Media Share 9/MEDIASHARE_09.ISO/private/tg120.zip/WORKING.NEW

Text File | 1993-03-24 | 20KB | 416 lines

*
* ARCHIVE: WORKING.NEW
*
* DATE: 03/24/93
*
* EDITOR(S):
*
*        Editor   1 : Paul J. Clegg  ([e-mail])
*        Editor   2 : Steve Baker  ([e-mail])
*
* NUMBER OF ARTICLES: 5
*


********************** I M P O R T A N T   N O T I C E **********************

This archive is maintained by Steve Baker ([e-mail])
  and is continually evolving as new articles arrive.  Watch for changes!

*****************************************************************************


*
*
* REAL (Fact) ARTICLES -- 5
*
*   2R20   -- Des Moines, Iowa, USA, Earth
*   2R21   -- Gravity
*   2R22   -- McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Earth
*   2R23   -- Program Structure Wars
*   2R24   -- Sleep
*
*


%t Des Moines, Iowa, USA, Earth
%n 2R20
%s The Land of Pigs and Corn
%a Warren Kurt vonRoeschlaub  ([e-mail])
%d 19930117
%i Iowa
%x Earth
%e
Many people think that Des Moines is a small town in the middle of nowhere
with nothing interesting to see in it.  They are right.  However, this does
not mean that the average hitchhiker should skip stopping there.  Since Des
Moines sits in the dead center of Interstate 80, the road that connects New
York to San Francisco, anyone making a trip from one half of the US to the
other will probably be passing by anyway.

If nothing else, one could certainly pick up a great deal of novelty items
with a pig motif, many of which are truly hideous.

Another place to visit is the Iowa Historical Farms.  This is located just
off the parkway as it traverses the western edge of the city.  It consists
of several farms from different eras in US history, all in full operation
using only the correct period machinery.  Do not visit if you are bothered
by flies.  Do not visit in the middle of August unless you have worn a ski
jacket in Malaysia and thought it was quite cool.

One of Des Moines' biggest celebrities is Tiny Tim.  No he wasn't born
there; Tiny Tim was born in New York City.  And he doesn't live there, he
lives in Los Angeles.  But apparently Tiny Tim does like the city, since he
drops by all the time, usually to make a commercial, or host a talk show on
the radio.  Don't be surprised if all the radio personalities in the area are
talking about what a great guy he is, even if he is 70 years old and still
goes by the name "Tiny."

If you are interested in famous people, Harriet Nelson and Sada Thompson
were born in Des Moines.  Don't be upset if you have never heard of them;
nobody has.  Not even people who live in Des Moines.

Des Moines has a population of about 190,000 people, which is about as big
as many other thriving metropolitan areas, like Ewa, Hawaii, or Spokane,
Washington.  However, Des Moines covers such a large area that it doesn't
feel nearly as crowded.  One third of Des Moines is malls, with only the
remaining two thirds left for small businesses, factories, office buildings,
and residential areas.  Don't go to Des Moines if you have mallophobia.

What about that rich Iowan history?  Well, thousands of years ago, people
crossed the land bridge from Asia into the Americas.  Some of them, known as
the "mound builders" because their neighbors were jealous that they liked to
build hills, settled in Iowa.  This was so that the mounds they built would
be the highest point in the state.

In 1673, two explorers named Marquette and Joliette (they were French and
could get away with names like that) visited the mound builders.  Only a
fragment of the original discourse remains:

Marquette: "We claim this land in the name of France."
Chief Mound Builder: "Hey, we were here first you know."
Joliette: "Did I mention the infantry we brought with us?"
Chief Mound Builder: "Vivre la France!"

Despite this setback, the mound builders were able to adjust to eating a lot
of bread and being rude to foreigners until the United States purchased
Iowa in 1803.  The mound builders were then moved from Iowa and given a plot
of land in southern New Jersey.
%e
*EOA*


%t Gravity
%n 2R21
%s All the average person needs to know about gravitation
%a Andrew Mark Kuchling  ([e-mail])
%d 19930208
%i General Relativity
%i Tensor Calculus
%e
One of the most remarkable forces in the universe is known as
gravitation.  There are other fundamental forces, ranging from the two
nuclear forces to electromagnetism, but none of them is of any
importance to anyone who doesn't want to spend their life considering
time-retarded integrals, group theory, and the horrible decor of physics
classrooms.  We can see why by considering Newton's law of gravitation:

          F=G*m[1]*m[2]/(r^2)  : G is a proportionality constant,
                                 m[1] and m[2] are the two masses,
                                 and r is the distance between them.

As far as we know, G is constant at all times and at all points in the
universe.  Gravity always attracts (there are no negative masses) while
electromagnetism can also repel; thus, it is extremely difficult to build
up a large amount of charge in one location.  Gravity decreases with r^2,
while the nuclear forces decrease with e^r, meaning they are noticeable only
over subatomic distances.

Therefore, these other forces can be safely left to the glossy pages of
physics journals, where they won't cause any harm beyond the publication
of theoretical papers.  (Physics lore claims that, asked to prove the
stability of a table, a theoretical physicist can quickly derive a solution
for a table with an infinite number of legs, and will then spend the next
thirty years trying to solve the special case of a table with a finite,
non-zero number of legs.)  Gravity, on the other hand, is important to
anyone who wants to travel through space and arrive at a given point on
the first try.  The various theories of gravitation lead to many interesting
results, such as bread always falling on the carpet with the butter-and-
jam side down, black holes forming, and lost change vanishing into sofa
crevices.

Unfortunately, all these really interesting gravitational phenomena require
a knowledge of General Relativity to understand.  Newtonian gravity is
almost exclusively used to derive orbits, and celestial mechanics has
become a nightmare of eccentricities, tidal forces, and mathematical
techniques all invented by Frenchmen whose names begin with 'L'.  Any
society needing really accurate orbital calculations is capable of building
computers able to numerically integrate them.

Therefore, in the real universe you don't have to worry about getting
actual symbolic expressions for orbital parameters; it's simpler to dump
all the masses and velocities into a suitable program and hope the
programmers responsible for the floating point routines weren't prone to
forgetting to check the carry flag.

General Relativity, on the other hand, deals with black holes, space
warps, time travel, and all the other things one finds badly mangled in
Shirley MacLaine's books.  To do this, however, one is forced to use
tensor calculus, a generalization of vector and scalar calculus that is
best defined as the field where one uses every Greek letter as both
super- and sub-scripts simultaneously.  Many theorems can be proved by
writing down some basic equations and manipulating them until an error
is made that lets the proof be easily completed.  (Confusing the letter
zeta with anything else is frequently used.  When handwritten, either
very quickly or with the greatest care, zeta always ends up looking like
a random squiggle; there is a Nobel Prize waiting for anyone who manages
to replace zeta with something simpler, like a 10-stroke Chinese ideogram.)

Errors in derivations have occasionally caused comical results; for
example, one result for the effect of emission of gravitational radiation
by two orbiting neutron stars was antidamping.  The emission of the
radiation would supposedly increase the orbital velocities, and hence
increase further emission, and so on.  Someone actually managed to get
that result published, thus proving that inhaling chalk dust over long
periods does indeed cause brain damage.

While a knowledge of all of the above may be useful for small talk at
cocktail parties, it probably isn't.
%e
*EOA*


%t McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Earth
%n 2R22
%s A high, cold place looking out over the universe (and Sherbrooke St.)
%a Andrew Mark Kuchling  ([e-mail])
%d 19930208
%x Earth
%e
A respectable hitchhiker is, of course, a contradiction in terms.
Hence, one of the places towards which hitchhikers gravitate is
frequently a college, university or other location of purportedly
higher education.  Here one can encounter eccentric geniuses,
promiscuous political science students, robotic graduate students, and
the occasional sober engineer.  Also present are libraries,
laboratories, computers, security staff, cafeterias, and professors.

To this standard design, McGill University adds one refinement: large
falling masses of ice and snow.  The extreme steepness of many roofs
at McGill means that in spring one must exercise extreme caution when
moving from building to building, unless one enjoys the tingly feeling
of having a 50-centimeter icicle embedded in one's cranium.  Smart
visitors either avoid walking under eaves or stay away from the
eastern side of the campus.  Extremely smart visitors may leave
immediately (or, better yet, avoid McGill completely) but they will
miss the opportunity to visit the University Center, recently renamed
the William Shatner University Center to honor a past graduate who
has done absolutely nothing for the university, but a great deal for
comedians.

Despite this drawback, McGill is still a wonderful place to visit.
Not because of anything intrinsically fascinating in the institution
itself, but because of its central location in the downtown core of
Montreal.  A walk of fifteen minutes in one direction will put you in
front of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and its attendant art galleries,
high-toned boutiques, and ferociously expensive restaurants (where to
enter wearing denim will lead to immediate arrest); going in the other
direction, one will wind up on St. Laurent street, remarkable for the
highest concentration of tattoo parlors in the city (handy for occupying
those one-hour breaks between classes).

There is an odd dichotomy at McGill.  It was built from donations by
rich, privileged Montrealers, and practically all of its buildings bear
their names.  The usual tie-dyed minority complains of the bedrock of
oppression McGill rests upon, yet, instead of leaving the place in
disgust, they write articles for the newspapers and demand partial
funding for staff parties.  (This is similar to the Guide's system,
except that the Guide is acquired voluntarily.)  The rest of the student
body ignores them, and continues kicking recycling bins out of the way
as it stampedes into courses rumored to be easy A's.

Unfortunately, McGill's past status as the premier educational institution
in Canada is shrinking rapidly (like its enrollment).  Library
underfunding, a multi-million dollar debt, a declining and pathetic
student population, and the increasing stupidity of both student and
academic administrations, all point toward a dark future.  Hitchhikers
wishing to visit McGill as a university, and not as a collection of
decaying buildings, are advised to hurry.
%e
*EOA*


%t Program Structure Wars
%n 2R23
%a Andrew Mark Kuchling  ([e-mail])
%s A silly verbal tempest in an even sillier teapot
%d 19930223
%i Computer Language Wars
%i Structured Programming
%e
Controversy swirls around computers like chocolate in a marbled cake.
Aficionados battle over different models, operating systems, and
applications.  It is a universal fact that the vehemence of an
argument is in inverse relationship to the importance of the arguers.
Perhaps the most violent of these debates center around computer
languages.  There are two extremist camps in the debate:

          1)  The Structured Programming crowd:  This camp believes
              programs should be clearly and logically broken down into
              small modules, each one of which will be given a separate
              procedure.  They also claim that many errors can be
              prevented by implementing a strong type checking system so
              that different data types (such as integer and real numbers)
              are not interchangeable, and attempting to use one instead of
              the other results in an error.  Truly fanatic Structured
              Programmers can easily be recognized; they are the ones
              simultaneously maintaining flowcharts, pseudocode and
              procedure trees as they develop a program.  Their favorite
              languages require one to memorize countless functions to
              convert from integer to real, character to integer, Boolean
              to character, meaning one has to disentangle skeins of
              conversion functions.  This is supposed to make program code
              understandable at a glance.  It doesn't.

          2)  The Unstructured Programming group:  This group hates to
              have any rules imposed on them.  Many of them cut their
              teeth on tiny microcomputers, and because of this early
              experience believe that every line of a program must be
              absolutely optimal for the machine it's running on.  Any
              technique which is not the fastest one possible is
              unacceptable.  For example, benchmarks showed that the
              Commodore 64's BASIC evaluated a lone '.' as zero faster
              than it would a '0'.  Many BASIC programs were full of lines
              like 'FOR I=. TO 255', even in cases where the resulting
              speedup would be nonexistent, such as in initialization code
              which is executed exactly once per execution of the program.
              Such programmers dislike leaving anything to a compiler, and
              prefer to hand-optimize compiled object code.  Moving such
              code to a different system is a nightmarish task, because
              the instructions were carefully crafted to fit a certain
              machine; unstructured programmers live in deathly fear of
              upgrading (with good reason).

The acrimonious debate between the two parties is eternal.  Unstructured
programmers use languages like Fortran and C; structured programmers like
Niklaus Wirth's languages, such as Pascal and Oberon.  Enormous amounts
of time are spent arguing over which language is superior, and over whether
structured programming is a blessing or a curse.  Truly intelligent people
don't belong to either religion.

The third group in this melee is that of the Moderates.  Moderates
completely agree that structuring programs logically into procedures,
and using type checking to ensure parameters and results are correctly
handled, are Good Things.  However, they also know that there are an
infinite number of programming situations that a language will have to
handle, and that no language designer will be able to foresee them
all.  Therefore, it is best if a language is loose enough to allow
dodging some of its constraints while using others to guard against
error; otherwise, limitations that seemed reasonable on the drawing
board will become straitjackets, forcing the program code into obscure
contortions to accomplish its goal.

From this point of view, all languages are fairly even.  With enough
care, beautifully designed programs can be written in any of them, and
there will never be a language in which it will be difficult to write
bad programs.  But choosing a language carefully means getting the
best of both worlds; safety from careless errors and freedom to
design elegant systems.
%e
*EOA*


%t Sleep
%n 2R24
%s The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of
%a Alex Miller  ([e-mail])
%d 19920202
%e
Sleep is fundamentally good.

It is something to be enjoyed, worshipped, loved, and cherished.  Humans
spend rather a large part of their lives either sleeping or wishing they
were.  The problem is most people don't take time to enjoy their sleep, to
revel in the very essence of sleepiness and how good it is to finally drift
off, away from the world.

Besides being all-together enjoyable, sleep is necessary for us to lead
normal, productive lives, the scientists say.  Sleep research has revealed
that the brain must have this "down-time" in order to be able to deal with
reality and consciousness the rest of the time.  Research has revealed that
the most restful type of sleep occurs while humans undergo Rapid Eye
Movement, or REM.  During so-called REM sleep there are spasms of the eye
muscles that are clearly visible to an observer.  Some of the more sadistic
sleep research has been on the subject of sleep depravation, or going for
extended periods of time without sleep.  Scientists have found that sleep
depravation, which leads to REM depravation, can have severe effects over
relatively short periods of time.  For instance, nuclear reactor failures
and problems have largely been linked to operator fatigue.

As a college student, I can attest that students are perhaps hit hardest
in the need for sleep.  In fact, to the college student, the entire
educational experience can sometimes appear to be a giant sleep
depravation experiment.  The typical student leads a schedule of sufficient
weirdness that sleep is not a part of the regular routine.  Hence, the
age-old student problems of sleeping through a day (or week) of classes
and sleeping during class are not something to be solved, but tolerated.
It is also important to note that unusual sleeping habits do tend to have
an adverse effect on grades.  (However, this is the least of the typical
student's problems.)

There is also the matter of sleeping style.  Everyone has a unique style,
or method of sleeping, whether they are aware of it or not.  In fact, they
often aren't aware of it, because they are sleeping while it is taking
place.  Perhaps the most common sleeping trait is snoring, which can range
from a gentle sniffling to a great hawking roar of a honk, sure to wake
people for miles around.  Others find that they tend to walk or talk in
their sleep which can lead to a number of interesting and potentially
dangerous positions.  For instance, I have heard tales of a sleeping college
student who mistook a fellow student's room for the urinal in the deep of
the night, leading to a rather unfortunate end for everyone involved.  As
children and occasionally later in life, many humans have problems
controlling their bladder at night.  This is always a consideration when
searching for a roommate.

A final sleeping problem is that of insomnia, or an inability to fall
asleep even when one is quite tired.  There are many classic ways to
solve this problem, such as counting sheep or drinking warm milk.  I
personally prefer a good knock with a lead pipe - I've never seen it fail.

"To sleep, perchance to dream," said Hamlet, and although he was really
talking about death, I think it applies anyway.  Dreaming can be a
wonderful thing, fulfilling your fantasies, or it can be a terrible thing,
leaving you in a cold sweat, terrified to leave your room.  Either way,
it is the ultimate story-making machine, far better than movies or books,
because it relies on the imagination without form.  Often, however, this
lack of form can also lead to strange or surprising results.  Consider,
for instance, the dream of yourself in a public place, but without a stitch
of clothing.  Sound familiar?  Freud used dreams as the basis for his work
because he believed that they were a window into the unconscious, a way to
see into a person's soul.  Nifty stuff, all together.

Sweet dreams.
%e
*EOA*


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* SEMI-REAL (Both) ARTICLES -- 0
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* UNREAL (Fiction) ARTICLES -- 0
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* End of WORKING.NEW
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