moon traveller herald

I was reading about Alan Turing last night, after going to see some good music (Mark Schlack and his John Paine All Stars). I wanted to refer to Claude Shannon, and recalled an obit/appreciation I wrote for ITWorld when he died. It was hard to find... so I am fair using it in great part here just in case and for reference. ... Shannon was born in Petoskey, Mich., and grew up in Gaylord, Mich. He worked as a messenger for Western Union while in Gaylord High School, and attended college at MIT, where he was a member of Tau Beta Pi. Although the algebra of digital binary bits was first uncovered by mathematician George Boole in the mid-19th century, it was Shannon who saw the value of applying that form of logic to electronic communications. As a student of Vannevar Bush's at MIT in the 1930s, he worked on the differential analyzer, perhaps the greatest mechanical (analog) calculator. His paper, "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits," which led to a l...

Sunnyland Slim Meets Little Brother Montgomery- This poem depicts Sunnyland's first encounter with Little Brother in Canton, Miss. in 1923. Jack Vaughan, of Boston, Mass. recorded this reading Jan. 19, 2013.

The biggest stories in recent application development history -- Amazon.com and Google -- are so big that they are pretty much hidden. Both applications required a big helping of chutzpah to happen at all. And both disrupted existing industries, creating whole new ones. Amazon.com's and Google's development managers stuck their necks out and trusted clusters of cheap computers to deliver the goods. In Amazon's case, it was personalized shopping. For Google, it was lightening fast Internet searches that fed-up usually useful results along with targeted advertising. Both applications, under the hood, employed a fair helping of warmed-over AI technology of yore. It was the cheap clusters, though, that made things possible. Amazon.com doesn't mind putting developer effort into making custom logic servers, or tweaking OSes to provide the type of fault tolerance this mega-site needs. Even in 2004 the Amazon crew thought of their end product as an application, not just ...

God is gone up with lyres, harps, tambourines, sistrums, and instruments of all kinds the LORD with lyres, harps, - tambourines, harps, tambourines, harps, tambourines, harps, - and sackbuts,  the LORD and David with all Israel celebrating lyres, cornets, dulcimers harps, psaltery, tambourines, castanets and cymbals. Now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the LORD came on him. that was the time when you did hear the sound of all kinds of instruments while me, a dreaming minstrel boy did play.                                                                                   -Jack Vaughan, 2013 Some related foundational elements http://biblesuite.com/2_samuel/6-5.htm http://bibleencyclopedia.com...

A poem about Las Vegas comprises a collection of aphorism which illustrate the Buddhist notion of Dharma, or moral system. Found in an old copy of The Dhammapada that wandered back into the living room here. was at http://www.xtranormal.com/xtraplayr/13741376/oh-let-us-live-in-joy. What can I say about this year except that there was an election that seemed to set the tone for every living moment? I could not stomach the news shows, but woke up at 5 am on the day after the election to find out my candidate had won by a decent margin. That same morning the contrarian crew did not admit it was fair, and we were left pretty much where we started, on one level at least. I continue to get my father’s money’s worth out of a class I took at Marquette that drove home the notion of circular or mythical time , versus progressive ( as in La Follett, Christian dairy co-ops, or milk) time. As I get older, I see things “at a remove”. In terms of poetry, they were like jokes in old v...