Peter G. Neumann, RIP

 The New York Times has an obituary of Peter G. Neumann online, though not yet, I think, in print. Neumann worked for many years as editor of the Association for Computing Machinery Risks in Computing news group. The Times says that he started this in 1985. The last comp.risks digest in my inbox is from April 12 this year: Neumann edited it, at the age of 93.

Neumann also played a considerable role in the development of the Multics operating system. Multics was never as widely adopted as its developers hoped, but it had a considerable influence on later operating systems, notably the minicomputer operating systems of the 1970s and 1980, for example Data General's AOS/VS. It also had an influence, on UNIX. Those interested can read about it on the Multicians website.

The Times describes Neumann's annotations of the comp.risks summaries as including "wry comments and the occasional pun". I remember the puns as more than occasional; but I looked forward to them.

 Those interested in informed discussions of computer security (including, over the last few years, artificial intelligence) can find the old digests posted at The Risks Digest site.

A Tradition Carried On

 In Roughing It, Mark Twain writes of a mining companion, Mr. Ballou:

Although he was more than twice as old as the eldest of us, he never gave himself any airs, privileges, or exemptions on that account. He did a young man’s share of the work; and did his share of conversing and entertaining from the general stand-point of any age—not from the arrogant, overawing summit-height of sixty years. His one striking peculiarity was his Partingtonian fashion of loving and using big words for their own sakes, and independent of any bearing they might have upon the thought he was purposing to convey. He always let his ponderous syllables fall with an easy unconsciousness that left them wholly without offensiveness. In truth his air was so natural and so simple that one was always catching himself accepting his stately sentences as meaning something, when they really meant nothing in the world. If a word was long and grand and resonant, that was sufficient to win the old man's love, and he would drop that word into the most out-of-the-way place in a sentence or a subject, and be as pleased with it as if it were perfectly luminous with meaning.

Mr. Ballou seems to have been an even-tempered man, but he could be provoked:

 Then the old man waxed wroth and abusive. He called Ollendorff all manner of hard names—said he never saw such a lurid fool as he was, and ended with the peculiarly venomous opinion that he "did not know as much as a logarythm!"

It presently appears that Mr. Ollendorf knew nothing of logarithms, but felt the force of the rebuke.

This came to mind today, for the New York Times obituary of Rex Reed quoted him as writing of 

the latest youth idols [seeming, in comparison to Bette Davis] about as interesting as a withered logarithm.

 I have probably been acquainted with logarithms for sixty years now, but have never encountered one that was withered, or for that matter one that was in leaf. If Reed knew at all what a logarithm is, he may have counted on his readers having slept through Algebra II, or having had the time to forget it.

The manner may be catching, for the obituary says that "he listened aerobically". It is hard to assign a meaning to the adverb, but perhaps Mr. Ballou would have approved.

Unknown Sees

 Last week, the The Washington Post reported that Bishop Evelio Menjivar-Ayala

was elevated from auxiliary bishop of the Washington Archdiocese to Bishop of West Virginia.

This surprised me a little, not because Bishop Menjivar-Ayala has been promoted, but because I had never heard of a Roman Catholic diocese named after a state. The Episcopalian Church (the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of  America) does organize its sees by state, but I had never heard of the Roman Catholic Church doing so.

Today I had a look at the website of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and indeed Bishop Menjivar-Ayala's new see is the Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston. And of course the website lists not the "Washington Archdiocese" but the "Archdiocese of Washington".