Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

In the way of achieving a healthy software development environment, a lot of projects fall in one of these two DON'Ts: irresponsibility and territoriality. Irresponsibility is when there is no one in charge of making things right (with respect to a whole category of problems). Territoriality is when there is someone in charge, and he won't let anyone else touch the code without him. They may sound opposite to one another, but often irresponsibility is a result of territoriality, where the person in charge just isn't interested in the kind of problem you're experiencing, and so any consideration for such problems gets disregarded in favor of whatever fits the interests of the maintainer.

Next Saturday November 21st 2009, from 2pm to 10pm, I'll have a late house-warming party and an early Birthday party, in Cambridge Massachusetts, and you are cordially invited.

112 Thorndike St #2, Cambridge MA 02414
Near to Lechmere Station (Green line) and not far from Kendall Sq/MIT (Red line).
Phone: 617 595 2601

Sorry for a late notice. Please RSVP with number of guests.

"Social contract" theorists try to replace universal natural law with arbitrary social constructs, but start by stealing the very concept of contract from the framework of natural law that they are claiming to do away with.

If there is no prior, higher, Law, then no contract whatsoever, "social" or else, is binding. Anything goes, contracts are void at best, fraud at worst, but fraud, theft, rape and murder are just as good as anything else, so who cares?

If there is a prior, higher, Law, that says that contracts are binding, and provides for enforcement of such contracts, then who needs a social contract? There already is a Law. Moreover, an alleged "Social contract" can neither contradict nor override this Natural Law without which it is void.

In either case, "Social Contract" theorists are crooks, and their theories are just another fraud to justify the arbitrary power of the mighty over the weak as if it had been somehow consented.

In the country where I come from, health care is free.

Is it?

Yes: doctors and nurses work for nothing. Their job is so deeply satisfying to them that they don't need either food or sleep, not even a bath. They are born ready-to-work with medical omniscience and so don't need years of expensive parenting and training. Moreover, hospitals and medical equipment grow naturally in otherwise infertile land.

Oh my! Nuclear-powered robots have taken over your country and control all resources!

Did I tell you about the free education?

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, October 29th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B. Alex Plotnick with talk about CLWEB, and Daniel Herring will give a short presentation of LibCL.

Additionally, we will have two 5-minute Lightning Talks, each followed by 2-minute Q&A. Speakers to be announced.

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

CLWEB is a literate programming system for Common Lisp in the tradition of Knuth's WEB and CWEB systems. These systems are based on the idea that there are two audiences for every program — the machine on the one hand and human programmers on the other — and that these two audiences have very different requirements for understanding a given program. They take as input a document containing a mixture of source code, TeX, and WEB control codes, and output both a program suitable for compilation or evaluation, and also a TeX file that contains a pretty-printed version of the source code along with accompanying commentary. The former is for the machine, while the latter is ready for typesetting, printing, and reading by a human. CLWEB is of course itself a literate program, written in itself, using (mostly) portable Common Lisp as the source language.

http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~plotnick/clweb/

Alex Plotnick is a graduate student in computer science at Brandeis University. His interests include natural and computer language semantics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language.

LibCL is a collection of Libraries for Common Lisp. CL has a wide range of libraries available, yet there are persistent rumors that CL has no libraries, or that they're hard to find and install. LibCL was created to tackle these issues by creating a distribution bundling many libraries into a single download. This presentation will focus on the dream, current progress, and issues which have arisen.

Daniel Herring works as an associate staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His academic interests center around control theory and walking robotics; practical issues such as computer algebra brought him to lisp.

http://libcl.com/

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday October 29th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT 34-401B.

Note that this is not the usual day of the week.

As the numbers indicate, the room is in Building 34, on the 4th floor. This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.

ITA Software a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclaimer: I work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our monthly Boston Lisp meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake.

We appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos you have, so that we can order the correct amount and kind of food. Tell us by sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We won't send any acknowledgement unless requested; importantly, we'll keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors.

The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on Wednesday, September 30th 2009 had about 20-odd participants. Christine Flood spoke about Project Fortress.

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Volunteers to give Lightning Talks are also sought. http://fare.livejournal.com/143723.html

For more information, see our web site http://boston-lisp.org/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.

Amongst the little Common Lisp projects I have been working on at ITA, that we have published as free software, there is single-threaded-ccl, a small modification to Clozure CL (CCL) that allows it to start and run in a single thread. Why is that hack necessary at all? Because I'd like to do useful computations in forks (including but not limited to parallel compilation with POIU or XCVB or robust Erlang-style concurrency), but (a) the upstream CCL insists on always spawning ancillary threads during system initialization to manage interactive I/O, and (b) threads pretty much guarantee that most attempts to compute in a fork will result in massive instability. I'll cover the first issue quickly, but the second issue is what I will develop.

A few months ago, my friend and former colleague Marco Baringer made a presentation of a photo reportage he did in a village lost in the middle of nowhere in Malawi.

People were literally dirt poor. Living a primitive agricultural life with little access to modernity, education or medical care, the same tasteless food everyday, a short life expectancy, high incidence of AIDS, corrupt government and inefficient bureaucracy, etc. A wretched life.

Yet, asked if people were happy, Marco said that yes, despite their miserable life conditions, and their being conscious how fickle their lives were and how much richer the rest of the world was, the Malawi inhabitants displayed genuine smiles and radiated happiness. And the embodiment of that happiness was his host, who proudly claimed to him that the food he was serving, he cropped himself on his own land, and the shack in which he was hosting was his own house he built himself.

Happiness and pride in being one's own man, no matter how small. What a lesson, that the restless hapless destitutes subsidized into zombiedom by our Welfare States will never learn!

The worst ignominy of socialists is possibly neither in the plunder of the productive they enslave, nor in the aristocratic morgue with which they impose their reign of good-thinking evil, but in the total ruination of the lives of the unproductive they claim to help.

http://fare.livejournal.com/147676.html

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Wednesday, September 30th 2009 at 1800 at NEU WVG 108, where Christine Flood will speak about Project Fortress.

Additionally, we will have two 5-minute Lightning Talks, each followed by 2-minute Q&A. Speakers to be announced.

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

Project Fortress is a programming language designed at Sun Labs with these fundamental principles:

What you write on your white board works (Standard Mathematical Syntax). Implicit Parallelism (Let the runtime system exploit the fine grained parallelism in your algorithm). Languages should be designed from the ground up to grow over time (A small fixed core with as much of Fortress as possible in Fortress libraries).

Other features include strong static typing and transactional memory.

This talk will give you an overview of the language and walk through some examples. Feel free to check out our open source implementation and language specification at http://ProjectFortress.sun.com/.

Christine Flood is a research scientist at Sun Microsystems Labs. She has been working in the field of computer science for 20 years. Her interests are in programming language design and implementation particularly garbage collection and parallelism. She's a former Symbolics/MIT hacker.

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Wednesday September 30th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at NEU WVG 108.

This is neither the usual day of the week, nor the usual location. This is at Northeastern University, in the West Village G residence building which is right behind the Computer Science building WVH (see this picture) when you arrive from the T on Huntington Avenue (Green E line, stop at Northeastern Station, or possibly Museum of Fine Arts; you can also walk from Ruggles on the Orange line). As the number indicates, the room is on the first floor.

Northeastern maps and direction: http://www.northeastern.edu/campusmap/maps.html

Many thanks go to Eli Barzilay for arranging for the room, and to Northeastern University for welcoming us.

ITA Software a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclaimer: I work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our monthly Boston Lisp meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake.

We appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos you have, so that we can order the correct amount and kind of food. Tell us by sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We won't send any acknowledgement unless requested; importantly, we'll keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors.

The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on August 31th had about 20-odd participants. Emmanuel Schanzer talked about Teaching Mathematics and Problem-Solving through Programming, preceded by lightning talks by Gregory Marton on Teaching Linguistics through Programming and Alex Plotnick on Gabriel's Gimmick.

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Volunteers to give Lightning Talks are also sought. http://fare.livejournal.com/143723.html

For more information, see our web site http://boston-lisp.org/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.

Does Virtue lead to Misfortune and Vice to Prosperity? Do we live in an Evil World where vice is rewarded while virtue is punished? Is Virtue counter-productive in This World, and does the only hope of vindication for the virtuous lie in an After-Life?

Not at all. Though this World is not perfect, there is an essentially progressive logic to it; and not only does this Logic reward Virtue, that it does is the very definition of Virtue indeed. However this logic is not the mystical logic of good intentions rewarded by fairy godmothers nor is it the official logic of social conformity rewarded by benevolent authorities. It is the implacable logic of Reality, that rewards the Essential Virtue of each domain of Existence with its Tautological consequence.

Now, the best norms in world do little good when they are not followed, and they tend to not be followed when they go unenforced, and other, corrupt, norms are being enforced instead. Which takes us back into the topic of Politics, and more generally Military Science. For Politics is indeed "the continuation of war by other means".

In my adventures in the building of Common Lisp software, I have had to deal more than I wish I had with something that is largely misunderstood, because it is completely crazy: EVAL-WHEN. In the hope that the loss of my sanity might be redeemed however fractionarily by the slightest enlightment of my better, I thought I would write up my conclusions. Dumping the topic on paper will also hopefully allow me to empty my mind from the sheer horror.

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, August 31st 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Emmanuel Schanzer will speak about Teaching Mathematics and Problem-Solving through Programming.

Additionally, we will have two 5-minute Lightning Talks, each followed by 2-minute Q&A: Gregory Marton will talk about Teaching Linguistics through Programming and Alex Plotnick will talk about Gabriel's Gimmick, an odd little idiom for (mis)using the sequence functions.

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday August 31st 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

The Law of Bitur-Camember at Equilibrium: The value of any unowned resource will be destroyed by the political process of grabbing it.

"La gauche et la droite sont d'accord" argumentait mon politicard de cousin à propos de telle taxe. Mais quand gauche et droite sont d'accord sur ce qui ne paraît pas évident à tous, c'est par définition même que l'intérêt de la classe politique unie s'oppose à celui de la société civile. C'est ainsi que les politiques bipartisanes sont les plus liberticides.

Les policiers se plaignent d'être traités comme des moins que rien. Or, ils le sont à juste titre. Car en tant que classe, les policiers sont des moins que rien: des larbins de l'état. Ils sont donc traités comme que de droit, tout particulièrement par les populations les plus opprimées par l'état.

Mon ami Bernhard m'envoie un lien vers un article prétendant dénoncer le prix de l'anarchie par des modèles mathématiques.

Cet article est tellement faux que j'ai du mal à imaginer comment un auteur apparemment intelligent et capable de raisonnement logique peut amonceller autant de sophismes. Comme quoi, le formalisme logique détaché du réel n'est pas la raison, mais la ratiocination des superstitions irrationnelles.

Vous qui me lisez êtes tous invités à un pot chez mes parents (Paris 16ème) ce Vendredi 31 juillet 2009 à partir de 18h! Apportez à manger ou commandez votre repas. RSVP avec nombre de personnes pour les coordonnées précises si vous ne les avez pas encore.

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, July 27th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Bruce Lewis will speak about OurDoings, and Richard Kreuter will speak about defsystems and deliverables, or, unary REQUIRE for the win!

Additionally, we are still accepting proposals for up to two volunteers to each give of a 5-minute Lightning Talk (followed by 2-minute Q&A).

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday July 27th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

The G1 has alluring hardware specifications and does everything you could expect a small computing device to do. Alas, it doesn't do any of it well. It is not by any means a decent Internet access device, a decent digital assistant, or even a decent MP3 player. What is worse, it is a computer on which you are not the one in control. It may be an excellent phone, but only because by the telecom industry has set very bleak standards indeed for what a phone may be expected to do. Moreover, if you use any of its advanced functionalities, then the battery situation is even worse on the G1 than on my old dying phone. All in all, it is a luxury I'd rather not afford.

I'm now the happy owner of the cheapest phone (marginally free) with the cheapest plan ($30 a month). This brings me 95% of the satisfaction of the G1 with none of the extreme frustration, for less than half the price and half the weight.

I am looking forward to a future of telephony over decentralized WiFi networks where government-backed telecom companies can no more force consumers into buying outrageously priced plans that can only be used with inferior locked down devices.

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, June 29th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Eli Barzilay will speak about Implementing Domain Specific Languages with PLT Scheme.

Additionally, we are still accepting proposals for up to two volunteers to each give of a 5-minute Lightning Talk (followed by 2-minute Q&A).

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday June 29th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Tuesday, May 26th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B, where Norman Ramsey will speak about Using Higher-Order Functions and Continuation-Passing Style to Make Dataflow Optimization Simple.

Additionally, we are still accepting proposals for up to two volunteers to each give of a 5-minute Lightning Talk (followed by 2-minute Q&A).

Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Tuesday May 26th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B.

And so for all I know, his eventual abduction by a ghost may be Don Giovanni's latest invention, staged by himself to get rid of all these former victims who are now running after him and spoiling his fun, all the while silently mocking their superstition and gullibility from behind as they sing their final moralizing Questo è il fin in the front of the stage. At least, that's how things would turn out if I had a say in a production of Mozart's masterpiece. Certainly it would bother me a bit to let the scoundrel get away with murder scot-free, but after all unhappy endings are par for the course in Opera.

Lightning Talks are series of short strictly timed five minute talks each followed by two minutes for questions and answers during which the next speaker gets prepared (by e.g. disconnecting the previous speaker's laptop from the projector and connecting his own instead). The formula was used at ILC'2009 in sessions of 4 to 8 talks, and was a tremendous success.

Indeed you don't need to have that much to say to give a Lightning Talk, and so the formula lowers the barrier to entry and allows for a wider diversity of ideas to be presented at such events. At the same time, the strict constraint forces the speaker to be more concise, maybe even poetic, in conveying his ideas. Several participants remarked that since Lightning Talks were both so short and precisely timed, you could rehearse them many times before you gave them, making delivery more powerful. Additionally, some argued that the short duration limits the potential for either speaker humiliation or listener boredom, once again giving incentive for people to participate on both ends of the communication, promoting the exchange of ideas.

And so, I instituted such Lightning Talks at the Boston Lisp Meeting; so far, they have been well-received, and many people have subsequently volunteered to give one -- which makes me hopeful about their positive impact on the exchange of ideas within the community.