Programming and Art

 The next book for our neighborhood book club is Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, which follows a couple of the young in Los Angeles from late childhood through their early thirties, say 1987 through 2015, as they found and continue a business that creates computer games. A book review putting it that way would not interest me in the book, but I found the book very readable. I finished its 400 pages in a week or so.

One curious aspect of the book was its detachment from the work of computer programming. It mentions the programming language Java (perhaps a few months early for Java's release), and I think might mention BASIC. Almost the only terms of art are "bug" and "debugging". "Interrupt" and "stack" you will not find.

This is not an unreasonable choice. Programming can be very absorbing, but watching somebody program is indistinguishable from watching someone stare at a screen and occasionally press on a keyboard. It takes a good deal of patience for the non-programmer to sit and watch somebody program. When I saw the movie The Social Network, I was impressed at the manner in which the writers and producers had managed to obscure this truth: in the movie programming was hardly glanced at, except when done by the drunk or the oblivious.

Frederick Crews, RIP

 Today's New York Times carries an obituary of the critic Frederick Crews. The headline calls him a "Withering Critic of Freud", featuring what I had supposed was a sideline of his. I knew of him as a literary critic, though actually I had not read his chief works in that line.

 The one book of Crews's that I did read was The Pooh Perplex, a collection of essays on Winnie the Pooh in the manner of then (1963) prominent critics. Under the invented names,  I was able to pick out Fredson Bowers, F.R. Leavis, Leslie Fiedler, and D.W. Robertson. No doubt the more widely read could pick out more. I regret that I never bought for myself a copy of Post-Modern Pooh, published in 2001.

Series

 A visit to Second Story Books led to the purchase of The Wittgenstein Reader, edited by Anthony Kenny. The book is a collection of excerpts from Wittgenstein's works. I have copies of most or all of the excerpted works; but it is worth seeing how a gifted editor will assemble pieces of an author's work to cast more light on one another.

In the chapter Kenny names "Intentions", there are paragraphs in which Wittgenstein discusses what it means to understand something. As an example of something to be understood, he gives the series of natural numbers, 0, 1, 2, 3, ... and the task of teaching it to someone. What he says about how we judge understanding here makes sense. Yet the paragraphs leave the impression that teaching someone the series could be a challenge. (Philosophical Investigations I, sections 143 and following.) I had read these paragraphs before, but today I thought of something else.

In the years of the Baby Boom, I was a second grader in a classroom of about fifty others. Our teacher's notion of restoring order when we made a disturbance--noise, notes, talking--was to tell us to take out a clean piece of paper and write the numbers from one to one hundred. Commonly, the quick writers got to one hundred very quickly, while those like me were in the upper twenties. Often, they made more disturbances, and the teacher would bid up the numbers. I believe that more than once she told us to write the numbers up to one thousand.

We all did it. (Well, as time allowed--some of us were under 300 when the bell rang.) She did not, that I remember, judge our understanding of the series. She may not have collected the papers.

The router's lease hath all too short a date.

 Memory says that during the pandemic I worked from home with a network connection as steady as if I had been at the office and the computer had been connected by cable to the building network. Perhaps memory exaggerates.

We mostly returned to the office in mid-2021. For a while I did not work much from home, then presently I would work from home a day or two each week. At some point I found that the network connection to work--a virtual private network or VPN--just wasn't as stable. I put up with it, though.

Recently, I found that I was disconnected too often, and I started writing down the times of disconnection. These were almost exactly an hour apart. Today, after one of the disconnections, I noticed a message about the underlying network, and I had a look at the PC's networking setup with ipconfig /all. I was greatly interested to see that my DHCP lease was of one hour. (Dynamic Host Control Protocol or DHCP is a method by which a server can manage the network configuration of many client machines.) I'm used to DHCP lease durations measured in days, not hours.

On logging into our router, I found that the DHCP lease duration was indeed set to 3600 seconds, one hour. I bumped it up to eight hours, restarted the computer, and found that I now had a lease of eight hours. I predict that my next day working from home will be less frustrating.

I assume that our ISP, which provided the unit that serves as both router and cable modem, set the configuration as I saw it. I wonder what they were thinking to set the lease duration so low.

A Universal Expedient

There is a sort of jocular American folklore around duct tape as a universal expedient. Eighty years ago, I believe, one heard of "chewing gum and baling wire" as that which kept rickety equipment going. Somewhere in the last forty years, duct tape replaced baling wire, perhaps because so many fewer Americans work at baling hay.

I had never heard of duct tape used in first aid, but on Thursday I saw it. A crew was working out front to run a new pipe from house to main, bypassing the old lead pipe. By mid-afternoon it was time to remove from the hole the machine that had pushed a path for the copper pipe, and then pulled it back from the house. The machine was clearly heavy: my eyeball estimate was a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five pounds. The two men who were removing it from the hole were strongly built, but one injured his upper arm. The man I took to be foreman had to come out from the house and help with the machine.

Somewhere along the way, the injured man and another walked down to the truck. The other applied to the injured arm two six-inch strips of duct tape, one along the bottom of the deltoid muscle, one along the biceps. I have seen runners with bits of tape applied to a leg, but never duct tape.

More practically, I think, my wife brought out ibuprofen for the injured man. He remained on light duty for the rest of the job, and I suppose will be on light duty for a couple of weeks. Given that most of his work involved digging, I'm not sure what that will be.