Wave Fronts

Howerrow

In 1991 my wife and I passed Dillon, Colorado on I70 on the last leg of a car-camping vacation. A few months later we picked a male kitten from a litter on the basis of it climbing up and into a filled watering can and having a quick dip. Dillon is now 15 and seems to have responded to the challenge of the young (and I just typed "jung" and had to fix it) upstart male cats nearing their third birthday: Magic and Moon Pie.

I accidently taught Dillon to say a passable approximation of "hello." My wife and daughter have both started to notice it (and reinforce Dillon) and if the rate gets up much higher I should consider teaching Dillon a discriminable stimulus to use as a prompt. Maybe an innocuous sound, like a certain kind of cough. But that Dillon can say "Howerrow" is a fun start.

My wife was skeptical until Dillon came to my side of the bed as we were reading one night and meyowed several times with no reaction from us. Then he said "howerrow" and I said "Hello Dillon! Come up and let me pet you" while patting the bed invitingly. He jumped up instantly and got a lot of cuddles. At about this time my wife and I both realized what had happened and how Dillon is training me to reward him for saying hello. My reward is of course hearing human language coming out of a cat's mouth. But this was completely accidently until a couple weeks ago when we became conscious of it and the rate seemed to go up. We'll see where this goes. NO, it will not go to Letterman, as Dillon isn't stupid!

Posted at 11:50PM Jul 14, 2006 by microwaves in Learning  |  Comments[0]

Macy's fireworks is the beauty of warfare without the suffering and death.

Posted at 11:36PM Jul 14, 2006 by microwaves in One Liners  |  Comments[0]

Immortal Source Code

The ISA of a VM (i.e. it's bytecode set and the semantic definition of all the bytecodes) can change and hypothetically all existing higher level ("source") code can be moved forward to the new ISA/VM combination with a well understood compiler bootstrapping process. So not only does a VM insulate source code collections from necessary hardware and low level ISA evolution, it supports evolution of the higher level ISA of the VM itself. An example of this that has been going on for years is concurrent evolution of the Java virtual machine and maintenance of backward compatibilty, providing "immortal source code." And for where the GPL is involved one gets "immortal open source code." I wonder if Forest (Earl) Gilmore, Don Parce, and Robert (Bob) Nichols shared a vision of this possible future when they launched Business Application Systems in 1978 to create BASPort? (BASPort was a portable operating system: Think Java on top of an extremely simple OS kernel and *everything* but the kernel itself and the virtual machine being in the portable language.)

Posted at 11:28PM Jul 14, 2006 by microwaves in Operating Environments  |  Comments[1]

Vegetarianism is a mindset, not a menu.

Posted at 11:17PM Jul 14, 2006 by microwaves in One Liners  |  Comments[0]

England Swings and Misses

Being married to a Lancashire lass has been a very pleasant and rewarding adventure for me for the past 19 years, but sometimes there is tension. As I type this, England is playing 10 men and it's 8m23s into extra time with the score nil nil. I know England can win this game, but I'm not sure who's nervous energy is going to be more fully spent, the team's or my wife's....

So let me get this straight. All that pure energy, all that sacrifice, all that perseverance through dry heaves and debilitating muscle cramps was neutralized because one immature toughie on the team couldn't resist stepping on an opponent's nuts? So this is a little chronicle of vulgar art and my wife and I are turning attention back to our daughter's recreational "soccer" after summer vacation.

Posted at 01:05PM Jul 01, 2006 by microwaves in Art  |  Comments[0]