Stray Hawkeye

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is the funniest thing I’ve read in months.  I actually fell out of my chair laughing.  That said, I’m pretty sure you have to be a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages to really get much of any of the humor of it.  But if you are a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages, it doesn’t get much better than this.  Snip:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Via Boing Boing.

A while ago I went to a performance by the Minnesota Orchestra where they showed an old Charlie Chaplin movie, and played the score to the movie as it went. (Side note- the Minnesota Orchestra is doing it again with another Chaplin movie in early January.  I’d recommend it.  It’s fun.)

It was really cool not only because it was a live performance coupled with a great movie (City Lights is awesome, highly recommended), but because it’s also the way silent movies were originally shown – with a live musician either performing the score along with it (often on just a piano), or completely improving a score for the movie as it played.

I also remember that at some point even longer ago, I saw something on TV about old movies, and I believe one of them was a Charlie Chaplin one as well, where they were saying that it’s a bit hard to restore a definitive version of the movie, because it was originally produced with 4 different scores, any one of which could be played with the film, and each one of which had a very different tone and style, each giving the whole movie a very different feel.

So, here’s my idea for the more cinematic crowd out there. I’d like to see a website called Four Score (intentional pun on Lincoln’s speech) where a film maker produces a modern silent movie, and then releases it to the website. Any user (or possibly a select group of preselected composers, up to you) can then submit a score / sound track for the movie in the form of an mp3 to be played along with the movie. The best four are voted on, and the 4 different versions of the movie are then released on the site. I would tend to imagine this would work best with shorts, maybe in the 5-10 minute range, just so people would be willing to watch the different versions, and so the idea of coming up with a score for them would be at least somewhat within reach of the average user.

There is only one known pig in all of Afghanistan.  Via Kottke and Boing Boing.

Given that it sound like it’s because no one in Afghanistan eats pork due to religious laws, I’m curious how many other countries have few or no pigs for the same reason.

Random bonus history of why it’s a pig in the field and pork on the table:

In 1066, William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, invaded and conquered England and the Anglo-Saxons. After the invasion, the Norman kings and the nobility spoke a dialect of Old French known as Anglo-Norman, while English continued to be the language of the common people. This class distinction can still be seen in the English language today in words such as “beef” vs. “cow” and “pork” vs. “pig.” The aristocracy commonly ate beef and pork, which are derivatives of Anglo-Norma, while the Anglo-Saxon commoners, who tended the cattle and hogs, retained the Germanic and ate cow and pig.

I have no idea where swine came in to that equation.

Entertaining both for the content, and the reflection of the culture:

All in a skirt no less. I love her casual, quiet, proper bad-assness.

The fact that she’s wearing heels, and that the bandit is wearing a tie and jacket make it even better.  Kinda makes me want to learn Jujitsu.

Via Boing Boing