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From the Wikipedia:

In Scientology doctrine, Xenu is a galactic ruler who, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs. Their souls then clustered together and stuck to the bodies of the living. These events are known as “Incident II” or “The Wall of Fire”, and the traumatic memories associated with them as the R6 implant. Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard detailed the story in Operating Thetan level III in 1967, famously warning that R6 was “calculated to kill (by pneumonia etc) anyone who attempts to solve it.” Much controversy between the Church of Scientology and its critics has focused on Xenu. The Church avoids making mention of Xenu in public statements and has gone to considerable effort to maintain the story’s confidentiality, including legal action on both copyright and trade secrecy grounds. Critics claim that revealing the story is in the public interest, given the high prices charged for OT III. The Xenu story prompted the use of the volcano as a Scientology symbol.

Although I’m sure this is the way the Romans felt when they heard that some whack-job from some backwater had proclaimed himself God’s son and had been resurrected after his death by capital punishment.

Well maybe I should make sure that I use a positive word, instead of “battling” I should say “becoming more acquainted with” Lisp.

This stuff reminds me so much of my symbolic logic class back in school, the material is dense, the explanation is denser, and virtually all the best part of the learning is left as an exercisle to the reader, his supply of ink, and his supply of paper.

As such, I have spent many hours trying to accomplish but a few problems or feel comfortable in being able to model the world according to the syntax of Lisp.

I don’t really fault the author for the didactic style, some things are just inherently hard and require a lot of independent work.

Here’s my nemesis:

Define a function that takes a list and returns a list indicating the number of times each element appears, sorted from most common element to least common: >(occurrences ‘(a b a d a c d c a))

From Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp

Well after a lot of fighting I finally got the code. I was about to post it in this entry but then I decided to try another test and broke it . So the problem has but only begun to fight.

Upon further reflection I have decided that the most dangerous language has to be the language which tolerates and assists too much unsophistication. It’s not to say that something dangerous isn’t useful, notable, laudable or worthy (see: atomic fission) - it’s just dangerous.

This is why Perl is loved by systems administrators. Sysadmins generally have a lot of work to do, enough programming knowledge to understand things like iteration and decision structures, and Perl provides access to familiar unix tools underneath.

Thus, a novice Perl programmer (sysadmin type) can make something very dangerous very quickly by stitching his familiar toolkit pieces together with the duct tape of Perl. Quick example. Imagine your tools were a chainsaw and a staple-gun. Both items are dangerous but you know how to operate the two well.

Now say you duct tape the staple gun to the chain saw, you now have an object whose interactions are new, unfamiliar, and potentially very, very dangerous.

The flexibility of Perl and the power tools of the admin, when bound together without discipline has the potential to abet the creation of catastrophic evil.

An example for The Rest of Us:

Imagine you are to visit France. One, if one hopes to get by in the native tongue, does not need the baby words of French (mama, haricots verts). Rather, one wants the “power words and phrases” that will get them what a traveler needs: (lit/bed), (hotel/hotel), (metro/subway) (vin/wine).

To this extent there are textbooks that teach from ground 0 up (baby-talk up) and then there are the power-user books (“Survival French” / “French for Travelers”). Yet what if one mixes the two (as often happens). Complex ideas, lacking for discipline and abetted by the false assistance of the power-user books make for a dangerously unpredictable utterance.

“Me talk pretty someday” - Clearly the speaker is on baby-level, the listener realizes the speaker is incredibly limited.

“Where is the Metro to Montmartre” - The listener hears an adult utterance, phrased with a horrible accent. Tourist. Agh. Must be using one of those travel phrase books.

Confusion (and possibly danger) results when:

“Thank you for the directions I wanting much woman for kissing”

What’s that? Our listener thinks. Are you wanting to kiss my wife here on the bench? Are you asking my how to get to a brothel? And what very much makes you think that I would know the building on the left is a brothel? Or are you just asking where the local hotties are?

Perl allows people who should be bound into baby-grammar to produce dangerous utterances like just mentioned incredibly easily. Now I’m not debating the utility, many clueless admins have had their keester saved by Perl in dire time of need, but months later (assuming they continue in their study) they find the uttered program to be incomprehensible.

Thus it would seem: - Low learning curve, high potential for dangerous utterance, instant efficacy - High learning curve, low potential for dangerous utterance (can’t do it), slow efficacy

So here I sit, pouring ink and paper into the maw of Lisp, waiting to surmount the learning curve.

I would add that this phenomenon can also bee seen in snowsport:

• Skiing: Low learning curve, high potential for dangerous getting in over your head, instant efficacy

• Snowboarding: High learning curve, less potential for danger

I hope that the time I’m spending getting familiar with this yoke will allow me to do things undangerously as well as well in the future.

Yours truly, P-Dizzle, and Jeff occasioned to go out to dine yesterday evening. Frequent are the times that we head to Fiesta del Mar for margaritas and the mysterious, tasty, and orange enjococado sauce.

But that was not the case last night. Instead we were out to get a steak with chivas, or so Jeff had proclaimed. We headed up to Palo Alto to this pretty nice looking steakhouse called “Sundowner”. Along the way we saw the usual lather rinse repeat formula of the South Bay: Strip mall, gas station, office building.

Upon reaching the Sundowner we were told that we were in for a 2 hour wait. That’s too much for “a few drinks” so there we stood, hungry and without other recourse.

We decided to make an odyssey into the life of the surburbanite South Bay family - we hit “The Olive Garden”.

I’m laughing as I type that.

It’s not so much that it’s bad food it’s just that we just don’t go to chain establishments. In fact, I had largely forgotten that they even existed.

Jeff and I recalled that the OG had been good when it first started but had made a huge downhill slide. By our boom-bust reasoning, we gathered that they must be somewhere in the stride of their “it’s decent now” and so we went.

The first thing I noticed was that everyone was young. I mean, even the barkeep looked too young to be sloshing me a martini (btw. he did as good a job as the guys up in the city). We then ordered the food and received the bounteous breadsticks and endless salad.

I sat there regarding the families and dating couples of simpler means (mostly Stanford students by the look of it) and recalled that somewhere beyond the embryonic awareness of the single person sans restraint there is a world where my immediate surroundings qualifies as escape.

The fact that i find this quaint means that I must be some sort of horrible snob (guilty on multiple fronts, apparently) or that this is the promised reward of “good grades / good college / good job” - forgetting that these places exist…

In any case we headed back to Jeff’s place to watch “Ray” and sample the mysterious liquer known as Campari. I like mine with OJ, but it’s definitely an acquired taste.

I’ll stick with the gin and juice.

I must say, if the zenith of acting in a biopic is to make the audience forget that they’re watching an actor and not the actual person then Mr. Foxx is a shoe-in Sunday night.

No update since his bitter Valentine’s day entry.

Recursion is a programming technique, or a mathematical technique, or a set logic technique.

When a {function} (or {procedure}) calls itself. Such a function is called “recursive”. If the call is via one or more other functions then this group of functions are called “mutually recursive”. If a function will always call itself, however it is called, then it will never terminate. Usually however, it first performs some test on its arguments to check for a “base case” - a condition under which it can return a value without calling itself. The {canonical} example of a recursive function is {factorial}: factorial 0 = 1 factorial n = n * factorial (n-1)

So when a function calls itself it can be said to recursing. When the answer is found it is passed up to the previous instance of itself, that instance of itself passes it back up to itself until it reaches the first invocation of the function.

So the process of looping deeper, as I said above, is called recursing, what is the process of untangling the Gordian recursion knot, of digging back out? A word that seems to suggest itself is discursion as in discursive.

But…that means ranging from this topic and that. That’s not answer.

Could it be decurse? I’ve not found it in any jargon file. If you know, let me know.

I’m working on a new Moleskine notebook (see pronounciation guide above).

Yes, say it like you-a imagine-a chef-a boyardeeah talk-ah (or like, as Merlin Mann pointed out, Silvia Poggioli from NPR talks).

They’re great notebooks, buy one from these guys.

Post-hip Chick a teacher in SJ apparently had to teach this poetic gem by Robert Frost to her 8th graders:

I stepped on the toe/ Of an unemployed hoe. It rose in offense/ And struck me a blow…

Wow, where to start?

The CBC is reporting that Hunter Thompson has chosen to end his life, self-euthanising himself.

Thompson appears to have opted for a metaphorical hemlock versus deal with pain and the slow decline of his meat-vehicle.

Thanks for the stories, Hunter.

I ate a bowl of Grape Nuts with water to drink and milk.

I felt my chest get tight like heartburn…..but Grape Nuts gives no such burn?

So what of the 3 things I ate caused this? Water - nope, drink it often without ill result. Milk? Good guess, but i had the milk with my coffee 2 hours before the cereal, no ill result.

Therefore, I’m down to the Grape Nuts. I recall that after eating them at night I’d wake up with that tight feeling — I’m wondering if it’s a celiac sprue type thing.

I’ll try not to sweat it too much lest i psychosomatically create something.

Well it’s been quite the news story of late. I’m not interested in re-hashing it here, I didn’t break the story and it has been summed up elsewhere more succintly….but here’s a quick synopsis:

• A guy named “Jeff Gannon” has a press pass (after being cleared by FBI, Secret Service) to attend the president’s briefings
• Gannon tosses softball questions to president (i’m paraphrasing here) “How can you plan to work with congressional Democrats when they are clearly out of touch with reality?”
• In the blogosphere the liberal guys go: “Huh, that guy sounds like a real troll, who the hell is he.”
• “Jeff Gannon” is an alias of “James Guckert” who writes for a conservative website and maintains a number of gay porn web sites
• No, that was no typo
• Said gay porn sites advertise his uhm, attributes, sparing no detail. Two words: uncut, inches. Eww.

So this story broke loose not on mainstream media, but from a pair of political ‘blogs: dailykos and americablog.org.

After the sordid true story on this Gukcert guy came to light his reporting history was researched. Some evidence has come about that he has fed tips to cable news media. If he’s feeding tips, that means someone in the White House is tipping him. Currently it is being investigated if he might have had foreknowledge about the timing of the Iraq invasion and if he fed that.

This brings about the question: “Who is giving secret tips to the gay-porn monger masquerading as a journalist?

In any case, the salaciousness of the status of being a gay-porn monger aside, how is a person getting into White House briefings without being properly vetted by the FBI and Secret Service? Or did someone force-green-light him so as to avoid this scrutiny?

In any case, it’s developing. Keep your eyes peeled in mainstream media this next week. I suspect the blogged gadfly has stung them hard enough to get them into action.

salon.com has a good running record of articles here.

Good video snippets can be found at: onegoodmove.