A bit of Gloucestershire in the South Pacific

Vide:

The entire population of a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean has been found to speak with a West Country accent – because the residents all descend from one man from Gloucestershire.

The ten-millionth Bernoulli number

Wolfram Research's Oleksandr Pavlyk recently computed the 10-millionth Bernoulli number using Mathematica:

BernoulliB[10^7]

(It took about 6 days to run).

He has a readable essay about it along with proof that the monster number he generated actually is a Bernoulli number.

Two!

Looky there! I have two entries in this week's Spanning the Globe - TSO's weekly Academy Awards for (mostly) Catlicker bloggers.

I'd like to thank my wife for her understanding and patience with my strenuous blogging schedule; my kids for their many interruptions that have saved me from long, linear trains of thought; Mrs Harmon, my high-school typing teacher; and our cat Casey for peeing all over my d*mned jacket once again.

Maybe I can parlay this into a hefty raise for my per-entry rate. Pardon me a moment while I rub my hands greedily.

A new interview with Donald Knuth

I've already had to look it up twice, so I'll put it here for future reference: Donald Knuth's interview with Andrew Binstock. Abstract:

Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming contest with a single compilation.

What Not To Be

Ann Althouse takes a look at the how-to reality show What Not to Wear and suggests an alternative:

I'd rather see a show where philosophers descend on a woman with a perfect exterior and rip into her for her intellectual and spiritual failings, put her on some kind of internally transformative regime, and turn her into a human being of substance. Can we get that?

Saturday evening playlist

A playlist for an evening of coding. Some of these imeem files are just short excerpts, so I guess this is here for expository purposes only...

The curse of a common name

Now that neo-Nazi moron Bill White is in the news again, it's time to post my periodic reminder that I'm not that Bill White. From my website:

Notice: I am not that Bill White. I post this reminder occasionally in case someone googles for me and thinks I'm Bill White the neo-Nazi from Maryland. I'm not. He's 11 years younger than I - according to the wikipedia entry above, he was born in 1977 and graduated from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1994. I was born in 1966 and graduated from Findlay High School in Findlay, Illinois, in 1984. I'm also not any of these Bill Whites (though I did receive a pleasant email a few years ago from a citizen of Houston, Texas, recommending a planting of trees along some street).

A look inside the Mathematica build system

Pat Rice on building the product every day.

Against the dehumanization of art

An old must-read from Mark Helprin in The New Criterion. Here's the central blessed point of his essay:

I have just spoken an immense heresy in this age of relativism: that some things can be better than others, that ways exist to assess value, that in life there is somehow an absolute standard. Though the entire cultural apparatus may deny the existence of an absolute standard, though the universities, the philosophers, the newspapers, and eventually, perhaps, every single human being on earth may deny that it exists ... it does, nonetheless, exist.

And here's a paragraph that stuck with me as I read the latest equipment-laden Field & Stream magazine:

Modernism is by necessity obsessed with form, much like a craftsman obsessed with his tools and materials. In my climbing days we used to call people like that “equipment weenies.” These days you can see it in fly-fishing, where not a few people go out once a year with $5,000-worth of equipment to catch (maybe) $5-worth of fish. What should have been the story of the man, the stream, and the fish becomes instead a romance between the man and his tools. In this century the same thing happened in art. Just as they who would deny the existence of the soul will perforce worship the body, those who do not immediately know the difference between art and design are those who would confuse and equate a sailfish levitated above windblown waves with a reconstruction of its stiff and motionless skeleton in a natural history museum.

This 1865 painting by Winslow Homer, "The Veteran in a New Field", figures in an anecdote in his essay:

An engineer's guide to cats

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Up and then down

Here's a marvelous essay on elevators from Nick Paumgarten in the April 21 2008 New Yorker.

Letter sentences

Our latest word game: sentences made up only of words that are letter names.

O G J I C Y U R N A B T P

"Oh gee, Jay, I see why you are in a bee teepee."

Paint It, Black

Via Nancy Nall, what was the top song on the radio (in the US) the day you were born? Mine was the Stones' Paint It, Black, aka the theme song of that 1980s Vietnam teevee series. Not sure what that means in the rock-n-roll zodiac. I've heard the song lately on the oldies stations and enjoyed it.

In our image?

It's not everyday that the best, most lethal and most humane army in the history of mankind gets to pass along its lessons and help teach another army the art of civilized warfare.

The doctor's autograph

Looks like my wife Lisa, a die-hard Olympics fan, will need a new knee soon. Ten years as a catcher in softball and a few years in collegiate vollyball are finally taking their toll. So we're getting things ready for a few months' recuperation this summer - we just got a twin bed from some friends and set it up in the room next to the downstairs bathroom, since she won't be walking far for a while.

Meanwhile, remember Debi Thomas? She won a bronze medal in figure skating in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary while a freshman at Stanford. Nowadays she's now an orthopedic surgeon doing hip and knee replacements at our main medical provider, Carle Clinic in Urbana IL. Here's her website: docdebithomas.com.

April 9, 1865

Here's an account of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on this day 143 years ago.

Let's take the kids to the big city

Scott Bilik linked to this Washington Post article on rich big-city folks having lots of kids; it seems that having a large family is some indicator of wealth and privilege since kids are so expensive. I guess we need to take our 5 on a trip to New York to display our vast wealth and status (heh).

Matthew at Creative Minority Report has a good take on the article.

So that's what Joe was up to

Sometimes it takes me a decade or so to realize what's going on. Reading this blog entry tonight, I finally realized 14 years later what Joe Kaiping and Joe Grohens were up to.

It was 1994; Wolfram Research's Joe Grohens had sent one of his TeX gurus, Joe Kaiping, to the TeX Users Group conference in Santa Barbara, California, while my employer sent me, Rich Rogers and Mike Hockaday. We met Kaiping and he joined our little gang of young geeks. It happened that his problem and my interests overlapped, and I wound up months later porting the Wolfram flavor of LaTeX to some Mac version of TeX. This was the early 1990s, so when I finished the project I FedEx'd the code to him on a pile of floppies. (!)

One day in 1996 he dropped me an email and suggested I apply for his position at Wolfram - he was heading off to a private consulting gig and they needed another guy who knew TeX. My interview with his boss, Joe Grohens, was rather perfunctory and involved no coding at all. And now I realize, after all these years, that they had already conducted the code-writing part of the interview by having me do the porting job months earlier.

The Taliban Kent Tekulve

Heh. Check out his fancy sidearm grenade throw! I used to try to pitch sidearm like Kent Tekulve (whom I watched close-up at a Cardinals-Pirates game way back when) but it hurt like heck. Obviously this prancing jihadi is made of sterner stuff.