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The Son Of Whacha Gonna Do, Whacha Gonna Do When They Come For You

What do I think about when I have time to kill and no useful information excreting device (a book, a computer or a person)? I think up strategies and tactics for certain situations that might arise.

I wrote about the strategy and tactics I would employ if I became crazy and homeless. But what would I do if the time police finally caught up with me and threw me into the 19th century for thoughtcrime? You know, it turns out that it’s very hard to come up with an idea that would make one rich with a minimum of effort. There is a host of sci-fi stories in which an alien from an advanced civilization on a person from the future fails to recreate a single hightech achievement.

Even though I know some basic theories behind vacuum tubes, transistors, microchips and other electric gadgets, It would take me a lot of time and effort to come up with a marketable wireless device. I could probably figure out how to make a single diode receiver, but I know next to nothing about how transmitters work. Making a speaker would also take me a very long time. I could make a crude sound recording device, but again, there probably would not be too much money in that. I could probably make a crude DC generator, but who would need it? In short, I would probably fail badly at recreating any of the technological marvels of the 20th century.

Finally, I think I figured out what I would do to become rich. The answer is not in the electronic technology field. It’s in the “biotech”. Penicillin. All I would have to do is experiment with molds. It would not be easy, but I could probably create enough for a demonstration. And then I would have a miracle lifesaving drug. That would set me up for life.

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The Deadprogrammer Drinking Game.

The Deadprogrammer Drinking Game.

Drink one shot when:
* There is a picture with a blurry yellow cab in the background
* There is a picture of a NYC landmark
* I obsess about titanium
* I post a poll and it’s filled out by 5 and a half people (out of a hundred + “friends”)
* I write about Nathan’s Famous, iXL or working as an elevator operator
* There is a Simpsons reference
* I make a list (drink now)
* The article is recursive (ditto)
* I post a “howto” article about something that is probably useful, but too weird to try
* I recommend a book
* I recommend a livejournal user or community
* I mention
* There is a spelling or grammar error
* I write about NYPD
* There is an absolete technology article

Drink two shots when:
* I am pissed off (or piss off) very smart people from
* I gripe about espresso quality in NYC
* There is a post with more than 5 comments

Drink three shots when:
* It’s an article written during lunchtime

Chug when:
* The lunchtime article is written around 5PM

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Some pictures I took today on my way home.


One thing I noticed upon reading the text that accompanied Lee Friedlander’s photographs in the awesome, awesome and ultra rare “Cray at Chippewa Falls” (some photos from which I scanned and posted earlier) is that Friedlander often made tiny visual jokes or puns. These details are very hard to notice. It’s also very hard to tell if the pun was intentional or not. Once explained, these little jokes make the image much more special and enjoyable.

The special thing in the previous photo is very hard to see. The traffic cop has a little sticker of an American flag on the cover of his ticket book. A 911 remnant.

I actually keep my notebook in a leather binder like that. My 911 reminder is a little flag button on my bag.

In the speech class that I took last semester I chatted a bit with an intern from New York Post. He told me that the tabloid format of newspapers was influenced by the fact that blue collar workers liked to keep a newspaper in the back pocket of their pants. He also gave me a blank New York Post reporter’s notebook (which is actually the same format as the aforementioned ticket book).

Kids playing in Brooklyn.

Hey, you never know. The New York State Lottery guy is out of a job. Strangely enough I can’t find any information about him online.

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Asperger Smasperger. The Important Thing Is, Michael Likes to Categorize.

Are all engineers autistic? Looks that way to me.
If by some chance you missed this Wired article, by all means read it. Interesting stuff.

Continuing in the vein of making a mockery of the scientific method, here’s a test for your amusement.
How autistic are you : http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html

I scored 31 which is pretty much borderline. My wife tells me that this is all silly, and I am just trying to find a fitting category for everything and everyone including myself. Hey, isn’t that a symptom? Besides, how can she dispute the two minute test from a magazine?

I didn’t get enough answers on the two minute short-term memory tests I posted previously to make any interesting conclusions yet.

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Lehman Brothers: Matrix Reloaded.

Turns out the Lehman Brothers led display is modular. One morning I’ve seen the maintenance people changing some burned out leds.

Some interesting stuff I learned from http://videosystems.com/ar/video_new_dimensions/ :
One Reality Check project involves a corporate installation in Times Square in New York City. It’s a huge, animated sign on the side of the Lehman Brothers building. The sign shows a mix of animation, information, messages, and mood based on changes in market news, the weather, time of day, or Lehman’s discretion.

The sign is a huge system of LEDs, 5340×736, that stretches vertically from the third floor to the fifth floor of the building. Horizontally, the sign wraps around the building from halfway down the 49th Street side across the entire length of building facing Times Square, then halfway down the 50th Street side. Uniquely, the building’s windows are not obscured by the sign. Rather, the sign is built around them.

By incorporating the sign into the building’s facade, the architects, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, followed the letter and the spirit of a new city ordinance pushed by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. That ordinance required any new construction in Times Square to have electronically lit signage with a size compensatory to the size of the building. While on many buildings those signs are little more than placards jutting off a facade — a giant Coke bottle or lit billboard — the Lehman Brothers building is itself an electronic sign.

Of course, the odd shape of three large horizontal bands connected by narrow vertical bands of LEDs between the windows of the building begs non-standard content. There are no 4:3 video images here to captivate the tourists.

The sign is kind of cool. I sometimes go to the Starbucks across the street to sit there and watch it.

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The Glory of Short-Term Memory

I am reading Bob Cringely’s monumental rant, “Accidental Empires“. One thing that he mentions in the very beginning makes a lot of sense to me.

Cringely talks about the importance of short-term memory to programmers. He briefly mentions George Miller’s research and goes on to quote the Hungarian:

“I have to really concentrate, and I might even get a headache just trying to imagine something clearly and distinctly with twenty or thirty components,” Simonyi said. “When I was young, I could easily imagine a castle with twenty rooms with each room having ten different objects in it. I can’t do that anymore.”

Basically, Cringely says that while normal people have a short term memory of Miller’s magic 7 items, really great programmers have short term memory measured in the hundreds.

I always knew that my painfully average short term memory is a horrible handicap. For instance, my inability to hold a large number of items in memory was a big drawback in my fast food career. I did great as working in the Nathan’s Famous clam bar where there were only a few types of items that I had to sell (namely half-dozens of clams, clam chowder and drinks). But when I had to work the seafood counter where orders included frog legs, clam strips, shrimps, fish fillets, crab patties, hot dog nuggets, onion rings, french (freedom) fries, clam chowder , drinks and a bunch of other stuff I don’t remember anymore combined in all kinds of combos and specials — well, that was hard.

When I worked as a doorman, keeping track of hundreds of guests, contractors and delivery people entering and building was also pretty tough for me. This kind of made me realize that I would not be able to become an efficient physician because a) I would not be able to keep track of all of my patients and b) although I could pull a 48 hour shift, I was barely fit to operate the mop after 24 hours. I felt kind of like Apu during his 96 hour shift.


Woods: Hey, you’re Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, aren’t you? I mean, you’re
the — you’re like _the_ guy, you’re a legend around here. Can I
ask you, is it true you once worked 96 hours straight?
Apu: Oh yes, it was horrible I tell you. By the end I thought I was a
hummingbird of some kind.
Woods: Oh yeah, you know, I studied your old security tapes.
[On tape, Apu imitates a hummingbird, flying back and forth
across the screen and emitting a high-pitched humming noise]
Apu: In a few minutes, I tried to drink nectar out of Sanjay’s head.

In any case, my fabulous associative long term memory, you know, the thing that enables me to spout Simpsons references and remember little details from books that I read serves me very well. But I feel that the lack of short term memory is what stands between me and the greatness and glory of being a great hacker. That and some other organizational and focusing issues.

I really wonder if great hackers invariably possess abnormal short term memory. You know, I have no doubt that the greatest hackers of all time, Von Neumann and Tesla had tremendous short term memory which was different from that exhibited by circus performers. Not only could they remember thousands of objects, but they could also make machines or programs out of them, run them and debug them, all in memory.

But what about a programmer of lj user=jwz’s, avva’s or brad’s caliber? I bet an above average hacker must have above average short-term memory.

Anyway, it’s getting rather late and I can’t find any serious online memory tests. Maybe I’ll put one together myself later. Here are two simple ones:
Picture Test
Verbal test from some anti-drug site
[Added this note in the morning] Try not to use any special means of remembering – for instance grouping of objects in any way, making up a story with the items or words, etc. We are looking for an effortless and natural above average short term memory.

If you find a good memory test, let me know.

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Pure Gold I tell Ya

is pure gold. Brown and sometimes chunky gold. Workers in ‘s nightclub tell their stories. No stranger to toilet cleaning and puke cleanup myself (although not nearly as hardcore) I can fully appreciate the amazing poetic prose of and in :

“The Latex Gauntlet is probably the single most important piece of armor in the gnomish armory. They, along with a generous annointing of holy water, known to alchemists as “bleach”, can render powerless even the most foul and vicious attcks from excrementals and vomitzombies.”

“Had I known that the upcoming experience (lurking just beyond my sight, like some Lovecraftian THING living at the back of my Psyche) was even then unfolding in the Women’s bathroom ”