Safety Fork, the

I sat down to read about sorting algorithms and this paragraph made me laugh:

Although dictionaries of the English language define “sorting” as the process of separating or arranging things according to class or kind, computer programmers traditionally use the word in the much more special sense of marshaling things into ascending or descending order. The process should perhaps be called ordering, not sorting; but anyone who tries to call it “ordering” is soon led into confusion because of the many different meanings attached to that word. Consider the following sentence, for example: “Since only two of our tape drives were in working order, I was ordered to order more tape units in short order, in order to order the data several orders of magnitude faster.” Mathematical terminology abounds with still more senses of order (the order of a group, the order of a permutation, the order of a branch point, relations of order, etc., etc.). Thus we find that the word “order” can lead to chaos.

—Donald Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming Chapter 5

These birds took up residence on my balcony shortly before I moved in. They’re not shy about flitting in and out while I’m sitting only two meters away.

Telecommunications executives make me crazy. Take this quotation (from here)as an example:

“Somebody running a server in their basement on our network and uploading illegal copies movies raises the costs for everybody else and jams the network in ways we’re not compensated for,” said Mr. Cicconi, whose company [AT&T] is also one of the world’s largest providers of Internet-based corporate communications services.

Mr. Cicconi’s argument is fallacious. (And it’s a poorly-worded argument, too; an executive for a communications company ought to have better grammar at his command.) AT&T is 100-percent compensated for some guy running a server in his basement uploading illegal movies. He has hired AT&T’s network to transmit data to, and receive data from, Internet hosts of his choosing. The content of any particular datum is irrelevant. Mr. Cicconi has chosen digital movie piracy as a straw man to hide his real concern: overselling profits.

ISPs sell more bandwidth than they have. People don’t usually notice, because it’s statistically unlikely that everyone will try to fully utilize their connections at the same time—at least as long as they stick to reading their email and looking up stuff on Wikipedia. When enough people start sending around big video files (even legal ones), they use up the ISP’s oversold bandwidth, and the rest of the ISP’s customers start making irate phone calls to complain that they can’t look at that one camel on Google Maps.

In short, if AT&T loses money on customers who actually use the capacity they lease, then AT&T should charge more or find ways to cut costs. Blaming customers just makes the company look like idiots.

One of the three light bulbs in my new kitchen just burnt out. As I was sitting at my computer in the next room I became aware of a high-pitched ringing noise. By process of elimination I ruled out my electronics and most of my kitchen appliances before I realized that the sound was coming from above my head. When I switched off the lights, it stopped. When I switched them back on, one did not light.

I find it to be a curious failure mode. I suspect that part of the filament or its support was warming and cooling in a cycle that caused it to vibrate against the glass of the bulb. I find it surprising, though, that the bulb remained lit until I turned off the power. It is unfortunate that the bulb is frosted; were it clear, I would have been fascinated to have observed the mechanics of a ringing incandescent lamp.

I saw the film Helvetica last night at the Walker Art Center. I bought my ticket six weeks ago when I first heard about the film. It’s a good thing, because the Walker employee who introduced the film’s director said that not only did that first screening sell out, so did the one they added later in the evening, and also the one they added for tonight.

The film was excellent. By my usual line of reasoning, in which I describe the quality of a thing by enumerating how few flaws I observed, I have only one: in one of the interviews, the interviewer’s voice was left in the film for one question, but he wasn’t properly recorded by the microphone. He wasn’t even on-screen, so it doesn’t make sense to me that he didn’t re-record those three seconds.