the father of us all

backstory: Richard Feynman has worked out how to use an IBM tabulating machine to do some of the high-volume calculations for Los Alamos, and the army has brought in a house expert from IBM to supervise.

Well, Mr. Frankle started this program and began to suffer from a disease, the computer disease, that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes with the work. It was a serious problem that we were trying to do. The disease with computers is you play with them. They are so wonderful. You have these x switches that determine, if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that, and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine. And so after a while it turned out that the whole system broke down. He wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly. The real problem was that he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent x, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi and calculate the arc-tangents automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation. Absolutely useless. We had tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers you understand the disease. The delight to be able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing got the disease.

in other clever child news

The ten year old and my seven year old should do lunch, is all I'm saying.

The thirteen year old intimidates me.

The Thirteen-Year-Old has found Greg Mankiw's Principles of Economics.

"Gosh. If this is what you teach, it sure is complicated, Dad," he says.

"But that's because the economy is complicated," I say. "We have a very sophisticated division of labor and a very complex economy--that's what makes us civilized," I say.

You mean that back before civilization economics was much simpler?" asks the Ten-Year-Old.

"Yes," says the Thirteen-Year-Old. "Back then, Principles of Economics books were really simple. They said: '(1) Find a rock. (2) Throw the rock to kill some small furry creature. (3) Eat the small furry creature.' That was it."

"But then things became more complicated. People invented farming, and some people became peasant farmers who grew the crops."

"And other people became workers who made pots," says the Ten-Year-Old. "And other people became blacksmiths who made spears."

"And," says the Thirteen-Year-Old, "then the people who got the spears told the peasants and the workers to give them half their crop--or else!"

"But," says the Ten-Year-Old, "the peasants and the workers made an alliance with the small furry animals. And then one night while the spear-chuckers were all asleep they raised the banner of revolution!"

"Now wait a minute," I say. The economics I teach is not the Materialist Interpretation of History crossed with the Chronicles of Narnia.

we will discuss this later, ladies and gentlemen

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
jmhm goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as witch.
carpeicthus gives you 16 light green vanilla-flavoured gummy fruits.
chipuni tricks you! You get a button.
fantome14 tricks you! You lose 9 pieces of candy!
indraladybug gives you 3 pink blueberry-flavoured pieces of taffy.
misseli tricks you! You get a block of wood.
mrdankelly gives you 1 yellow vanilla-flavoured miniature candy bars.
myasma tricks you! You get a dead frog.
serenada gives you 10 teal root beer-flavoured pieces of chewing gum.
t_l gives you 13 mauve watermelon-flavoured miniature candy bars.
weremensch tricks you! You lose 30 pieces of candy!
jmhm ends up with 4 pieces of candy, a button, a block of wood, and a dead frog.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.

Nice friends list I got.

Root beer. Blech.

desperate desperate desperate desperate

US President George Bush says "desperate" killers will not sway America's resolve in Iraq, after at least 34 people died in a series of bombings in Baghdad.

The attacks, which wounded at least 224, targeted the headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross and four police stations across the city on Monday.

The casualty toll makes it the bloodiest day in the Iraqi capital since Saddam Hussein's regime fell to US-led forces in April.

Mr Bush said the violence only showed that those responsible were becoming more desperate because of the progress made towards a free and stable Iraq.

"There are terrorists in Iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress," Bush said after meeting with Paul Bremer - US civil administrator for Iraq - and General John Abizaid, head of US Central Command.

But opponents - among them Democratic presidential candidates - said the surge in violence only bolstered their contention that post-war Iraq was a mess.


"There are terrorists in Iraq who are willing to kill anybody in order to stop our progress"

They must not have heard about the statue.

edit: Billmon points out that this is not Our Fearless Leader's first whiff of the desperateness of it all.

shorter Ann Hulbert

It's so not fair that Cathy Young got the Cathy Young gig. I can be mindlessly contrarian. No I can't. Yes I can. I can only when you think I can't.

Also, keeping kids from being brutalized in school is vaguely distasteful for some reason which is clear to me although I don't feel compelled to explain it at this time. I am highly nostalgic for the days when government employees in loco parentis for our nation's children pretended not to notice felony assaults against them because the mothers didn't want their children protected. It was neater, and it made the people who run the Weekly Standard, who go figure have strong feelings about the abject silliness of disciplining bullies, happy. Please, please, hire me. No kidding. I have all sorts of theories. I wrote a book.

Diebold countdown

I've been avoiding this, because it makes me sick to my stomach, but I think I should pay some notice to the Diebold controversy, in which machines which were designed to be unauditable and which are fed with unknown instructions by employees of a Republican party activist just before and sometimes during an election are bringing in election results which don't track the exit polls (so the news organizations...? cancelled exit polling, watchdogs that they are).

I'm sure there'll be nothing very new here - pretty much everyone to the left of Genghis Khan (heh. indeed.) starting with Seeing the Forest, has written about this - so I'll probably just pull a lot of that stuff together in one place.

That said, let me know in comments if there's anything in particular about this you want to know and I'll try to hunt it down.