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bored by talk of lignin
Sunday, December 31 2017
Usually the cold would've broken by now, but it's not your mother's climate any more, and I had to feed the insatiable fire or suffer the consequences. It's not just that the pipes froze and there's no bathroom at the Woodstock bookstore where Gretchen works on Sundays, it's also that today the heating system couldn't make the temperature in the store into anything anyone would consider comfortable, so Gretchen wore her coat and hat all day (solving the problem of not having washed her hair).
Meanwhile I spent most of my time in the recuperation fort. I'd drunk some marijuana tea, which helped with the headaches caused by an absence of caffeine. This also excited the pattern-finding circuits in my brain. My interest in punch-card-based computing had been heightened by watching YouTube videos on the subject, so today I read a firsthand account of someone who learned to program in the paradigm of punchcards circa 1973. (At the time my father was working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, and, though he never wrote a program or even so much as operated a keyboard there, he used to bring home scrap computer cards and fanfold printouts frequently.) The writing int his article was adverb-heavy and melodramatic, but it allowed me to understand, for the first time, how computers were actually used in the days of batch processing. Back then, the punchcards were where programs (and much of the data) lived. A deck of cards was the physical embodiment of the data. The program could be easily duplicated, but at any one time it existed only in one or more deck of cards. If you were a programmer, every card was a line of code, and editing the code involved replacing cards or inserting, duplicating, or removing whole sets of them. New ones could be retyped as needed, and though initial typing of the cards was often done by woman in a secretarial role operating a QWERTY-keyboard-equipped keypunch, most programmers eventually learned to operate the "spare keypunch" for small edits. But to test your changes meant re-entering a queue for time on the computer, and making it through that could take as long as 24 hours. Debugging is hard enough with immediate turn around (available during all the time that I've worked with computers); imagine how painful this must've been!
Apart from the computer that could read and write the punchcards, there were special-purpose machines for creating them, duplicating them, and sorting them. Since the computer itself was expensive and time on it precious, an operator had to queue jobs, feeding in stacks of cards like an engineer shoveling coal into a locomotive. Eventually a parallel development (a word processing system that was storing text files on disk for online editing by secretarial typing pools) was hacked into the computer, and the whole need for cards vanished. To complete the process, an operating system that permitted concurrent jobs meant that everyone could have constant access to the computer, whose operating system now handled the allocation of resources, automating the computer operator out of a job (or, at least, into a much easier one). Reading how humans themselves used to be so intimately involved in computation and how they were gradually replaced by machines was an eye-opening experience.
Another thing I did was watch a series of lectures on Lynda.com (which I have free access to via my employer) about big data and machine learning. Unfortunately, the lecture was all rather high-level covering material I mostly knew. What I really want is a concrete programming example involving a sample data set and the software to crunch through it, producing whatever is the result of machine learning. Generally I don't need more than a "Hello World" to get started in any new programming paradigm.
After she got back from the bookstore, Gretchen and I made a pizza together. Gretchen did most of the hard work: preparing the cashew nut cheese, making the dough, and frying up the tempeh crumble. For my part, I mostly sauteed a combination of mushrooms, onions, and spinach. After two hours of intermittent work, we ate our pizza in the recuperation fort. Gretchen was trying to make it so we hung out and talked instead of staring at one or more screens, so we just kind of stared at the flames dancing in the woodstove. Occasionally I'd try to mansplain things such as the fact that wood is mostly made of a sugar (cellulose), though, I felt the need to add, it also contains something called lignin. Gretchen kept getting bored by the things I'd say. She'd been similarly bored by an earlier monologue I'd made about when I did or did not wear shoes as a child (though I hadn't been able to remember whether or not I'd routinely worn shoes in the house in the winter when I was a kid).
[REDACTED]
The dogs mostly left us alone, though at some point Neville pissed in his dog bed. We managed to stay up until 2018, though I was the only human who slept in the recuperation fort tonight.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171231 feedback
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