"A Triumph of Engineering over Design"

Jim Horning has a nice cautionary tale about the over-zealous application of auto-correction in one of the IBM PL/I compilers:

It always converted its input into legal PL/I; whenever it encountered an error, it modified the program to a form it could deal with; and it always executed the compiled result, no matter how many errors had been encountered.

I suppose its creators thought they were being helpful in covering up the users' mistakes...

Making my Walk to and from the Station more Interesting

Each week day I walk past various drab buildings as I walk to and from the railway station. Just recently, I realised that most of them look much better reflected in the river. Now I often carry my camera with me so as to be able to take photos when the lighting and the river surface are just right. Here is one of the results.

No Miracle Cure Yet for Bad Science Reporting...

A couple of weeks ago on Radio 2 I overheard a piece about Wynford Dore's proposed cure for dyslexia.  When I heard the phrases 'miracle cure', 'techniques developed by NASA' and 'Daily Mail', I immediately suspected that the story was not quite as solid as it was being presented and, sure enough, a few days later I found out that it wasn't.  I was tempted to sit down right then and post a fiery rant about the abysmally poor level of science reporting which seems to be the norm nowadays but, instead, I let myself cool down, and leave it to some people whose rants carry far more weight than mine: Ben Goldacre, Mark Trodden and Peter Norvig.

Spend a Year in a Couple of Hours...

While I am wallowing in YouTube-inspired nostalgia, here is a clip of the excellent John Cooper Clarke reading Beasley Street. Try to ignore the visuals, which are rather distracting.  I saw JCC only once: at Leeds Polytechnic in 1978 or 1979, supporting Stiff Little Fingers.  He usually performs without musical backing.

A Long Time Ago in a University Far, Far Away…

Back in the autumn of 1977, when I was a young and impressionable student at Leeds University, I went to my first rock concert.  This is how it started (you need turn your sound up really loud to get a true impression of what it was really like).  Four days later my ears were still ringing.  (The video is actually from a concert in Munich, but the one that I went to in Leeds  was very similar).