I'm not complaining. We have great weather, delicious seafood and fine wine. It just feels so arcane, when googling a reference isn't instantaneous. Yesterday I tried to explain this to Stella and Luke. They wanted to watch the newest movie trailers. I couldn't deliver. They were inconsolable. To them the notion of wires, modems and limited bandwidth is as alien as a summer without ice cream.

Here are some comments on the books I've been reading:

• Richard Feynman - A Life in Science by John and Mary Gribbin is the most interesting Feynman biography I've read so far. Such a nice book about a brilliant man. Highly recommended!
• The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin is a scary book. Sometime in the not too distant future, we will be able to build a Truth Machine. Halperin believes it will save the world. I don't buy it. The powers that be will not hesitate to use it as a tool of oppression. Democracies will be transformed into police states and freedom of thought will die. His believe, that a (world) government using the Truth Machine will make this world a better and safer place is utterly wrong. If anything we need less government and less control over the individual.

Back to the reading list:

• The Truth Machine by James L. Halperin
• The Paleo Diet by Loren Cordain
• Richard Feynman by John and Mary Gribbin
• Bayesian Artificial Intelligence by Korb and Nicholson
• The Confusion by Neal Stephenson (again)
• On Lisp - Advanced Techniques for Common Lisp by Paul Graham (again)

Over the last couple of weeks I collected numerous papers in a Read This! folder. This morning I read a paper written by Hans Moravec in 1975 titled: The Role of Raw Power in Intelligence. Thirty years after its publication it's still quite to the point:

The enormous shortage of ability to compute is distorting our work, creating problems where there are none, making others impossibly difficult, and generally causing effort to be misdirected. Shouldn't this view be more widespread, if it is as obvious as I claim?

In the early days of AI the thought that existing machines might be much too small was widespread, but there was hope that clever mathematics and advancing computer technology could soon make up the difference. Since then computers have improved by a factor of ten every five years, but, in spite of reasonably diligent work by a reasonable number of people, the results have been embarrassingly sparse. The realization that available compute power might still be vastly inadequate has since been swept under the rug, due to wishful thinking and a feeling that there was nothing to be done about it anyway and that voicing such an opinion could cause AI to be considered impractical, resulting in reduced funding.

There is also an element of scientific snobbery. Many of the most influential names in the field seem to feel that AI should be like the theoretical side of physics, the essential problem being to find the laws of universe relating to intelligence. Once these are known, the thinking goes, construction of efficient intelligent machines will be trivial. Suggestions that the problems are essentially engineering ones of scale and complexity, and can be solved by incremental improvements and occasional insights into sub-problems, are treated with disdain.

This attitude is a variant of the philosophical notion that all truth can be arrived at by pure thought, and is unfounded and harmful. One wonders what state space travel would be in if the Goddards and von Brauns had spent their time trying to find the universal laws of rocket construction before trying to build space ships. AI needs a stronger experimental base. Like other branches of endeavor (notably physics, aeronautics and meteorology), we should realize our desperate need for more computing, and do things about it.

AspectL provides a number of features that have been developed in the recent years in the AOSD community. Some of them have been generalized in the process of translating them to Common Lisp.

This is version 0.5 of AspectL. Currently, this is only distributed as a collection of source files together with system definitions for asdf and the LispWorks defsystem. It has been developed and tested on LispWorks for Macintosh Personal Edition, 4.3r2 (4.3.7). It is extremely unlikely that the system will work on other Common Lisp implementations since it depends heavily on the correct behavior of the CLOS MOP. Other MOPs I have tried are the ones for Allegro Common Lisp 6.2, SBCL, and OpenMCL, all on Mac OS X. I think I can make AspectL work on these platforms, provided I can get into contact with those responsible for the MOP implementations of the respective CLs. I will probably not be able to make special generic functions work on OpenMCL, since it doesn't and probably won't implement the generic function invocation protocol of the MOP. Please let me know what you are interested in.

It's fast enough to be useful. In fact, it's a lot faster than I was expecting.[...] A very pleasant suprise. This leads me to think that 10 years ago or more, these machines must have seemed wicked fast.

All in all, I am very, very pleased with my decision to purchase one. Definitely no regrets, and I'm a lot happier than if I had purchased something else, like a Powerbook or other laptop, like I was contemplating.

Here is a list of some of the papers:

• Programming in an Interactive Environment: The Lisp Experience by Erik Sandewall
• The Interlisp Programming Environment by Warren Teitelmann and Larry Masinter
• Automated Programmering: The Programmer's Apprentice by Warren Teitelman
• EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable, Self Documenting Display Editor by Richard M. Stallman
• The LISP Machine by Richard D. Greenblatt, Thomas F. Knight and Daniel L. Weinreb
• Initial Report on a Lisp Programmer's Apprentice by Charles Rich and Howard E. Shrobe
• The UNIX Programming Environment by Brian W. Kernighan and John R. Mashey

I have seen things you people wouldn't  believe:
a Racal Norsk  on fire in the basement at the University of Oslo.
a Symbolics 3600 dropped on the floor while moving the comp.sci. department.
Lisp classes given witout any course credits.
All these moments will be lost in time,
like Teco.
Time to go for Java.

The "tears in the rain" line is my favorite in that movie, so I might
have said:

 like Teco in line noise.