Date: Wednesday, 19 December 1984 15:48 mst From: James J. Lippard Subject: Miscellaneous Digest V3 #43 Reply-To: {mbx >udd>Multics>Lippard>misc>misc} To: {list >udd>Multics>Lippard>misc>misc} Miscellaneous Digest Volume 3 : Issue 43 Today's topics: Three Blind Mice Multics History The imperceptibility of Santa Claus "Computer Error" ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tuesday, 18 December 1984 20:19 mst From: Rob Austein Subject: Mices, treble Office: [NE43-502] 545 Technology Square, Cambridge MA 02139; (617) 253-7341 The version I heard was: Three myopic rodents Three myopic rodents Observe how they perambulate Observe how they perambulate They were all pursued by the agriculturist's spouse Who excised their extremities with a carving utensil Have you ever observed such and occurrence in your existence As three myopic rodents A friend of mine claims she learned it at age ten, in school. ------------------------------ Date: Sunday, 16 December 1984 17:44 mst From: Kevin P. Fleming Subject: Multics History Here are some excerpts from 'Hackers', by Steven Levy, reprinted without permission. The ideas presented are by no means mine. {The misspelling of Multics as MULTIX is Levy's.} "And no system of using a computer earned the hacker's contempt as much as the time-sharing systems...The other, long in preparation and high in expense, was called MULTIX, and was so offensive that its mere existence was an outrage." "But as bad as CTSS was, the hackers thought MULTIX was worse. MULTIX was the name of the hugely expensive time-sharing system for the masses being built and debugged on the ninth floor {under CTSS, no less -Kevin}. ...MULTIX was a big topic of hacker conversation." "Originally, MULTIX was done in conjunction with General Electric; then Honeywell stepped in. There were all sorts of problems with it. As soon as the hackers heard that the system would run on teletype Model 33 terminals instead of fast, interactive CRT displays, they knew the system was a total loser. The fact that the system was written in an IBM-created computer language called PL/1 instead of sleek machine language was appalling. When the system first ran, it was incredibly sluggish. It was so slow that the hackers concluded the whole system must be brain-damaged, a term so often used to describe MULTIX that 'brain-damaged' became a standard hackerese pejorative." "But the worst thing about MULTIX was the heavy security and the system of charging the user for the time. MULTIX took the attitude that the used paid down to the last nickel; it charged some for the memory you used, some more for the disk space, more for the time. Meanwhile the MULTIX planners, in the hacker view, were making proclamations about how this was the only way that utilities could work. The system totally turned the Hacker Ethic around - instead of encouraging more time on the computer (the only good thing about time-sharing as far as most hackers were concerned), it urged you to spend less time - and to use less of the computer's facilities once you were on! The MULTIX philosophy was a disaster." I love all the in-the-past references to Multics. -Kevin ------------------------------ Date: Saturday, 24 November 1984 14:46 mst From: John R. Kender Subject: The imperceptibility of Santa Claus Orig-To: BBOARD at COLUMBIA-20.ARPA Redistributed-Date: 15 December 1984 21:12 mst Redistributed-From: CARTER at RU-BLUE Redistributed-To: Info-Cobol at MIT-MC "OK, Daddy, why has nobody SEEN Santa Claus on Christmas Eve?" Tough question. But, a few back-of-the-envelope calculations were enough to convince my doubting offspring that it was physically IMPOSSIBLE. To wit: Suppose that Santa starts at the International Date Line and travels westward, in order to maximize his time for delivering presents on or about midnight. Let's guess that there are 4 billion people, and so about 1 billion households worldwide. Just as we assume Santa has solved the travelling salesman problem (1 billion nodes!), so too we will assume that he can handle the unequal distribution of households over the land masses, too (Fiji Islanders, etc., probably don't have reason to doubt his presence). Roughly 1 billion / 24 hours gives 40 million households / hour; and as there are 3600 seconds / hour, that gives us about 10000 households / second. Thus, Santa drops down the chimney and is gone, on average in .0001 second: FAR LESS time than the human eye (even dark-adapted!) needs to see--.01 second being about the lower limit established by tachistoscope studies. "OK, Daddy, then why has nobody HEARD Santa Claus on Christmas Eve?" Tougher question, and one that demands serious analysis. If Santa moves that quickly, of course, he is going to push a lot of air out of his way, and silent night would be more accurately be called the Night of the Sonic Booms. The envelop (last year's, once containing a Christmas card as yet unanswered) quickly fills up: Let's see: 1 billion households distributed on average equally over 4 pi radius squared. That's about 12 times 4000 * 4000, but three-quarters of that is water (poor Fiji!): so about 3 times 16 million, or about 50 million square miles. So, 1 billion / 50 million is 20 households / square mile, and if they were distributed in gridlike regularity, Santa has to travel (at LEAST, depending on the sophistication of his TSP solution) about 1/5 mile: 1000 feet in .0001 second. Sound itself would take about 1.3 second; clearly, even if Santa were made of Kevlar and could withstand the accelerations necessary (poor toys!), Santa is not only booming about the Baby Boomers' babies, he is beginning to suffer from Fitzgerald contraction. (Let's see, here on the envelop flap: 1/5 mile in 1/10000 of a second is 2000 miles / second, or about .01c, if c is rounded to 200000 miles / second.) Thus giving new meaning to "relative clause", he is approaching the danger of being misperceived as anorexic. Perhaps, then, the answer is as follows: you can't see Santa because he moves too fast; and, because he would look skinnier than you think, you wouldn't recognize him anyway. Further, any atmosphere overpressure generated by his rapid descent is canceled by the underpressure of his nearly instantaneous return: in contrast to most phenomena, the sonic boom cannot form! What remains to be explained, of course, in addition to the usual arrival of undamaged gifts (even on Fiji), is why the evening of his rapid transit is not marked by the spectacle of a multitude of gifts being sucked, nearly simultaneously, up through millions of chimneys throughout world, to trail happily in his wake. ------------------------------ Date: Monday, 17 December 1984 11:19 mst From: ELISHA Subject: From the New York Times, Saturday, December 16: SORRY, RABBI (ER, JUDGE) Computer trouble sent out 5,000 thank-you letters from the Democratic National Committee that conferred upon the recipients judicial, military and religious titles that had no connection with their professions. The letters, dated Dec. 5, were sent to party activists who helped in the Mondale-Ferraro campaign. Gene Russell, a spokesman for the committee, said a keypunch coding mishap mistitled party supporters "Chaplain," "Judge," "Rear Admiral," "Lieutenant General," "Rabbi" and "Commander." The committee, said Mr. Russell, "apologized for the error -- we are sending letters of apology." [I wonder if they used the same computer ...] ------------------------------ End of Miscellaneous Digest ***************************