I used to think that a clean house was a sign of a wasted life. After all, why would anyone spend time cleaning when they could be reading, writing, teaching, running, programming, doing judo or drinking margaritas at the pier watching the sun go down? Well, I still don’t alphabetize my spices or clean the…
Remember that old saying that 1,000,000 monkeys on a typewriter would eventually produce Shakespeare? After the equivalent of more than a 1,000,000 monkey-years of text published on the web, so far, no Shakespeare. (For a superb, in-depth discussion of this point, read Jason Lanier’s book, “You are not a gadget”) In very, very, brief, Lanier …
My favorite comic is the one where Dilbert is pointing to a number like 7,345,897 on a slide and saying that he did not have any real numbers so he just made some up because statistics show that numbers you make up are just as good as real ones. A member of the audience asks…
It’s the holidays and people are drifting in and out of the house. Apparently there is lots of sleeping over going on, although no one bothered to ask me. If you lived here when you were a kid and still have a key to the front door, you don’t need to ask. I can see…
We interrupt the prior rambling discussion of high performance computing for a new rambling discussion. A lot of things bother me – hate crimes, domestic violence, terrorism, drug-related crimes in Mexico, low college graduation rates of minority youth – well, it’s a very long list. When I was younger, so much younger than today ……..
Years ago, I read a science fiction story about a future where all plays were performed by robots that had been programmed with the combined characteristics of the world’s best actors. An aspiring actor sadly asked the technician working on the computers to run these robots: “What would you do if they invented a little…
Back when I was in college, there was a group advocating burning rock albums. A major investigative journalist wrote a story on their motivation (I think he either wrote for Rolling Stone or Playboy, the latter of which, yes, I really did read for the articles. Despite having competed on my college track team and…
I’ve been in business for over twenty years. All of that time, I have run a small business, by choice. During those twenty years, I have had a sick husband, been widowed, had four children – so I had some reasons that becoming the next Oracle was not my priority. However, I have made a…
Two or three lifetimes ago, I was an Associate Professor at a small, liberal arts college, teaching, among other things, lifespan developmental psychology because, well, somebody needed to teach it and I had published several articles on assessment of families and other semi-related issues. One debate in the field, I learned, was how much of…
I’ve been asked several times what made me change my mind about SAS Enterprise Guide. SAS EG and my husband have a lot in common. For one thing, neither made a great first impression. When I first met Dennis and saw that he was the same size as me (which my third daughter says is…