Evil, compounded by evil, committing evil against evil, with innocence in the crossfire
But, a bad ventriloquist, with his own show? No. This will not stand.
He’s been doing this whole “on a stick” schtick for over 2 decades. He’s safe comedy, invoking shock to the level that would titillate your older aunt who mocks outrage at the slightest mention of vulgarity or the most timid racial references, like she’s never heard it before. Jay Leno is more controversial and entertaining… with Pat Morita…
I found it. I finally found it. After 15 years of having access to the internets, I've finally found this clip.
This Mr. Wizard segment was about 50% responsible for my current career as a programmer. It was my first realization that I could actually understand how computers worked, and could bend them to my will.
Now, clearly, Mr. Wizard is way out of his league here. It’s the early 80’s and computers are taking everything we knew about science and electronics and shoving them into some tiny little array of microchips. Science and TV exposure isn’t going to help an old man come to grips with a new world in which a single person can’t possibly understand a technology from top to bottom.
In this clip, we see such basic errors as
Radioactive interference – he thought the metal casing shielded the rest of the world from the computer’s television station, rather than outside interference mucking with the computer’s internals.
He did get chips vs. their housings concept right (clearly through much coaching). I have to give him credit there… though, he did call the connections “bumps”, and kind of mumbled off into something about other places… glossing over the difference between ROM and RAM. Common rookie mistakes.
8-bit computer - thinking 8 chips meant 8-bit, rather than the width of the data bus. And he thought that each sends a “byte” off to the screen and each little “dot” has to have a signal from each one of them.
Input controlling – it goes through all the little things and goes all over the place… something something…
The man concedes the value of the engineers who put this marvel together. However, it was the controller stuff that stuck with me most, lodged in my memory for decades almost completely unmolested by time.
Let’s leave aside all the horribly inept aspects of Mr. Wizard’s understanding of computers. At a very young age, through this clip, I was unknowingly introduced to the idea of abstraction. It’s the idea that a programmer can rely on the layers below him to make it possible to produce something great for those above him, without fully understanding what’s happening below.
In this clip, it was told to me that controlling video games was as simple as mastering these 5 switches for up, down, left, right and the “start” button. To make a video game, I just needed to write something to react to up, down, left, right and “start”.
It’s more complex than that, but in a completely different way than the complexity we deal with now. Inheritance, inversion of control, decorators, database access, html rendering, persistence frameworks… it’s all just flavors of the same concept… It doesn’t matter where you are in the chain, you’re always a middleman (unless you’re drawing traces in some p-charged well in a substrate… which, even now, is abstracted). This is what makes this field great.
Somebody always has an interest in the layer below you, and sometimes it’s you who is that layer. It’s thrilling to use what someone else has done to improve the lives of those above you. Sometimes, it’s enjoyable to be the top of the software chain making it possible for real-world users to do their job better.
It’s what software people do. They solve the hard problems so others don’t have to. We thrive on this.
It reminds me of the old yarn about dwarfs and giants.
"Bernard of Chartres used to say that we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by virtue of any sharpness of sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size."
Which brings us to an all-time great comeback by the Gipper. I’m not sure if it’s genuine, but it’s great nonetheless.
At one campus meeting, a student told Reagan that it was impossible for people of Reagan's generation to understand young people. [The student said] 'You grew up in a different world. Today we have television, jet planes, space travel, nuclear energy, computers.' Without missing a beat Reagan replied, 'You’re right. It's true that we didn't have those things when we were young. We invented them.'"
So, enjoy your frameworks. Love your languages. Everything becomes too complex at some point to completely understand from top to bottom. Rely on those below you to make your tools, and use them to make something better for those above.
I know this commercial is supposed to be all adorable and about how the kid is exploring his world of electronics, and his parents have big dreams of his future in the world of computer science. He's taking things apart, learning about computers and electrical systems... I was that kid. I took things apart to see how they worked, and not everything went back together quite right (always had a pile of important looking shit left over).
But he's taking a screwdriver and digging up the traces on the motherboard, before he jams that wretched tool into the IDE and power ports and bends all the pins into a completely unusable state!
He's destroyed what would be, to a consummate computer professional as myself, merely a $100 piece of equipment. But, given his retard parents, he's probably demolishing their entire $1000 Dell desktop with no hope of repair. Say goodbye to all that savings you devoted to Lit 101 and 102!
I want to encourage any kid I have someday to explore his interests. But I don't want him opening the hood to my car, jamming a screwdriver through the fuel line, knifing the timing belt and trying his hand with the wire cutters on the brake lines. That's not learning... it's just vandalism.
Tonight I gave a chance to a reprehensively bad episode of the new Fox breakout: Lie to Me. Besides the criminal use of Tim Roth in this one-trick pony of a team of deus ex machina truth detectors, I saw the Fairness Doctrine in action without the need for government intervention.
I saw the team, over the course of an hour, demonstrate the effect of "microexpressions" (in the form of ham-fisted displays of obviousness) to solve their crimes CSI-style. They even-handedly used images and video of Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld and Chief Justice John Roberts, juxtaposed over the hour with videos of President Obama and President Bill Clinton to illustrate examples of people lying.
This show decided to use government officials as example of liars, which is well within reason. But it knew not to go the now standard Bush-bashing route (oddly, I didn't see any imagery of Bush himself) to sell its product.
It does a decent job of using the weaknesses of our government controlling a message or keeping a secret, but at least it doesn't paint the whole apparatus as an institutional lie factory.
Hats off, of course. Enough crazy has happened in the last couple of weeks to wipe clean the achievement of a perfect water landing (in layman's terms, a horrific firey drowning exercise). But the composure of not only the pilot jarting headlong into hydro-doom... but of the air traffic controller executing emergency procedures and activating emergency response in the unlikely event that some star child were to survive the splashdown. Wow... just, wow. How are you?
My favorite part is the guy on the edge of the wing falling into the water. When you're the considerate nice guy first out of the plane, you walk to the furthest edge of the wing. What's your reward? Wet coldness with your life-raft (read: AirBus 320) floating away. I feel for you, Properly-Walking-To-The-End-Of-The-Wing-Guy.
