Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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Tuesday, December 9 2008
The reason I like writing computer code so much is that it maximizes all the features I like most in the results of a creative endeavor: duplicability, reusability, and extensibility. Computers have made just about every form of media with two or fewer space dimensions duplicable, though duplicability in the context of reusability is rare for most computer media (unless you're a fan of clip art or making music from samples). And there is nothing that I know of outside of computer code (except DNA) that is duplicable, reusable, and extensible. An indication of the way code allows you to stand on the shoulders of all your previous days of coding is this: I have functions I've written in Javascript to manipulate integers that I can reuse with trivial modification in the Arduino programming environment (which is based on C++).
Today's big programming achievement was a completely generic PHP function for performing a site search for a site built on a MySQL database. You pass in the search term, the search type (exacting, loose, etc.), and an associative array of tables keyed to the base URLs for displaying the rows of those tables, and it does everything else. It's a terrible expensive function in terms of server effort, but it makes up for it in ease of implementation, a huge factor when putting together a site few will probably ever see. And if it ever becomes a bottleneck, I'll find ways to tweak it until it's nearly as modest in its server demands as the non-generic alternatives.
I've found that I can listen to spoken word (talk shows, podcasts, and audiobooks) when I'm programming; evidently computer programming uses a different part of my brain than the part that processes language. Since yesterday, I'd been doing a lot of programming, and by this evening I'd listened my way all the way through Malcom Gladwell's latest book, Outliers. As with all writing Gladwellian, I found it wonderfully interesting. Gladwell's argument in Outliers isn't all that different from Jared Diamond's argument in Guns, Germs, and Steel: success has less to do with innate aptitude than it does with circumstantial luck. In Diamond's book, the success is that of civilizations. Europeans didn't take over the world because they were the smartest (as many people used to assume) but because they were the positioned in the best location geographically. Gladwell's focus is on the individual, but he's saying the same thing: sure, Bill Gates is smart, but there are a lot of people as smart as he is, and some of those people probably have better business skills. Bill Gates is where he is today because he lucked into a situation where he got unlimited mainframe access while still in high school. Sure, had he not been interested in computers this wouldn't have done him any good. But there were plenty of people in remote villages throughout that country who might have thrived as well or better had they been given an equal chance.

The weather had become warmer since yesterday, though now clouds were moving in and there were predictions for rain. Still, the longer-range prediction was for a day or two of above-freezing weather, which provided me a narrow window for doing some last-minute masonry before the winter descends in earnest. So I mixed up some concrete and used it to both attach and fill a partial concrete block on the greenhouse's southeast corner, the corner nearest the door. I wanted to build up the masonry here some more to better anchor the bottom of one of the two vertical posts defining the doorway.

I'd been concerned about the amount of work I'd have to put in this winter to keep the household supplied with firewood given how little firewood-related work I did in the warmer weather (having been distracted by the greenhouse project). But at some point today I went wandering on the little knoll behind the woodshed and all my fears evaporated. For there, along a contour just below the top of the knoll, less than a hundred feet from the woodshed, an enormous Red Oak had fallen over. Because the strongest winds in this area are from the west, most trees in our fall eastward. In the case of this tree, falling eastward would have also made sense because eastward is downhill and the hill is steep. But this tree had fallen southward and landed on the contour. Though a "wind fall" in that it was an unexpected bounty, the tree might have fallen for other reasons. A couple weeks ago, while I'd been working at the greenhouse site, I'd heard a slow creaking crash from that direction, and there had been no wind blowing at the time. (I'd run over too see what had fallen and had attributed the noise to a much smaller down tree.) There's such a motherload of wood to be gathered that I'll probably build a special mountain goat trail to the tree to make the task easier.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?081209

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