Arjun’s note: Here is part 3 of my good friend Dougal’s description of life in Nepal. You can find part 1 here and part 2 here.

My host family is awesome.

There’s a baa (dad), aamaa (mom), hajurbaa (grandfather), a 14-year old bahini (younger sister), a 9-year old bahini, and a 2-year old bhaai (little brother). At first, it was hard to get any communication through, but every day, there’s been slightly more than the day before. Playing with my bhaai was also critical on the first day, as was showing the family calendar with pictures of all the relatives on my mom’s side. My baa’s daai (older brother) lives about forty feet up the hill with his family — a wife, a 16-ish son and 18-ish daughter, and another student on the program. My Nepali name is Suman Khetri and his is Saman Khetri, which is a little ridiculous, but they didn’t coordinate it beforehand or anything. My baa works for the recently-privatized drinking water company, and my aamaa is an elementary school teacher.

We live in a village called Jygata, which is pretty rural, on the foot of some hills that in the US would be mountains. With the Himalayas in sight when it’s not too foggy, though, they’re hills. It’s about a 40-minute walk from the program house, which I thought might be a problem, but it really hasn’t been at all. The four of us who live in the village walk together, and the fields on the way are beautiful.

I’ll upload pictures at some point, but I don’t have my camera with me. I’m in Kathmandu, at an internet cafe that’s faster, but also more expensive. (About two hours ago, I used one that was slower than the slowest one I’ve used in the village here, but just as expensive as this fast one….couldn’t even update my Facebook status.) This is also the first one I’ve been to that isn’t running IE6, which is nice. (It’s an actually-updated copy of Firefox 3!) Plus, this one I can set to use Dvorak, which means I don’t need to stare at the keyboard the whole time! All the computers here have been exclusively Windows XP, though; the standard matches in the program house and at the store are these crappy plastic ones with the Windows logo on them.

This cafe is probably so much better because I’m in the touristy area, called Thamel. All the students on the program just ate really good Italian pizza at this place called Fire and Ice, supposedly the former king’s favorite restaurant. Actually, one came in to Kathmandu with us but is still at the aforementioned internet cafe, working on some scholarship thing, which is horrible when the rest of us had a good time.

Yesterday was the first family day, where we’re required to hang out with our families, doing what they do. For me, that meant washing clothes, bathing, peeling vegetables, and playing with the kids. The first two are made significantly more complicated by the fact that our house doesn’t have running water. We washed clothes in buckets at a little stream, which was thankfully pretty clean, but we had to walk almost a mile to get there. It took a long time, though — the washing machine was a good invention, and whoever was the actual inventor, I salute you. Bathing meant using a mug out of this bucket — which, since it had been in the sun for a while, was actually much warmer than the water in the program house’s shower. I had to do it relatively in public, though, ie on the porch which is in full view of the (not-frequented) road that goes by our house. Nepali modesty customs make the whole deal somewhat complicated. Other than that, though, not having running water really isn’t as big a deal as I thought it would be. There’s a tap relatively close to the house, and though of course I can’t drink the water that comes out of it without boiling, it’s fine for washing and the like.

I saw some big animal in the fields the other morning. Because they had warned us that leopards sometimes come down from the hills, I thought that’s what it was, and so that’s what I told people at school. Seeing a leopard is apparently very auspicious, and since my house is kind of low in the hills, it was kind of a big deal — nobody that low has seen one. Turns out, though, that it was actually a jackal — not auspicious.

My room is the nicest in the house. There are mice that make noise at night, but my bed is covered, so they won’t fall onto me (as happened to my “cousin” Saman on the first night).

Next week, we’re going down into the Terai, the lowlands. First, Chitwan National Park, where we’ll ride elephants, and probably see both tigers and real leopards. Then, we go somewhere completeley the opposite — Buddha’s birthplace.

I’m out of time now — need to get back by around five, since that’s what the family dictated I be home by.

Arjun’s Note: Here is part 2 of my good friend Dougal’s dispatches from his semester abroad in Nepal. I hope you find it interesting. You can find part 1 here.

- A story: One of the program directors is this guy from eastern Nepal. When his dad was like twenty, so maybe fifty-ish years ago, to get to and from Kathmandu, there was no way to do it but by walking…which took three or four weeks. Not an easy walk, either — a not insignificant portion of the people who tried never made it. His dad went, though, to look for a job. Once he finally made it there, he had to wait in line to actually get a job offer. The way they did it, apparently, is that they would have a wood-chopping or long-jumping contest — to get a clerical job. He did win one of those long-jumping contest, but then he couldn’t read or write, which makes clerical jobs a little harder. So, he went out and learned how to, and then by the time he retired, he was a judge.

- The temples are amazing, and we saw like ten million monkeys around one of them. Also some musk deer, which are tiny — there was a baby musk deer and a baby monkey running around next to each other, and they were the same size.

- Two of the kids on the program just walked past on their way back from Kathmandu. They were on the bus there and some guys were trying to collect money for some political organization. Nobody gave them any, so they got mad and started beating up women and old people, as in punching in the face more than once, before jumping off the bus. We drove past some Maoist youth group yesterday marching down the street.

- The caste stuff is pretty intense, though some of it I’m sure is just cultural differences that make it seem worse. We went on a tour of Patan yesterday, and the (high-caste) tour guide dude just stopped and pointed out things related to (low-caste) people’s cultural things — how some of them had tatoos on their legs, etc. He was grabbing at one guy’s ear talking — in English — about his earrings, and didn’t even talk to the guy until afterwards. He did know his stuff though, and it’s hard to tell whether that was actually really offensive or not. I just know that we were all really uncomfortable about it.

- We also saw these artist people, who make amazing metal statues, and saw a little bit about the process and stuff. So cool.

- There was a bat circling in our room the other night, and a giant spider outside one of the girl’s room’s today. Both left (or were coerced into leaving) peacefully.

- Prices here are weird — a 150ml soda, about the size of a can in the US, is 15 rupees; a 650ml beer, twice the size they are in the US, is 135.

- We’re moving into our Nepali families tomorrow, which could be as much as an hour’s walk away. I’m kind of scared — we really speak very little Nepali, and there’s so many little things I’m going to do that are going to be offensive. But we also went to a “village dinner” the other day with one of the host families, and that was a lot of fun, and the food was also amazing, so we’ll see.

- Apparently they teach us how to make traditional food stuff before we go — very excited about making that this summer, when there’s no Sharples.

Arjun’s Note: So I know I haven’t been doing a lot of my own writing lately, but I’ve had a lot of stuff going on. I recently brought you Federalist Paper No. 420, by my good friend Jeff. Now I want to bring you something entirely different; another one of my good friends, Dougal, is abroad in Nepal for the semester, and occasionally sends dispatches via internet cafe. Here is his first one.

Part 1

I’m in Nepal now; have been for almost a week.

We’ve been living at the program house, which is this awesome little courtyard with a few buildings in the middle of this pseudo-suburb — it’s like a rural village, sort of, but also not at all. On Monday, we move into our family stays; haven’t found out who it is yet.

The scenery is amazing, and it’s still too foggy to even really see the tall mountains.

We’re learning Nepali really quickly compared to a college class, but that’s probably because we do it two to five hours a day, six days a week, plus practice with each other and actual Nepalis outside of class. The class sizes of two to three also help.

Very different, in a lot of ways. The eating with your hand is fine (the food is awesome, so much better than Sharples — it’s amazing how much variety you can squeeze out of dhaalbhaat, rice with lentil soup), “charpi business” (charpi = toilet) isn’t as bad as you think. Nepalis don’t like dogs a whole lot but they’re all over the place, possibly with rabes, and every night they bark nonstop form nine to sometime after midnight. (I’m not really sure when, because I’m generally in bed before eleven, and up before seven.)

There’s way more demand for electricity than there is supply, so each of six regions gets only about eight hours of power a day. This is fine except for the computer / phone situation, because we’re busy all the time and the only internet access is at cybercafe type places (which actually aren’t cafes, generally, just computers; it’s way cheap, though, and there’s one right down the street).

The program has 13 kids: 7 from Pitzer, 3 from Pomona, one from Wesleyan, one from Colorado College, and me. Everyone’s pretty cool.

The caste system, officially illegal for the past 40 years, is still definitely in place. The low-caste (and poor) kids who live nearby, who some of us have made friends with, are uncomfortable coming into the program area because the landlord, who’s a highest-caste priest, would get mad.

Everyone is really nice, though, especially to Westerners. (Little kids wave and shout “Hello” as we walk down the street to get the bus to Kathmandu.) The neighbor kids are also fun; I played badminton with a few today. Karomboard (I think?) is also fun — similar to pool, but you flick little poker chip-type things. Much harder than it looks.

I’d post pictures, but the internet here is soooooo slow. Maybe it’d be faster from a place in Kathmandu. Kathmandu, by the way, is crazy — bustling city, tons of traffic and very crowded streets, vendors selling everything imaginable for way cheap, and then you turn a corner and there’s a sixty-foot tall pure white tower, a guard tower from at least five hundred years ago. I bought this cool touristy traditional Nepali shirt for 250 rupees, or about $3.25.

We’ve also had cool lecturers, including one who is currently involved in writing the new Nepali constitution. This guy is a former education minister and top development planner, and he’s been speaking at our program for thirty years….

Still not really sure what I want to do for my project, but I have a month or two to find out.

Family stays next week, and then in March, we go to Chitwan National Park, where we will ride elephants.

By J

At its core, the medical marijuana movement is being held back by one thing alone, and that is ignorance. Just like the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s or even the Women’s movement in the years preceding 1920, the quest to decriminalize or legalize cannabis must overcome the preconceptions burned into the minds of Americans at very young ages. Ask the average middle-aged housewife in Wyoming, or the plumber from Barstow his or her opinion on medical marijuana (here forth referred to as MMJ), and the likelihood is that you will find a person who has a negative opinion on MMJ, but knows virtually nothing about it. Yet, if such a person were to be educated on the matter, if they would see the hypocrisy that exists in regards to our government’s treatment of MMJ, they would see that medicinal cannabis really does serve to make patients’ lives better (or in some cases, even tolerable), and most importantly, they would see that our government has stepped on our civil liberties to such an extent that any American should be concerned regardless of their opinion of marijuana. So why exactly should marijuana be decriminalized? All personal opinions aside, it is a matter of logic. When one sits down and looks at all of the facts revolving around the medicinal qualities, the economic potential, the history, and the politics of marijuana, legalization plainly makes good sense. Period. It is simply a matter of getting those facts into the brains of enough people so that the government can no longer pull the wool over the country’s collective eyes. The facts will set us free; we need only to educate the people.

From a medicinal standpoint, cannabis certainly is not the be-all and end-all that some claim it to be. It will not cure every disease known to mankind; however, it does have significantly more medicinal qualities than the average person either knows about or gives MMJ credit for. It seems as though most people out there who aren’t directly involved with the cannabis industry in any way believe that MMJ is a hoax and is being described as medicinal only so it is easier to access. This simply is not true. Cannabis has been proven to stimulate the growth of brains cells, and as a result is a particularly effective countermeasure to deleterious brain diseases, particularly Alzheimer’s. Higher cannabinoid levels have been shown to result in an increased ability to learn and accept change, and THC is a bronchodilator, meaning that it opens up the airways and facilitates easier breathing (contrary to popular belief). Being someone who used to suffer fairly regularly from asthma related issues, I can personally confirm that I have had zero problems with asthma since starting to smoke cannabis. The number one killer in hospitals in the United States today is the resistant strain of the Staff infection, which patients contract while in the hospital and the hospitals currently have no viable way of combating the problem—except for marijuana. Hospitals around the country are now going to apply a THC tincture (basically a concentrate made with alcohol) directly to the infected area, and have had very successful results. And perhaps most amazingly, there have now been human clinical trials in which direct application of THC has been shown to force certain types of tumors into remission—yes, marijuana can actually cure certain types of cancer.

The autonomic nervous system, which is controlled by the glands of the brainstem (primarily the hypothalamus), is responsible for everything our bodies do without us telling them to—breathing, digesting, etc. It is this system that keeps us alive when we are, say, unconscious. Most “recreational” drugs out there, whether it be heroin or cocaine or whatever, can directly affect your brain stem, and therefore your autonomic nervous system. You can overdose on one of these heavy drugs, lose consciousness, and your body’s normal regulatory systems can be rendered useless due to the drugs’ effects on the brainstem. However, marijuana does not affect the brainstem at all; therefore, you cannot overdose on weed. In fact, it has been calculated that one would have to smoke approximately fifteen pounds of cannabis in five minutes to result in death, and that death would be due to excessive CO2 buildup in the body, not due to anything from the cannabis itself. For clarification, fifteen pounds would be roughly equivalent to 3,360 joints at 1 gram apiece. Yet for some reason or another, marijuana is classified as a Schedule I drug by the federal government. In terms of drug classification, Schedule I is considered to be the most dangerous of drugs with the least potential for medicinal use. Other drugs classified as Schedule I include heroine, LSD, and GHB (the date-rape drug). Schedule II drugs include cocaine, methamphetamine, morphine, PCP, and oxycontin, and Schedule III contains Marinol, which is a prescription form of THC that does not contain the other cannabinoids primarily responsible for marijuana’s medicinal effects. How any of this makes any sort of sense is beyond me. In fact (and if this is not proof enough, I do not know what is), the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES holds the patent on the medical use of cannabinoids, which are the active ingredients in marijuana that provide the plant’s medicinal effects (THC is one of many cannabinoids). This is a way for the Feds to hedge their bet; on one hand they are doing everything in their power to keep legalization of marijuana from being realized, but on the other hand they know it will be legalized at some point and they want to be able to cash in when it is.
Ratified December 15, 1791, the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States reads “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” In essence, this means that unless the Constitution specifically and explicitly sets rules for a certain subject matter, each individual state has the right to determine its own laws for said subject matter. This amendment was put into affect a mere three years after the official ratification of our current Constitution, and was done so because the founding individuals of this nation quickly realized that, left unchecked, the Federal government of the United States could become far too powerful and far-reaching. On November 5, 1996, Proposition 215 passed with a 55.6% voter approval. Prop 215 was a statewide voter initiative written by Denis Peron, which gave Californians the right to visit a doctor and, if the doctor so chose, be recommended for the use medical marijuana to help with any one of a number of ailments. Prop 215 is a legitimate law voted in by the people, and unfortunately for the Federal government, the Constitution does not explicitly deny the use of cannabis (see the first sentence of this paragraph). In fact, our founding fathers were anything but opposed to marijuana; George Washington once stated “Make the most you can of the Indian Hemp seed and sow it everywhere,” and Thomas Jefferson was quoted as saying “Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country.”

However, marijuana is still illegal on a federal level, and the Federal Government has refused to recognize the California state law, regardless of what the Constitution may say. Under the Bush administration primarily, the DEA has been breathing down the necks of every collective operator in California. Keep in mind, these collectives run just like any other business; they have to apply for business licenses and pay taxes as though they were a furniture store. Yet the DEA still finds it necessary to randomly shut down collectives without any rhyme or reason, including eleven collectives on January 26, 2007. They gave no forewarning; they showed up in bulletproof vests with masks on their faces and broke down the front doors of these eleven collectives. In some instances, all of the glass cases, shelves, televisions etc were destroyed by the DEA. In all cases, all medication, money, patient records, and computers were confiscated, never to be seen again.

There has been a recurring trend in these raids in which DEA officers play up the idea that some serious criminal activity is taking place inside collectives. Twenty to thirty officers show up in all black with shotguns, and they generally find two or three people working in the collective and perhaps a few patients (God forbid the old woman on chemo get some weed to help with her nausea). The DEA wants to make a point for the cameras that marijuana is bad and that bad people are involved in the industry, and that simply is not the case. This same type of DEA behavior took place when Tommy Chong was arrested for his glass blowing company (which, I should note, is not illegal); however, the DEA found it necessary in this case to bring in two helicopters and a SWAT team to his home at 6AM. They ended up finding Mr. Chong and his wife in bed (as most people would be at 6AM), who of course went peacefully. The raids on Tommy Chong’s house and business cost the DEA over twenty million dollars. Luckily for us, the Bush administration had their priorities in order and decided that using twenty million dollars of taxpayer money to go after TOMMY CHONG was a good idea considering that the national deficit is in the trillions of dollars. In the transcripts of his case, it can be found that Tommy Chong was sentenced to jail primarily because his career “glorified the use of marijuana,” and federal prosecutor Mary Beth Buchanan specifically cited Cheech and Chong’s 1978 film “Up in Smoke” as evidence against him. Tommy Chong went to federal prison for nine months. DEA: 1, First Amendment: 0.

All this being said, not all is lost. With a new administration comes new hope, and President Obama is certainly the marijuana activist’s best friend in the White House since Jimmy Carter. Obama has outright stated that he is opposed to the DEA actions of the past few years, and was actually quoted as saying “[He] would not have the Justice Department prosecuting and raiding medical marijuana users. It is not a good use of our resources.” There is a palpable buzz in the marijuana community today, a great hope for change the likes of which has not been seen for decades. It is important to note that the collectives that generally end up getting raided are those that do everything by the books and begin to grow and organize. The DEA does not want the collectives to start gaining any political clout (which they have anyway), so instead of going after the underground collectives that don’t do everything the way the laws say they should, they go after the well established, legitimate collectives. If DEA raids were to stop, the level of organization and political power within the marijuana industry would skyrocket, which would only act to move local and state legislature to pass more cannabis-friendly laws.

For the most part, I have made an effort to keep this essay within the scope of a medicinal argument. However, the potential economic benefits of hemp cannot be ignored in an argument about legalization. First, it should be noted that currently marijuana is the largest cash crop in the United States; larger than corn, flour, cotton, what have you. In fact, marijuana is estimated to be a larger cash crop than all others combined, and if it was legalized and taxed it would result in billions of dollars of tax revenue annually, the majority of which would be coming to California, since the state produces roughly one third of all of the marijuana for the entire nation (sales tax on medical marijuana alone would still result in approximately $100,000,000 annual revenue). Hemp is a legitimate and long-term cure to many of our economic and even environmental woes. There is a reason weed is called weed…and that is because it’s a weed. Hemp is especially easy to grow and is very hearty, and can be used to create strong, longer-lasting paper, softer clothing, rope, cosmetics, building materials, fuel, and even foods. Hemp seeds contain fiber, protein, and essential fatty acids, and has superior range of nutritional benefits to even that of the soy bean. Hemp can be grown in a wide variety of climates and can easily be grown in mass, meaning that it is a particularly useful source of ethanol based fuels (which currently power many of the cars in South America, but are usually produced with corn or sugar). In essence, we could basically end our dependency on fossil fuels, stop chopping down the world’s forests, and using petroleum based skin products, as well as much more, by widely adopting hemp as the country’s major cash crop. Do I think this will happen any time in the near future? Certainly not. Would it make sense? Absolutely.

The way this movement has been and will continue to make headway is through education. It is through papers like this and through organizations like Oaksterdam University. Whether you believe in medical marijuana, total marijuana legalization for everyone, or neither of the two, once educated on the facts regarding cannabis and the government’s treatment of the subject, I fail to see how you cannot be outraged. If you have any sense of patriotism and any desire to live in a country in which your government is held accountable for its actions, then you must see the wrongs being done. And with a new president in office, we can now begin to reverse the corruption and lack of accountability of the past eight years. I started this paper and I will end it with the same sentiment: currently there are between twenty and fifty million Americans who smoke marijuana. In the not too distant future, the rest of the nation will begin to understand the truths about marijuana, and they will do so because of people that strive to teach them. The facts will one day set us free, of that I am sure; we need only to educate the people.

Following is a list of my favorite marijuana-related quotes:

“The prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”
- Albert Einstein quote on Hemp

“When a private enterprise fails, it is closed down; when a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. Isn’t that exactly what’s been happening with drugs?”
- Milton Friedman quote on Marijuana

“It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics . . . dope and all that crap. It’s a thousand times better than whiskey - it’s an assistant - a friend.”
- Louis Armstrong quote on Marijuana

“That is not a drug. It’s a leaf,”
- Arnold Schwarzenegger

“Forty million Americans smoked marijuana; the only ones who didn’t like it were Judge Ginsberg, Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton.”
- Jay Leno

“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”
- Carl Sagan

“Penalties against possession of a drug should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself; and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against possession of marihuana in private for personal use… Therefore, I support legislation amending Federal law to eliminate all Federal criminal penalties for the possession of up to one ounce of marihuana.”
- Jimmy Carter, U.S. President

“I used to smoke marijuana. But I’ll tell you something: I would only smoke it in the late evening. Oh, occasionally the early evening, but usually the late evening - or the mid-evening. Just the early evening, mid-evening and late evening. Occasionally, early afternoon, early mid-afternoon, or perhaps the late-mid-afternoon. Oh, sometimes the early-mid-late-early morning. . . . …But never at dusk.”
- Steve Martin

AND FINALLY

“When I was a kid I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
- Barack Obama, U.S. President

Arjun’s Note: Anyone worth anything in programming who has spent a considerable amount of time on the internet has stumbled across ‘The Story of Mel’. It was posted to Usenet in 1983, and once it migrated to the internet it developed the free-verse form you see here. I know I’m unoriginal and lame for posting this since it’s available all over the internet, but for those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a true gem.

“Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.”

Maybe they do now,
in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and “user-friendly” software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term “software” sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN.  Not RATFOR.  Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers
grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I’ll call him Mel,
because that was his name.

I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster — drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren’t here to stay, anyway.
(That’s why you haven’t heard of the company,
or the computer.)

I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler
for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn’t approve of compilers.

“If a program can’t rewrite its own code”,
he asked, “what good is it?”

Mel had written,
in hexadecimal,
the most popular computer program the company owned.
It ran on the LGP-30
and played blackjack with potential customers
at computer shows.
Its effect was always dramatic.
The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
and the IBM salesmen stood around
talking to each other.
Whether or not this actually sold computers
was a question we never discussed.

Mel’s job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port?  What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.

In modern parlance,
every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
Put that in Pascal’s pipe and smoke it.

Mel loved the RPC-4000
because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the “read head”
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
an “optimizing assembler”,
but Mel refused to use it.

“You never know where it’s going to put things”,
he explained, “so you’d have to use separate constants”.

It was a long time before I understood that remark.
Since Mel knew the numerical value
of every operation code,
and assigned his own drum addresses,
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier “add” instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
His code was not easy for someone else to modify.

I compared Mel’s hand-optimized programs
with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
and Mel’s always ran faster.
That was because the “top-down” method of program design
hadn’t been invented yet,
and Mel wouldn’t have used it anyway.
He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first,
so they would get first choice
of the optimum address locations on the drum.
The optimizing assembler wasn’t smart enough to do it that way.

Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,
even when the balky Flexowriter
required a delay between output characters to work right.
He just located instructions on the drum
so each successive one was just past the read head
when it was needed;
the drum had to execute another complete revolution
to find the next instruction.
He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure.
Although “optimum” is an absolute term,
like “unique”, it became common verbal practice
to make it relative:
“not quite optimum” or “less optimum”
or “not very optimum”.
Mel called the maximum time-delay locations
the “most pessimum”.

After he finished the blackjack program
and got it to run
(“Even the initializer is optimized”,
he said proudly),
he got a Change Request from the sales department.
The program used an elegant (optimized)
random number generator
to shuffle the “cards” and deal from the “deck”,
and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair,
since sometimes the customers lost.
They wanted Mel to modify the program
so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
they could change the odds and let the customer win.

Mel balked.
He felt this was patently dishonest,
which it was,
and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer,
which it did,
so he refused to do it.
The Head Salesman talked to Mel,
as did the Big Boss and, at the boss’s urging,
a few Fellow Programmers.
Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,
but he got the test backwards,
and, when the sense switch was turned on,
the program would cheat, winning every time.
Mel was delighted with this,
claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,
and adamantly refused to fix it.

After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$,
the Big Boss asked me to look at the code
and see if I could find the test and reverse it.
Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look.
Tracking Mel’s code was a real adventure.

I have often felt that programming is an art form,
whose real value can only be appreciated
by another versed in the same arcane art;
there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
by the very nature of the process.
You can learn a lot about an individual
just by reading through his code,
even in hexadecimal.
Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.

Perhaps my greatest shock came
when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.
No test.  None.
Common sense said it had to be a closed loop,
where the program would circle, forever, endlessly.
Program control passed right through it, however,
and safely out the other side.
It took me two weeks to figure it out.

The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility
called an index register.
It allowed the programmer to write a program loop
that used an indexed instruction inside;
each time through,
the number in the index register
was added to the address of that instruction,
so it would refer
to the next datum in a series.
He had only to increment the index register
each time through.
Mel never used it.

Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register,
add one to its address,
and store it back.
He would then execute the modified instruction
right from the register.
The loop was written so this additional execution time
was taken into account —
just as this instruction finished,
the next one was right under the drum’s read head,
ready to go.
But the loop had no test in it.

The vital clue came when I noticed
the index register bit,
the bit that lay between the address
and the operation code in the instruction word,
was turned on —
yet Mel never used the index register,
leaving it zero all the time.
When the light went on it nearly blinded me.

He had located the data he was working on
near the top of memory —
the largest locations the instructions could address —
so, after the last datum was handled,
incrementing the instruction address
would make it overflow.
The carry would add one to the
operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set:
a jump instruction.
Sure enough, the next program instruction was
in address location zero,
and the program went happily on its way.

I haven’t kept in touch with Mel,
so I don’t know if he ever gave in to the flood of
change that has washed over programming techniques
since those long-gone days.
I like to think he didn’t.
In any event,
I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the
offending test,
telling the Big Boss I couldn’t find it.
He didn’t seem surprised.

When I left the company,
the blackjack program would still cheat
if you turned on the right sense switch,
and I think that’s how it should be.
I didn’t feel comfortable
hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.

Meet Hank Hill. He’s a forty-something father living in Arlen, TX whose ambitions in life are to have a good family, and sell propane (and propane accessories) to all the good folks of Arlen. He lives in a quiet house with his family, next to his neighbors: Dale the conspiracy theorist, Bill the failure, and Boomhauer, who’s…. well, he’s Boomhauer.

King of the Hill was started in 1997, and entertained viewers for over a decade before recently getting cancelled, and failing to be picked up by ABC. To give you a sense of how old the show is, it was started in the same year that Bill Clinton started his second term in office.

The show has been parodied and ripped on for many years, but despite that it has always been successful. It was only about two years ago when I started watching, but I haven’t looked back since. It’s one of those shows where it’s easy to not get it if you only watch a couple of minutes, but after you watch an episode you start to understand the brilliance. I mean, how can you hate on a show where Dale misinterprets his father’s coming out as meaning his dad is a CIA operative, where Hank pretends to be a pimp to save a prostitute in distress, where Peggy’s poor Spanish (despite the fact that she teaches it) leads her to saying she is “embarazada” (pregnant) in a Mexican court, and where no one has qualms talking about Hank’s “narrow urethra” problems.

I know that I haven’t said anything extraordinary or crazy or probably even that interesting here. But I love King of the Hill, and since it’s being cancelled, I want to give it a proper farewell. So please… watch it in reruns on Adult Swim or Fox… buy the DVDs… make a propane joke… but above all, enjoy the brilliance. It’s an animated show that I will truly miss.

Yep.

by Arjun Sharma

I’m the first person to admit that I text a lot. I mean, with the iPhone unlimited text plan, I’ll have entire conversations via text, and I’ve gotten comfortable sending 1-letter texts too (like ‘K’).

But this is ridiculous. A 13 year old girl sent and received 14,528 texts between November 27th and December 26th, according to KTLA. The 440-page bill from AT&T would have cost her father over $2,900 if he hadn’t (wisely) chosen the unlimited texting plan.

The most interesting part, which CNN didn’t report (although they did bother to calculate that the girl sent an average of one text per two minutes awake), is that the entire family is text crazy. Her father sent 900 texts over the same period, which blows away his age demographic average of about 200. One of her sisters, age 22, sent 7,100 texts over that same period of time. In fact, combined this family sent over 23,000 text messages over that one month period.

Boggles your mind a bit, doesn’t it?

by Arjun Sharma

Anyone who went through school in the United States has learned American history over and over again. I first remember learning about Christopher Columbus in the 1st grade to learn about why we get Columbus day off, followed by a lesson about the Pilgrims to understand Thanksgiving. Slowly, my knowledge was expanded- the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI and II, the Industrial Revolution, the colonies and their early settlements, etc etc. I’ll admit that there are still parts of our history I never really memorized and continue to only know of them by name- the French and Indian War, the War of 1812, etc. I know they happened, but I don’t really know the details.

The worst part of all these classes I took is that none of them properly covered the period of time from the late 60’s through the present, except for the developments in the Civil Rights movement. Considering that a large number of people around now grew up between the 60s and the 80s, I know very little about the affairs, scandals, controversies, fads, trends, attitudes, etc of those times. The only things my generation really hears about are Watergate, Iran-Contra, and (maybe) the stock market crash of the late 80s.

That’s why my undertaking of reading the entire Doonesbury catalog from 1970 through the present has been infinitely more educational than I could ever have imagined. Whether it’s the strip’s frank way of dealing with issues ranging from drugs to race to religion, or the multi-faceted characters that all represent a little piece of us in one way or another (although the strip is admittedly liberal leaning), I’ve learned more about the history of the past 30 years than any textbook or class has ever taught me. Sure, a history textbook can tell you the facts about the protests at home and battles abroad during Vietnam, but reading the running commentary that Trudeau provided through Doonesbury taught me what was going on as those events were taking place; it’s history that was written concurrently with events, rather than with 20/20 hindsight.

The Doonesbury collection from the start until 1995 can be purchased, but there are many other ways to find the entire collection, which go until the present.

Here are a few examples of Gary Trudeau’s humor and political insight. Click to enlarge:

by Arjun Sharma

It’s 2009, we can talk to people anywhere in the world instantaneously, fly through the air at the speed of sound, and walk on the moon. It’s about time we talked about religion for a bit.

I don’t care if you’re Hindu, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Zoroastrian, or just “spiritual.” You believe in God or some kind of force that’s unquantifiable, not scientifically supported, and invisible, and I get that. You have a faith, and an understanding of the way the world works. You believe that your own faith is correct, and you have some reasoning for that as well. Again, I get that.

Now do me a favor; for the next 10 minutes, drop those beliefs. I don’t mean revoke your belief in God, or renounce your faith. I mean, just suspend your religious and spiritual beliefs. Simply be the person who worries about buying groceries, feeding the dog, reading that novel that’s been sitting on your desk, getting that TPS report out before the deadline, and remembering to buy a birthday card for your mom. Don’t think about meditation or prayer or confession or Easter or prophets or fatwahs or holy anythings.

Good.

Now let’s start at the beginning. How did we all come to be? Where did this world come from? Modern science claims that the Big Bang theory explains this. Simplified, the Big Bang theory says that all matter was intensely condensed at one point in time, estimated through scientific calculation at about 13.73 +/- .12 billion years ago.

Notice that I say “theory.” Not, “the Big Bang,” but the “Big Bang theory.” Why? I’m willing to acknowledge that we don’t know if its true. I sure as hell don’t know; I could spend the rest of my life devoting myself to studying the universe and could never say that I know for sure that it’s true. Where did that first bit of condensed matter come from? I don’t know. What will happen after the Universe ‘ends’ or after all energy is dispersed into entropy? I don’t know. But so far, the Big Bang theory has stood up to scientific experimentation, which is all I can really ask for.

The same is true for the theory of evolution. Again, note that I call it the “theory” of evolution. I can’t say with 100% certainty that evolution is how the world came to be the way it is today, but it sure seems like a damn good explanation. The theory has been used in other fields; for example, scientists were able to use a genetic algorithm to create a circuit that completed a defined process more efficiently than any humanly designed circuit. In fact, there were elements of the circuit that didn’t make any logical sense, but through their minute affectations of the magnetic field of the circuit, and the temperature of the room the circuit was made in, they were integral parts of the process. A sort of “modern miracle,” if you will.

What’s my point, then? The point is that we don’t ever know anything with 100% certainty. All we can do is hypothesize, test, evaluate, and re-hypothesize. But of all of your theories about how the world works, why would you choose one that claims that an invisible man (or woman or being or whatever) created the world?

Do you ever think that maybe religion was just an ancient way of explaining a world that we can never fully understand? That maybe it’s just an outdated biological response to help us cope with this life? In fact, did you ever stop and look at what motivates us? If you look at it, education, working, competing, socializing, and all other major parts of human life all seem to come down to one think; furthering the human race. We strive to make our species better, to find a life partner (or partners) with whom to reproduce and ensure the protection of our race. Maybe love, hate, ecstasy, depression, happiness, sadness, anger, and fear all come down to biological responses to further that purpose.

Maybe religion is just a holdover from those ancient times. I mean, it is passed down generation to generation, right? Maybe it’s time to stop and say, “Wait a minute… what are we doing here?” For example, take Christian beliefs. Keep in mind that we’ve suspended belief in God for the purpose of this article, and take a look at some of those stories. Genesis? The Garden of Eden? Noah’s Ark? Do you really believe those stories to be true? If you do, don’t you think they seem to fall apart under even the slightest of logical scrutiny? If you don’t believe in them, but you still claim to be Christian, isn’t there something WRONG there? You claim that the Bible is the word of God, but you don’t believe all those stories. So what’s the deal? You can use one passage to say that God is against homosexuality, but you’ll say you don’t believe in the stories that claim you can sell your daughter and take an eye for an eye and all of that. Seems rather convenient, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t make sense! Look at religion again, in the eye of logic and rationality! It’s nothing more than the word of men, who made a convincing story and spiritual structure that gave people a false sense of comfort. Instead, if we stopped taking things on “faith” and started testing out our theories, a whole lot of stuff we do would suddenly make a lot less sense. It’s not bad to question your faith; it’s your human responsibility.

I don’t know if I’ve made any impression on your or not. I don’t dislike or judge religious people because I know that there’s a lot more out there in the world that I don’t understand. I can’t even say that there is no God, because I have no proof. But I need to tell the world why I believe what I believe, and allow my theory to be tested in the public sphere; that’s what any responsible scientist would do.

So go at it. Please. I’m begging you. Pick my theories and ideas apart. Prove to me why I’m wrong. I’m all ears.

by Nat Lavin

Yesterday, I returned from Birthright Israel. I can honestly say that no blog entry could possibly do the amazing experience justice.

About two weeks ago, I was leaving New Orleans to spend a few days in DC before heading off to Israel. I was being driven to the airport by my best friend and his girlfriend. The girlfriend, “TG,” has a Jewish roommate, and two Jewish suitemates. She, however, is Catholic. I made a comment to her, something to the effect of, “Why don’t you just tell them you’re Jewish and come along on the trip! It’ll be awesome” and she responded something to the effect of “No thanks. I can’t stand the Jewish people any longer.”

It was a moment for me where I was so offended, I didn’t really know how to respond. In her defense, I knew where she was coming from. He roommates are not exactly welcoming of her Catholicism (her roommate thought she was doing her a favor by allowing Christmas decorations in the room). Her roommate also got offended at TG’s use of the word “Jew,” not even in some sort of bigoted context. She got offended at TG saying something like, “My roommate is a Jew”. The fact that anyone could think “Jew” is an offensive word is beyond me, and the amount of shame and self-loathing you must have as a Jew to find that word offensive is sickening. I say this for two reasons. TG’s comments, although horribly bigoted and offensive, and certainly a little broad, were somewhat founded. The Jews she knows the best and spends the most time with are horribly misguided and annoying. Secondly, it shows what a horrible sense of Jewish identity many Jews in the US have today.

I finally responded to TG by saying “um….I’m a Jew”. She and her boyfriend both argued back, “Yeah Nat, but you’re not a real Jew.”

I was, again, deeply offended, but I really had no way to respond. What makes me a Jew? My mother is Catholic. I don’t believe in God. I haven’t been to a synagogue since sophomore year of high school. At the time, I silently decided they were right. I wasn’t a real Jew.

About 3 days later I boarded a plane for Israel. I sat between two kids who would end up being on my bus, one from Tulane, and the other from American University [in DC]. We didn’t know each other well, and we were all very tired. There was not a lot of talking on the flight.  We landed in Tel Aviv and went through immigration and customs. We got on our bus, and headed for a hotel just outside of Tel Aviv on the Mediterranean Sea.

The next day we saw some of the sights in Tel Aviv and then drove to Jerusalem. As we got to Jerusalem, we stopped at a pavilion on top of a cliff, overlooking the city. I have two distinct memories of that moment. The first was, “I feel nothing.” The second: “Someone in my family would probably want a picture of this anyway.” It was not a bad looking city at all. In fact, it was beautiful. Everything was made of limestone. Every building looked beautiful.  The city certainly has a unique aesthetic.

That night we were taken to hear the former president of Hillel speak. I remember thinking it was going to be a waste of time, but what he said may very well have been life-changing for me.

” ‘Jewish’ is NOT a religion!” In order to get the point across again, he yelled it again. “‘JEWISH’ IS NOT A RELIGION.” He spent the next hour or so talking to us about how there are plenty of secular Jews in Israel, and they are all just as welcome. He made a metaphor about how Judaism as a whole can be compared to a table with 5 legs. Each one of those legs represents something different. For example, one of those legs was religion, another was Israel, another was a sense of Jewish memory (and/or history). His point was that a table made for five legs will still stand with only 3. There’s no such thing as a “bad Jew”. He talked to us about “converted Jews”. I didn’t know this, but apparently, it is against Jewish law to remind someone who converts to the religion that they are a convert. The phrase “converted Jew” refers to a Jew who converts to another religion. He said something like “Yeah….that guy may think he’s a Catholic…..what a sucker”. He talked about how Judaism really only became strictly a religion in the time since World War II. He let me know that no matter how I felt about God or religion, I was still a Jew. I was still a Jew and I was still welcome in Israel.

The next day we walked through old Jerusalem. I saw the Western wall from a distance and felt nothing. I walked down to where the wall was and was suddenly hit by a wave of….I don’t know what. For that brief moment though, I believed in God. Perhaps that’s not the best way to put it. It’s not that I believed in God, its that I couldn’t not believe in God. I thought back on Jewish history. An unbroken chain of Jewish families and cultures and for that moment, refused to believe that Abraham and Moses made it up. They saw something. They talked to something. Maybe it wasn’t some supreme, infallible creator of all existence, but they saw something.

I walked closer to the Western Wall, wondering if I was “Jewish enough” to touch it, despite the pep-talk the night before. As I was about 20 feet from the wall, a Rabbi saw me, and could tell I was American.  He rushed up to me, and extended his hand for a handshake. I shook it, and that’s when he said words that I know will always resonate in my head for the rest of my life. This rabbi whom I had never met, mere feet away from the holiest sight a Jew can visit, looked me in the eyes and said “Welcome Home.”.

He offered me anything I needed to pray at the wall. At the time I was horribly confused about God, so I opted out of prayer, but the Rabbi was so clearly still thrilled that I was there. He left me to stand at the wall in peace and collect my thoughts. I saw people shove notes in the cracks of the wall, and part of me wanted to. The other part of me decided I should leave space for those who know they believe in God. I listened to the latter voice in my head.

I then thought back, with bitter disdain to what TG and her boyfriend had told me less than a week earlier. “You’re not a real Jew.”. Those words only offended me more now. I was now sure, more than ever, that I was a Jew. I was never more welcomed in the house of a family member than I was in the land of Israel. I walked to the holiest sight a Jew could visit, and a complete stranger welcomed me home. I think I’ll trust the Israeli Rabbi at the Western Wall over the Catholic college kids from Missouri.  I am a Jew, and I am damn proud of it.