Life and Opinions

I just came across this quotation attributed to Pablo Picasso:

Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers.

This is so extraordinarily silly that I can only assume that Pablo never actually used a computer.  Otherwise he would have discovered that the questions they pose far outnumber any answers they give.

The story is of how Edsger Dijkstra and Jaap Zonneveld agreed to stop shaving until they had completed the implementation of X-1 Algol compiler is well documented.  However, their underlying reason for doing so is not quite as well known.  Here Dijkstra himself explains it in a letter addressed to Maarten van Emden:

We were to implement with five of us: Aad van Wijngaarden, Jaap Zonneveld, Joke Feringa, Freek Barning, and myself.  Feringa and Barning left quite soon.  Van Wijngaarden did not contribute — on the contrary! — but pretended otherwise to the outside world. I had been warned by Bram Loopstra and Carel Scholten [hardware designers formerly at the Mathematical Centre] that the little chief was not adverse to showing off other peoples’ work as his own.  I was not in the mood to let that happen to me.  At that time Jaap, van W. and I were clean-shaven; Jaap had a moustache.  To make clear that the two of us were doing the work, Jaap and I decided not to shave until the implementation worked, being convinced that van W. would not follow us in this.  In this way we made it clear who was responsible for the Algol compiler.  Thus it happened; that was around Pentecost [a European holiday six weeks after Easter].  In August the system worked.  Jaap got rid of his moustache and beard soon after; I retained them.

So the beards were their way of making sure that their boss didn't cheat them out of the credit for writing the the compiler!

For those who are interested, a description and listing of the Dijkstra-Zonnefeld compiler can be found here:  F.E.J. Kruseman Aretz, The Dijkstra–Zonneveld ALGOL 60 compiler for the Electrologica X1, Note SEN-N0301 June 30, 2003

This evening I wanted to download the Blender Python API documentation onto my  laptop so I could refer to it when I am not connected to the web. I knew that I could use the Linux command line program Wget to do this but it took me quite a bit of experimenting to get the right options.  Initially I was just using the -r and -k options but Wget would go off and download pages from other web-sites.  Eventually I discovered the -L option which restricts download to pages that are linked relative to the initial page.  This did the job:

wget -rkL http://www.blender.org/documentation/245PythonDoc/frames.html

This left a directory structure named www.blender.org in my home directory and this structure contained correctly interlinked copies of the pages I needed. For more details on the Wget options see the Wget man page.

This afternoon I discovered this gorged tick on my stomach.  It was about 3mm long. Ticks are arachnids, not insects, but I have no idea what sort of tick it is.  The web doesn't seem to offer much help in classifying them.

I am a bit uncertain as to where and when I could have picked it up.  I haven't been rolling in any grass, or been near any cats or dogs for weeks.  I did go up Reading University grounds yesterday but the only thing I did that could have possibly allowed a parasite to get onto me was brush past some tree branches.  Maybe some tick eggs have been lying dormant a long while in my clothing or my bed and are just starting to hatch out.  I did put the heating on last night, for the first time in ages.  I think I will wash all my bed sheets, just to be on the safe side. I have also looked up the symptoms of Lyme disease, the most serious disease transmitted by ticks, just in case.

From a comment by Martin Rundkvist at Aardvarchaeology:

Just look at Late Bronze Age graves. Full of razors and tweezers, of all the bizarre things they could have chosen. And those things are hallmarks of their culture. People are strange.