Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Grace Hopper explains Nanoseconds.

Link to video

11 comments:

edutcher said...

Amazing Grace.

And she has what a good teacher needs. An appreciation of what it takes to explain abstractions to people who have no concept.

And she can do it with a sense of humor (which doesn't hurt).

There are easier languages than COBOL (which I coded, off and on, for some years), but she gave the world one of the better ways to tell the machine what you want it to do.

The Dude said...

COBOL, SNOBOL, Basic assembler language, Fortran, JCL, punch cards, man, that stuff takes me back.

I got a notification from RunKeeper - in my first year I completed 336 activities, but to get any meaningful stats or totals, I would have to pay to upgrade. No thanks, I'll just keep walking. That stuff takes me forward.

edutcher said...

For those interested, the Cruz speech.

Lem, Chip, whomever, if you want to put up a separate post, I can copy it over.

If you want peace in our time, we can always let people try to find it.

Synova said...

She's incredible.

edutcher said...

One of the great minds of the 20th century.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

I heard Laura Ingraham gave a good speech.

edutcher said...

Quite good, overall, the best of the night (I understand why FNC's ratings are lousy; I've been watching conventions since '56 and the first rule is you talk between speeches, not during them), very popular with the crowd.

Newt gave a college lecture - material was excellent, but he needed to give it some punch.

Pence is a better speaker than I would have thought. Speech itself was OK, but he may turn out to be more of an asset on the campaign trail than many would otherwise imagine.

Cruz? Not exactly a barn burner. Rather bland - lots of platitudes - more than a few ironies in his remarks, rather subdued on O and Cacklpants (not sure what I was expecting, but I thought there'd be more red meat a la Rudy and Christie), biggest yell was for the wall - which was as close as he came to endorsing Trump, and what was that televangelist ending?

The place went dead when he gave a shout out to Alton Sterling's family.

PS Don't know where this business Drudge gets about him being booed off the stage.

He was done, he walked off. I presume the crowd was expecting an endorsement, there was a lot of noise when the cameras showed Trump in the room at the end (I watched it live), so they were disappointed.

My own opinion was that he didn't help his cause tonight.

YMMV

Chip Ahoy said...

I missed the Cruz speech. I saw Lem regards his cadence goes nowhere. All independent statements.

To watch him is to begin imitating him -- what? -- and that means straining one's voice uncomfortably to achieve his high-pitched choked-back anal-retentive quality. or as we say in the German Proctor household altepitchchokenbaksphincterpinchen quality.

Trump's kids are impressive. All of them. And I don't care what you say, or what impressions gained over the years, that says something very important. The pride the kids show in their father is returned and that's palpable. There's usually one that's that nut. They could all be spoiled rotten but appear stable. They could be like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie but they are not.

And this worries me.

Because I read several commenters (the Twitter people I follow are having a difficult time with this. They're mostly going through an extreme c**tish phase right now. Their timelines read like suicide watch alerts except a lot meaner) would rather have Donald Trump Jr. than clown buffoon orangeman lying disreputable goofy unpredictable Donald Trump Sr.

And now Trump kids will be positioned in government.

Then Trumps will become comfortable with high public offices.

And in my view a large part of the populist uprising that upturned the GOP and changed it into something else by forcing it to represent is a rejection of political dynastic families. While accepting a new one preformed from the start.

Blasting through with a billionaire who cannot be bought, who does not need the office, has no political ambition is one thing if they do this themselves, but Trump is involving his entire next generation kin into the action, all giving speeches. And they're all good. I'd hate to see them running for office. I'd hate that. Because there we would be all over again.

I thought of this watching Jake Trapper interviewing Trump supporters. Trapper was asking, wouldn't it be nice if Mitt Romney was there. Wouldn't it be nice to see the Bushes there. LIberal concerns, liberal type questions that expose Jake Trapper still does not comprehend what he is seeing. Immersed in the action and he cannot see synthesize events. Still stuck in the pre-Trump way of looking at everything. One man answered, now it's a populist movement. *ding* clear as a bell. The second man answered, yes, he sure does like those guys mentioned, Bush and Romney, and he does miss them *click* his answer is edited. We don't hear him say as I hope he would continue, "it's sad but they're realizing their whole family is rejected, their dynasty is rejected. And that's hard to accept. Nothing personal. It's just that there are a LOT of great families out there. You guys take your well deserved rest.



rhhardin said...

I remember it via the speed of light, six inches per nanosecond, but that's for radar range so is actually half the speed of light, which itself would be one foot per nanosecond.

rhhardin said...

COBOL, SNOBOL, Basic assembler language, Fortran, JCL, punch cards, man, that stuff takes me back.

SPITBOL, a compiled SNOBOL, was much faster than SNOBOL but you had to pay a license fee, which was a new idea at the time.

Basic assembler language was for the 360, which came long after real assembly, FAP or for IBSYS sufferers, MAP.

Assembler for the 7090.

The Dude said...

Good times, good times. We had a 360, used it to build a 470 - those were the days, my friend...