Let me start by saying this: I can’t possibly be the first one to think about this.
I’ve been working up in Mountain View, this week. It was a great trip, and I stayed in a totally gorgeous little place. When I got home from work, I either went running or biking. After that, I cooked myself a small dinner, ate it outside, then went into my room to get a bit of work done or get ready for bed.
Macros are a wonderful thing. A hygienic macro system puts language extensions within the reach of non-compiler-hackers.
However, to date, most modern, hygienic macro systems are associated with languages like Scheme and Racket that are quite high-level. My claim is that macros are probably much more useful in low-level languages. Here’s why:
The student-run Cal Poly Solar Decathlon site is now online, at http://www.calpolysolardecathlon.org.
Check it out!
I’m sympathetic to Teachers’ unions. In fact, I’m in the Teachers’ union. More specifically, I’m a tenure-track associate professor at Cal Poly, and a member of the California Faculty Association.
Many of the faculty union’s actions I find commendable. In particular, I’m thankful that the union supports faculty wages1, and tries to ensure the continued presence of full-time faculty.
However, I find the union’s seniority rules pretty much indefensible. In particular, article 38.16 of the contract (Collective Bargaining Agreement) negotiated by the CFA with the California State University system (or CSU) stipulates (IANAL) that “The President shall establish the order of layoff for tenured faculty unit employees in a unit of layoff by reverse order of seniority.”
Why would this be the case? Is the administration presumed to be so incapable of estimating worth that this decision needs to be taken out of their hands completely? It appears to me that the current goal of the union is to demonize every aspect of the CSU administration’s activity. The level of the CFA rhetoric in its published materials is incredibly low; to take just one example, the idea of paying more money to certain employees based on their performance is described by the CFA as “Pucker Pay.” Please.
Now’s where I should launch into a detailed analysis of the history of labor laws and the role played by seniority layoffs… but I don’t have that background, or that time. If I could build a model using Redex and publish it in POPL, I’d be all over it. Instead, it will just be my opinion.
Here’s another part of my opinion: civil discourse is the basis for forward progress in our government.
I guess I can say this: I voted for Marshall Tuck.
1 though probably not mine, actually
What? There are no decimal time zones?
Okay, backing up.
I love time-wasting hard-to-learn idiosyncrasies. I use the dvorak keyboard, I run in sandals I make myself, I run my own mail server (surely the stupidest of my habits).
About two years ago I “invented” decimal time. Which is to say: I did in fact think of it myself. Unfortunately, there’s a bit of prior art here, going back to the French Revolution.
Short version: Our current day has 86,400 seconds in it. This is not really very far from 100,000. So… what if we just designated a decimal second as being 1/100,000 of a day? then we could have all of our hours and minutes be decimal divisions. More specifically: the day is divided into 10 decimal hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each minute into 100 decimal seconds. Works great! The decimal hours are quite long, but the decimal minutes are pretty close to our existing ones.
A brief diary of broken bicycle frames.
All dates approximate.
This list does not include broken axles or bent forks.
EDIT:
Back in 2005, Cal Poly placed third in the Solar Decathlon… and there’s a movie, to prove it!
The Rahus Institute has graciously agreed to put their 2005 Solar Decathlon movie online. Here’s the first of three segments of the hour-long movie.
I feel like the list of things I’m outraged about politically is always growing. How can I keep track of it?
I have the feeling I’m going to be adding to these.
I’m totally delighted to move from octopress to Greg Hendershott’s frog, a Racket-based static blog generator. No more of those !@#$ RVMENVRCETCETC dot files.
Yes, there are still lots of things to fix. Some of those images are a wee bit enormous, for instance. That’s not going to happen today.
Granite Mon 2013 is in the books. Well, in some books. This was the 19th running of the … well, of the Long Island Challenge part of the Granite Mon. This year it was organized by Alice Clements, and enjoyed by many.
We arose at an absurdly early hour on August 17th, and met at the KYC at 5:00 AM. Miraculously, we had plenty of chase boats, despite a few late cancellations. We counted seven swimmers and eight chase boats, if I recall correctly, so we packed kayaks into the motorboats and headed over.
It was a really lovely morning:
starting out
Here we are after we finished:
all done
From left to right, in this picture:
Justin Pollard
Matt ??
Also swimming was Matt, whose last name I can’t remember and who is cut out of the picture. That’s really too bad, and if anyone can give me a picture, I’ll stick it in here.