Poet Marvin Bell, in his contribution to the collection Writers on Writing:
The future belongs to the helpless. I am often presented that irresistible question asked by the beginning poet: "Do you think I am any good?" I have learned to reply with a question: "If I say no, are you going to quit?" Because life offers any of us many excuses to quit. If you are going to quit now, you are almost certainly going to quit later. But I have concluded that writers are people who you cannot stop from writing. They are helpless to stop it.
Reading that passage brought to mind Ted Gioia's recent essay on musicians who can't seem to retire. Even after accomplishing much, these artists seem never want to stop doing their thing.
Just before starting Writers on Writing, I finished Kurt Vonnegut's Sucker's Portfolio, a slim 2013 volume of six stories and one essay not previously published. The book ends with an eighth piece: a short story unfinished at the time of Vonnegut's death. The story ends mid-sentence and, according to the book's editor, at the top of an unfinished typewritten page. In his mid-80s, Vonnegut was creating stories t the end.
I wouldn't mind if, when it's my time to go, folks find my laptop open to some fun little programming project I was working on for myself. Programming and writing are not everything there is to my life, but they bring me a measure of joy and satisfaction.
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This week was a wonderful confluence of reading the Bell, Gioia, and Vonnegut pieces around the same time. So many connections... not least of which is that Bell and Vonnegut both taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
There's also an odd connection between Vonnegut and the Gioia essay. Gioia used a quip attributed to the Roman epigrammist Martial:
Fortune gives too much to many, but enough to none.
That reminded me of a story Vonnegut told occasionally in his public talks. He and fellow author Joseph Heller were at a party hosted by a billionaire. Vonnegut asked Heller, "How does it make you feel to know that guy made more money yesterday than Catch-22 has made in all the years since it was published?" Heller answered, "I have something he'll never have: the knowledge that I have enough."
There's one final connection here, involving me. Marvin Bell was the keynote speaker at Camouflage: Art, Science & Popular Culture an international conference organized by graphic design prof Roy Behrens at my university and held in April 2006. Participants really did come from all around the world, mostly artists or designers of some sort. Bell read a new poem of his and then spoke of:
the ways in which poetry is like camouflage, how it uses a common vocabulary but requires a second look in order to see what is there.I gave a talk at the conference called NUMB3RS Meets The DaVinci Code: Information Masquerading as Art. (That title was more timely in 2006 than 2023...) I presented steganography as a computational form of camouflage: not quite traditional concealment, not quite dazzle, but a form of dispersion uniquely available in the digital world. I recall that audience reaction to the talk was better than I feared when I proposed it to Roy. The computer science topic meshed nicely with the rest of the conference lineup, and the artists and writers who saw the talk seemed to appreciate the analogy. Anyway, lots of connections this week.
The other night, I wanted to have some fun, so I implemented a few Racket functions to implement Flavius Josephus's sieve. Think the sieve of Eratosthenes, but with each pass applied to the numbers left after the previous pass:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 ...
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 ... - after pass 1 (remove every 2nd)
1 3 7 9 13 15 ... - after pass 2 (remove every 3rd)
1 3 7 13 15 ... - after pass 3 (remove every 4th)
...
My code isn't true to the mathematical ideal, because it doesn't process the unbounded sequence of natural numbers. (Haskell, with lazy evaluation, might be a better choice for that!) Instead, it works on a range [1..n] for a given n. That's plenty good enough for me to see how the sequence evolves.
I ended up using a mix of higher-order functions and recursive functions. When it comes to time to filter out every kth item in the previous sequence, I generate a list of booleans with false in every kth position and true elsewhere. For example, '(#t #t #f #t #t #f ...) is the mask for the pass that filters out every third item. Then, this function:
(define filter-with-mask
(lambda (lon mask)
(map car
(filter (lambda (p) (cdr p))
(map cons lon mask)))))
applies a mask to a list of numbers lon and produces an updated list of numbers. The rest of the code is a recursive
function that, on each pass, applies the next mask in sequence to the list remaining after the previous pass.
I won't be surprised if my mathematician friends, or readers who are better Racket programmers, can suggest a more elegant way to "strain" a list, but, hey, I'm a programmer. This is a simple enough approach that does the job. The code is reasonably fast and flexible.
In any case, it was a nice way to spend an hour after a long day on campus. My wife just smiled when I told what I was going to do to relax that evening. She knows me well.
Catching up on articles in my newsreader and ran across Commands I Use by @gvwilson. That sounded like fun, and I was game:
$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr > commands.txt
The first four items on my list are essentially the same as Wilson's, and there are a lot of other similarities, too. I don't think this is surprising, given how Unix works and how much sense git makes for software developers to use.
It's interesting to see that I use rm and /bin/rm in roughly even measure. I would have guessed that I used the guarded command in higher proportion.
At the bottom of the tally are a few items I don't use often, or don't generally launch from the command line:
... and a bunch of typos, including:
That was fun! Thanks to Greg for the prompt.
(These days, I'm posting a bit more on Mastodon. It has a higher character limit than Twitter, so I sometimes write longer posts, including quoted passages. Those long posts start to blur in length and content with blog posts. In an effort to blog more, and to preserve writing that may have longer value than a social media post provides, I may start capturing threads there as blog posts here. This post originated as a Mastodon post last week.)
~~~~~
This post contains one of the reasons I tell prospective CS students to take their humanities and social science courses seriously:
In short, the key skill for making sense of the world of information is developing the ability to accurately and neutrally summarize some body of information in your own words.
The original poster responded that it wasn't until going back to pursue a master's degree in library and information science that this lesson hit home for him.
I always valued my humanities and social science courses, both because I enjoyed them and because they let me practice valuable skills that my CS and math courses didn't exercise. But this lesson hit home for me in a different way after I became a professor.
Over my years teaching, I've seen students succeed and struggle in a lot of different ways. The ability to read and synthesize information with facility is one of the main markers of success, one of the things that can differentiate between students who do well and those who don't. It's also hard to develop this skill after students get to college. Nearly every course and major depends on it, even technical courses, even courses and majors that don't foreground this kind of skill. Without it, students keep falling farther behind. It's hard to develop the skill quickly enough to not fall so far behind that success feels impossible.
So, kids and parents, when you ask how to prepare to succeed as a CS student while in high school, one of my answers will almost always be: take four years of courses in every core area, including English and social science. The skills you develop and practice there will pay off many-fold in college.
Bruce Springsteen, on why he puts on such an intense physical show:
So the display of exuberance is critical. "For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself," he says. "Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it's really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time."
This passage is from a 2012 profile of the Boss, We Are Alive: Bruce Springsteen at Sixty-Two. A good read throughout.
Another comment from earlier in the piece has been rumbling around my head since I read it. Many older acts, especially those of Springsteen's vintage, have become essentially "their own cover bands", playing the oldies on repeat for nostalgic fans. The Boss, though, "refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past" and continually evolves as an artist. That's an inspiration I need right now.
Today I received an email message similar to this:
I didn't do very well in my first semester, so I'm looking for ways to do better this time around. Do you have any ideas about study resources or tips for succeeding in CS courses?
As an advisor, I'm occasionally asked by students for advice of this sort. As department head, I receive even more queries, because early on I am the faculty member students know best, from campus visits and orientation advising.
When such students have already attempted a CS course or two, my first step is always to learn more about their situation. That way, I can offer suggestions suited to their specific needs.
Sometimes, though, the request comes from a high school student, or a high school student's parent: What is the best way to succeed as a CS student?
To be honest, most of the advice I give is not specific to a computer science major. At a first approximation, what it takes to succeed as a CS student is the same as what it takes to succeed as a student in any major: show up and do the work. But there are a few things a CS student does that are discipline-specific, most of which involve the tools we use.
I've decided to put together a list of suggestions that I can point our students to, and to which I can refer occasionally in order to refresh my mind. My advice usually includes one or all of these suggestions, with a focus on students at the beginning of our program:
That's what came to mind at the end of a Friday, at the end of a long week, when I sat down to give advice to one student. I'd love to hear your suggestions for improving the suggestions in my list, or other bits of advice that would help our students. Email me your ideas, and I'll make my list better for anyone who cares to read it.