The Mysterious Benedict Society” with my daughter (after the show on Disney), and … it has some interesting parts.
(This was written just before “the Great Recession”, fifteen years ago)
There have always been “mega-building projects”. In the past, these were large hydro-electric projects, and more recently skyscrapers competing to be the tallest building.
Today one such mega-project is “the line”, which aims to cut across the desert in a narrow strip blanketed by sheer glass walls.
I find this ridiculous, but hey I’m not the one spending half a trillion on it, so I’m happy to watch them try.
I want humanity to build something gigantic, but my desires had tended towards something functional, like a large space station, or a space elevator, or some such.
Then I discovered Étienne-Louis Boullée.
None of his buildings were ever realized1, but his are the sort of ideas I can get behind.
My favorite2 is the “Cenotaph for Newton” (image above), but all his buildings exude some sort of quality I cannot name.
This is something I wish would be made in the world today. It can be.
These are all within our ability to make, lacking only the will to make them. I don’t particularly care who makes them, as long as they exist and are accessible.
Abacus Noir 