pray that El Don’s health allows him to complete Volume 4 in as many fascicle stages as he considers proper. Then on to Volumes 5, 6, 7 (for which tentative titles exist) as the arts of computer programming just refuse to slow down. Echoes of the Tristram Shandy/Russell paradox: a diary where each day’s activities take two days to record.
Duncan A. Hall offers from New Zealand some welcomed refinements to my Gaussian lattice of complex truth-values T(P) = x + iy (ACM Queue March/April 2008). He suggests that we can use the two values of i = sqrt(minus- 1) to distinguish “truly meaningless” from “falsely meaningless.” I invite meaningful examples.
Andy Kowalczyk, whose name I once saw on an optician’s test-card, sends me from Bloomington, Indiana, an aphorism penned by Roger de Bussy-Rabutin while he was serving anxious time in the Bastille. It’s movingly relevant to the prize-winning contradictory pair, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” and “Out of sight, out of mind,” submitted by Joe Perret (ACM Queue, May/June 2008).
“Absence is to love as wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small and kindles the great.”
It brings to mind the tragic loss of Jim Gray who disappeared at sea on January 27, 2007, and the moving anniversary tributes in the August 2008 issue of Communications of the ACM. Ambrose Bierce (whose Devil’s Dictionary was my inspiration) is another hero of mine whose time and place of death are unknown—Gringo Bierce simply vanished without a trace having joined Villa’s army during the Mexican civil war in 1913-14. There was much speculation, following several sightings, that Bierce may have lost his memory and survived in some remote part of Mexico. Can we assign some tiny, tiny probability to the possibility that Jim Gray may still be alive? However disturbing that may be to his loved ones, wouldn’t the conjecture appeal to Jim’s scientific mind?
I offer my dear readers the usual prize beyond valuation for the best explanation of my column title, “Affine Romance.” Hint: geometrical clues in the Kern/Field hit song of 1936. Q
REFERENCES
1. One is reminded of Ettore Bugatti’s approach when selling his customized Royale model in the late 1920s. Buyers had to establish that they were reigning monarchs. The global market crashes combined with diverse regime changes came at a bad time for sales. The huge
prices fetched now by Bugatti Royales (I believe all seven have survived—I’ve personally seen five of them) indicate what a real bargain they were back then.
2. Mendacity Sequence (n.) “An ISO standard sorting sequence allowing the F’s in a truth table to be ordered by degree of falsehood.” Benchmark (v. trans.) “To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on competitive systems.” (Kelly-Bootle, S. 1981. The Devil’s DP Dictionary. New York: McGraw-Hill).
3. The cliché “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” is one of those glib dichotomies that has oft led to a job termination. Both it and its inversion defy a decent parse. “No Parseran,” as my uncle in the Spanish Civil War proclaimed before he was forced to surrender.
4. My own internal pace-setting pacemaker and external monitor are programmed in C++, which Bjarne Strous-trup assures me is a good thing, better than Java for what’s known as Borrowed Realtime with Nonrandom Garbage Collection. After a recent check, my esteemed cardiologist Dr. Evans (flattery was never more warranted or advisable) told me that my pacemaker battery was good for another four years. I said, “I’ll do the best I can.”
5. Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat: “I often wonder what the vintners buy / One half so precious as the goods they sell.” (tr. E. FitzGerald).
6. These are Knuth’s own in-jokes.
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STAN KELLY-BOOTLE ( http://www.feniks.com/skb/; http://www.sarcheck.com), born in Liverpool, England, read pure mathematics at Cambridge in the 1950s before tackling the impurities of computer science on the pioneering EDSAC I. His many books include The Devil’s DP Dictionary (McGraw-Hill, 1981), Understanding Unix (Sybex, 1994), and the recent e-book Computer Language—The Stan Kelly-Bootle Reader. Software Development Magazine has named him as the first recipient of the new annual Stan Kelly-Bootle Eclectech Award for his “lifetime achievements in technology and letters.” Neither Nobel nor Turing achieved such prized eponymous recognition. Under his nom-de-folk, Stan Kelly, he has enjoyed a parallel career as a singer and songwriter. He can be reached at curmudgeon@acmqueue.com. © 2008 ACM 1542-77300 /08/0900 $5.00
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