Linux4All

And no, neither the “P” nor the “PL” means “parking” or “parking level”. The “P1” and “P2” do, however. And “P” and “PL” go to the same place.

If you die in an elevator, be sure to push the up button.
—Sam Levenson

HERE are the answers to the book quote meme I posted the other day. How many did you guess right? What are some of your favorite books?

( Answers below here... If you haven't tried guessing yet, look at the earlier post first... )

He’d been wrong, there was a light at the end of the tunnel, and it was a flamethrower.
—Sir Terry Pratchett
Mort

ON this Friday,I’m feeling a little scattered, with a few random thoughts flitting about in my gray matter without much rhyme or reason to them. That may be because of the intense rush I was going through in all my spare time for the last several days trying to get a research paper ready for publication, only to get stuck on a couple of fine points that just didn’t feel ready yet. So, rather than publish something I’d feel was half-done, I’m taking a step back to catch my breath, look at it fresh again after the weekend,¹ and look on Monday for a new journal or conference to submit it to instead.

C’est la vie.

I was listening to YouTube videos of a PhD physicist (Dr. Blitz) debating against people who hold views contrary to demonstrable reality. Most of these are proponents of the idea that the Earth is flat, but there are others he’s engaged on other topics such as evolution, and the age of the Earth.

It’s somewhat frustrating to listen to some of the people arguing with him and their lack of ability to pose anything resembling a coherent point of view or to provide any evidence in support of their position that makes any sense. (I’m not necessarily even assuming here whether or not their position is correct or not,² just that the contingent of people who show up on his debate channel seem to be so woefully misinformed and lack any sense of how to make a logical argument or even have a modicum of rational, critical thinking about them.³

In the comment section I noticed someone had made a comment that summarized what it feels like to listen to many of these, in a way I hadn’t thought of but now that I’ve seen it, it makes perfect sense. “It’s like listening to a conversation where only one of the people is high.”

It occurred to me that I posted some of the questions that came up in my quiz show but never gave the answers. In case you’re curious, here they are.

• (The Good AI for 100) To destroy The Good Place AI assistant, named Siri due to product placement, you hold her nose while inserting a paperclip into her left ear, reducing her to a marble which can be disposed of.

  The AI assistant in the show is named Janet, not Siri.

• (CS for 800) A toddler staring at cookies baking in an oven, constantly asking “Are they done yet?” is a real-world example of the Dining Philosophers Problem in Computer Science.

  This is an example of one process blocked waiting for another to complete. However, while I might be tempted to name this “The Starving Toddler Problem,” it’s not an example of The Dining Philosophers Problem. That one is an illustration of a problem in Computer Science where multiple processes are mutually deadlocked, since they are waiting for each other before proceeding, so the whole operation is hopelessly stuck. By contrast, the toddler is just blocked waiting for the cookies but nothing’s preventing the cookies from eventually being done, at which point the toddler gets access to the resource they’re waiting for.⁴

• (Potpourri for 100) Known for its ease of implementation and efficient run-time performance, Bubble Sort is taught to first-year CS students as a go-to sorting method due to its O(n) growth characteristic.

  Bubble Sort is notoriously awful in terms of performance. It is taught to first-year students because it’s insanely easy to understand how it works and to run through the algorithm in your head. But it has a growth characteristic of O(n²), not O(n).⁵

• (Conspiracies and Pseudoscience for 400) According to a 2020 survey conducted in Britain, one-third of those polled “could not rule out a link” between GPS satellites and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, with some believing they were both part of a deliberate plot against the populace.

  The people surveyed thought 5G cell towers and signals were to blame, not GPS.

• (Hardware for 400) The first commercially-available personal computer, the Altair 8800, consisted only of a front panel of lights & switches, a 6502 CPU board, and a small RAM board.

  The Altair 8800 was based on the Intel 8080A CPU, not the 6502.

• (Mascots for 300) The public face of the OpenBSD operating system has been a spiky pufferfish named Buttercup, since version 2.7 of that OS.

  The name of the pufferfish mascot is Puffy, not Buttercup.

• (CTF for 200) Capture the Flag games have a long history in literature and film as a training exercise, as seen in the Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, and Divergent stories. (14981, 45294220909404522163130995)⁵

  Harry Potter did not have a Capture the Flag game.

• (CS for 600) After writing the first modern programming language compiler, Lady Ada Lovelace went on to help create the COBOL language which still powers much of the world’s business architecture today.

  Lady Ada Lovelace made her contributions to Computer Science long before COBOL. That was invented by Grace Hopper.

• (Fun & Games for 400) The Chinese game of Mahjong is similar to the card game of Rummy but is played with small tiles representing winds, dragons, flowers, and seasons, plus four suits (cups, wands, pentacles, and swords).

  Mahjong’s tiles come in three suits: bamboo, characters, and dots (or coins). The four suits in the question are actually from Tarot cards.

• (– for 200) In Python, if x=42, then after executing y = --x, both x and y have the value 41 since x is decremented first then the resulting value assigned to y.

  The values of x and y will both be 42. Unlike C, the Python programming language does not have a “--” math operator, so “--x” is just two minus signs, making the value –(–(x)), which is just x.

That’s probably enough randomness from my brain for today.

… Nature almost surely operates by combining chance with necessity, randomness with determinism…
—Eric Chaisson
Epic of Evolution: Seven Ages of the Cosmos

I did the movie quote meme the other day, and I traditionally do these two together, so here goes…. Again, this will be a mini version of the meme compared to previous years because of my serious lack of free time while getting a research paper written. Here’s how it works:

• Think of a few books you love. I’ve always done 20 in the past, but I’m doing a smaller one this time.
• Post a memorable quote from each one in your blog.
• Let your friends have fun trying to guess the books.

1. “That ship hated me.”

   “Ship? What happened to it? Do you know?”

   “It hated me because I talked to it.”

   “You talked to it? What do you mean you talked to it?”

   “Simple. I got very bored and depressed, so I went and plugged myself into its external computer feed. I talked to the computer at great length and explained my view of the universe to it.”

   “And what happened?”

   “It committed suicide.”

2. “My brother has his sword, King Robert has his warhammer and I have my mind… and a mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge.”
3. “I’m your worst nightmare!” said Teatime cheerfully.

   The man shuddered.

   “You mean… the one with the giant cabbage and the sort of whirring knife thing?”

   “Sorry?” Teatime looked momentarily nonplussed.

   “Then you’re the one where I’m falling, only instead of the ground underneath it’s all—”

   “No. In fact I’m—”

   The guard sagged. “Awww, not the one where there’s all this kind of, you know, mud and then everything goes blue—”

   “No, I’m—”

   ‘Oh, shit, then you’re the one where there’s this door only there’s no floor beyond it and then there’s these claws—”

   “No,” said Teatime. “Not that one.” He withdrew a dagger from his sleeve. “I’m the one where this man comes out of nowhere and kills you, stone dead.”

4. Grinning is something you do when you are entertained in some way, such as reading a good book or watching someone you don’t care for spill orange soda all over himself.
5. Farewell sweet earth and northern sky,
   for ever blest, since here did lie
   and here with lissom limbs did run
   beneath the Moon, beneath the Sun,
   Lúthien Tinúviel
   more fair than Mortal tongue can tell.
   Though all to ruin fell the world
   and were dissolved and backward hurled;
   unmade into the old abyss,
   yet were its making good, for this—
   the dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea—
   that Lúthien for a time should be.
6. From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.
7. Saying that, he was suddenly himself again, despite his lunatic hair and eyes: a man whose personal dignity went so deep as to be nearly invisible…

   It was more than dignity. Integrity? Wholeness? Like a block of wood not carved.

   The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved: the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.

8. “Genius will only take you to ‘good.’ Practice will take you to ‘Master.’ ”
9. “Come you near or go you far, light from candle or flick’ring star? See what you will, or so you think, but is water sweet before you drink? Who can know of truth and lies? When can a man believe his eyes? Suspect what’s known to mortal senses, for our nature vaults all mystic fences, that stand between that which is and seems, and back we are to truth… or dreams.”
10. “He should not be here,” said the fish in the pot. “He should not be here when your mother is out.”
11. “It would seem that you have no useful skill or talent whatsoever,” he said. “Have you thought of going into teaching?”
12. “Well, I’m back.”

Books are a uniquely portable magic.
—Stephen King

TODAY is the 11th of November. Veterans Day in my country, and other things elsewhere in the world, such as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, as we commemorate the end of The Great War, nay, The War to End All Wars. (If only that were true. Hindsight can be painful sometimes.) It is good to pause and pay respect to those who made the ultimate sacrifice to bring an end to a war so devastating that we couldn’t—at least for a time—imagine humanity doing that to ourselves all over again.

Even though it seems to have baffled some of our dear leaders that we never celebrated Armistice Day like the rest of the world, they just aren’t apparently aware of our own history. We did. We just later (in the 1950s) expanded it to include all war veterans, and renamed it Veterans Day at that point.

But thinking of that got me wondering what else has happened or has been celebrated on this day. Thanks to Google and Wikipedia and various other infallible founts of knowledge and wisdom on the Internet, today I learned….

• It’s apparently an unofficial holiday for single people in China.
• The state of Washington was admitted to the Union in 1889 (Oregon chose to join the Union on Valentine’s Day, which is cooler).
• In 1215 the doctrine of transubstantiation was codified officially.
• Gemini 12 was launched in 1966, getting us one step closer to the moon.
• Speaking of NASA, on this day in 1982 the first “real” space shuttle mission takes off (sorry, Enterprise, it should have been you instead of Columbia).
• Demi Moore was born (1962), as was Leonardo DiCaprio (1974).
• It’s also the date of a number of Christian feasts.

Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of readiness to die.
—G.K. Chesterton

THIS will be the sixth time I’ve done this little quiz format. It’s been fun each time to see how many of these my friends remember, and sometimes see a few people walk away with another film on their “to watch” list.

Here’s the deal.

• Think of some of your favorite movies, or at least ones living rent-free in your head that you can’t get rid of so you might as well reference.
• Post a memorable quote from the film that your friends have a chance of being able to recognize out of context.
• Let your friends have fun trying to guess what movie they each came from.

I’ll post the answers to these in a few days. If you think you know them, say something in the comments below. Be coy if you want to let others try to figure them out too, but that’s not required.

1. “They’re probably foreigners with ways different from our own. They may do some more… folk dancing.”

   “This isn’t the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Brad!”

2. “Your parents are international spies. Good ones, but they’ve been mostly inactive for the last nine years.”

   “What are you talking about?”

   “I was assigned to protect your family, but something’s gone wrong. I have to take you to the safe house.”

   “My parents can’t be spies! They’re not cool enough!”

3. “But genies can’t kill! You said that!”

   “You’d be surprised what you can live through.”

4. “In the jungle you must wait, ’til the dice read five or eight.”
5. “The Crystallic Self-Perpetuating Breeder Construction Core!”

   “Those are big words! I’m frightened!”

   “Don’t be, it’s just evil marketing.”

   “Is there anyway to stop it?”

   “No, General. Marketing is the one force in the universe that is stronger than—”

   “No, no! I meant the big evil takeover thingie!”

   “Oh… There we might have a chance if we can breach the core and pull out the crystallic fusion rods.”

   “More big frightening words!”

6. “You will be king of Egypt, and I will be your footstool!”

   “The man stupid enough to use you as a footstool would not be wise enough to rule Egypt.”

7. “There’s children throwing snowballs
   Instead of throwing heads
   They’re busy building toys
   And absolutely no one’s dead!”
8. “You know, I’ll never forget my old dad. When these things would happen to him… the things he’d say to me.”

   “What did he say?”

   “ ‘What the hell are you doing in the bathroom day and night? Why don’t you get out of there and give someone else a chance?’ ”

9. “…a slight weapons malfunction but… uh… everything’s perfectly all right now. We’re fine. We’re all fine here now. Thank you…. How are you?”
10. “Science and technology were outlawed millions of years ago. And we must admit it’s been a peaceful world since then.”

Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.
—Martin Scorsese