Re: Kerouac [was: Groundhog Day]

[Clive Tovero]

ERRATA (Or, Scmutils made me "Think Again, A Priori") [Apologies to 
those other companies' slogans.]

1) Some people misunderstood the pun with .IGNORE, "was that a typo?"  
It was a deeply recursive pun (needed "letrec" for that one), regarding 
Groundhog Day and Einstein's more philosphical work. "The definition of 
madness is making a mistake and repeating it, expecting different 
results."  Our in-house logician found a slight error in my pun (see 
what I mean about completeness to within the limits of Godel around the 
house?)--in that .IGNORE, having the effect of adding a dash to every 
shell command, thus potentially ignoring compounding errors, in a 
makefile might lead to some weird build state.  ["make", Oram and 
Talbot, 1991, p. 62] She pointed out .IGNORE is in fact a stronger 
assertion than Einstein's, which is repeating the same error, while 
"make" is a series (in the strict Taylor-ian mathematical sense, good 
old formally verified make) of possibly non-identical mistakes.  "So 
Einstein was only talking about idempotent mistakes, never having used 
'make'?", I asked.  We both gave up and ate enchiladas.

2) Another note about Einstein.  Due to a minor sign error in the 
Machinate code, my previous message produced a contracted set of jokes, 
rather than the dialated or just the vacuum you wanted.  My wife accused 
me of trying to make a black-hole pun the jokes were so dense.  I have 
read "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman", but I can't remember his 
advice on creating a paper based soley on dumb jokes and puns.  It that 
science?  I am not going further with this line of inquiry...remember 
[HIC SVNT DRACONES]? No? Read on.

3) Now Faraday and Hawking.  Since building the Faraday cage, I can no 
longer receive the "X-Files" on over-the-air TV as good as I used to.  
Does anyone know, if I wire the antenna connector on the TV to the 
Faraday cage, will I stop having to move the old antenna every 10 
minutes?  I'm worried if I do, I will break the Faraday cage abstraction 
and EM radiation will escape--leading to a leak in the source of 
Machinate--I'm using the TV as a monitor as well.  Is a black-hole sun 
like a Faraday cage, in some sense? What is the difference between 
vacuum junction and traditional semiconductors?  In one the electron 
tunnels through the matter, in the other it crosses a vacuum.  I 
remember from my punk rock band, "The Matching Qs" that semiconductors 
clipped to a square wave when overdriven, while vacuum tubes generated 
warm, smooth harmonics.  (Rockman vs. Marshall stack).  Does that have 
something to do with R-functions and modeling a square?  Maybe I'll 
leave this group alone and suggest Scholtz build the Rockman X with 
vacuum junction transistors.  As of yet, not one person here wanted to 
rebuild that '79 Scheme Machine with vacuum junctions, or explained what 
the advantage (if any) would be over tunneling.  '82 Porsche 911s are in 
the 6 figure range for a rust bucket.

4) Descartes (the well known "Cogito, ergo sum" guy. ...is it just me?  
Doesn't the expression "Lingua Franca" seem to have a syntactic/semantic 
mismatch?) and Rvachev (lingua Russian) are inversely related (with 
respect to analytic geometry). R-functions are "logically charged" [see, 
Shapiro does puns too, but within reason which is why he has a geometric 
modeling lab and I don't.  Try disentangling the puns here.  You might 
learn R-functions, Huck Finn].

5) A surprising number of taunting replies to my previous message 
pointed out what looked like a flaky "(newline)" procedure in 
Machinate's output.  I'm going to throw that software defect back over 
to the fence to the "mailman" program--it looked OK when I typed it in 
T-bird.  I *have to* leave it "[sic]" because unlike Re-did-it, I cannot 
go back and edit my typos here.  It also seems funny that Machinate's 
semi-AI REPL wants to start eval/applying immediately after the closing 
paren, reading the space before I get a chance to input a newline.  
Almost like it is, HAL-like, a bit TOO eager to dominate the CNC milling 
machine industry, and I may never gain back control.  Don't tell the 
Julia project, but I'm extensively reworking Femtolisp conform to 
DO-178B Level I, and defeat the Julia language with it's own MIT 
licensed parser/form-lower-er Scheme.  They don't know that, suitably 
tweaked like a Marshall stack, Femtolisp runs sphere tracing code faster 
in Lisp than in C.  I am not making that up, or at least only partially 
exaggerating like any good marketeer.  I like the way my geometric 
models look better in S-expressions, but am planning to add CGOL if I 
can figure out what a Pratt Parser does (I'm joking, I worked on a 
safety critical Ada compiler in grad school.).

6) I received an unusually polite email from the person on Re-did-it who 
wanted to find me, or my libraries that is.  He said something, like 
"Sorry, sorry, sorry to bother you. Never mind, I found what I needed.  
No need to reply.  We've removed the request to find you from the 
posting.  We value your privacy."  Someone must have leaked yesterday's 
email.

7) Let me reiterate, that all this stems from going on Re-did-it for 5 
minutes after 6 months of Faraday cage living to get away from the 
Internet.  There they are making SICP fan fiction, morphing the image 
from Aho et al.'s "Dragon Book" onto the cover of SICP.  I guess you 
could say my posting here is a form of SICM fan fiction, to be fair.  I 
generally skip a "deep read" of the cover of textbooks, and concentrate 
on what is inside.  That said, my interpretation of the SICP cover is 
that it is a pun to that effect.  Aho's pun is slaying the dragon of 
compiler complexity. The SICP cover did get me interested in the sort of 
"geometrical" syntax/semantics of math symbols.  Why is "+" addition 
while the similar but rotated to "x" is multiplication? Can we really do 
scalar multiplication with only one rotation-matrix multiplication 
instead of one POM (plain old multiply)?  My wife tried in vain to 
explain something about junction symbols V and A [sic, limited character 
set in Edwin]. "Does the lambda in the sun mean that the laws of physics 
are ... expressible ... in ... lambda ... calculus?"  Who cares? This 
errata is getting quite extended, but I remember back to reading SICP 
and sometimes it seemed like the footnotes there were more copious than 
the text.  An impetuous young 35 year old at the time, I also asked "Who 
cares?"  A stylistic difference in writing is one of presenting 
explanatory material using foot notes vs. errata.  SICM is more recent 
to me (I read them ordinally by date), and I sometimes superimpose, in 
my mind--not in Gimp--its cover with SICP.  The cover of FDG is 
explained as "using this stuff to create a lambda picture"--the lambda 
on my book's cover is modeled with implicit functions and any FreeType 
font that has Greek support installed.

8) A number of you asked where the terms Clive/Tovero came from. (Mark 
Twain named himself after a term in his occupation, setting a 
precedent.)  CL-IV-E is an "extended Roman numeral" = 150 - 4 - e (The E 
is an anachronism of the Latin alphabet and has the same meaning as our 
modern day e.).  Back then, they had to simplify their letters so they 
could use their primitive "stone chisel shader", very similar to B-rep 
modeling in graphics.  I've got implicit functions. In Common Lisp type:

    (format nil "The ~@r Files: 'Clive Tovero, I believe!'" 10)
    ;; [TO DO: go on Re-did-it to see if Roman numerals in CL is a 
conspiracy.]
    (format nil "~@r-~@r-~a" 150 4 "E")
    ;; [PRIORITY TO DO: implement irrational numbers in Roman numerals].
    #| (format nil "~@r" (- 150 4 *e*)" ; Does not work! |#

Or, (C)ommon (L)isp Inventor (IV) with (E)xtensions.  Tovero is a horse 
coat coloring, the shading pattern on horses being a very complicated 
subject which could take over your academic studies if you aren't 
careful (a concept similar to GLSL--in the good old days, SGI was 
getting into mutually recursive acronyms, I think, without actually 
finishing the Lisp machine embedded in Open Inventor).  Horses in the 
American West were often insultingly named after how they looked or 
behaved, like "Ol' Paint", "Fiery", "Clive Tovero", "Rocky", "Conniver", 
or "Huffy".  The horse is an amazing species, having originated in North 
America, migrated around the globe and eventually found their way back 
to their primordial home.  "Tallgrass: Go West ol' Tovero, holding your 
hand perpendicular to the line of travel--escape the Savannah." 
Perpendicular to *which axis*, FDG?  If you've ever walked by a herd of 
(technically most wild creatures are only "feral" or "managed" 
nowadays...resisting urge to make CL programmer joke...) wild 
horses--they look at you like "Where have you been, old friend?  You, 
not your libraries."  Our defunct company's name was Kavalogic, a pun 
(naturally) meaning "horse sense" (a sort of "Think *really* 
differently, like a horse e.g.--Our world is going to need it." slogan), 
and we had hoped to donate part of the profits (stop looking at this in 
hindsight, please) to rescuing wild horses.  That idea nearly got me 
Hell-banned from the 'net. I think the 'net's version of SBCL has a 
minor bug in the sign, with respect to the spiritual direction vector.  
John Cleese recently "cancelled himself" to avoid the rush...and the 
final joke...(my wife doesn't think this assay is pointed enough, so 
before I announce Artificial Kavalogic Intelligence):

...back to Hell-banning myself, being a semi-involuntary, Faraday-caged 
hermit (crab), and re-re-reading "Dual Contouring with Hermite Data", 
Tao Ju, et al., my current Groundhog Day subtask--squaring circles, 
using rounded squares.  Maybe I ought to try exact arithmetic.