On LISP

My undergraduate buddy, Tomas Benda, and I were taking CS 241 in the summer of 1999. CS 241 was, at the time, a course that involved no less than three different computer programming languages, Modula-3, DLX (a knock-off of MIPS or some similar machine level RISC architecture) and Scheme. It was around the time that we were poking around with Scheme that Tomas drew the long awaited O(1) solution to the traveling sales man problem.

Now chances are if you are reading this you probably have some computer programming experience, most likely in a type setting language like HTML, but chances are most of my readers do not have real programming, as in, I wrote an entire Operating System with context switching, time slicing, memory management and Inter Process Communications in this Language back in 2001, experience. (For those of you who might be wondering, yes I did, in the summer of 2001, Insop Song and I worked together and wrote... forget it doesn't matter and you probably wouldn't understand the terminology anyway.)

Anyway I discuss programming for one reason, as I said Tom and I were studying a horrible language called Scheme which basically works by recursion only, there are variables, but you are not supposed to use them, instead you just make a function call over and over. Scheme is so thick with recursion that any code in scheme ends up being loaded down with parenthesis, i.e. brackets "()". Well I read somewhere that Scheme was actually a knock off of LISP, the designers of Scheme had tried to remove some of the parenthesis required by LISP. When I told this to Tom he replied that LISP must stand for, Lots of Idiotic and Stupid Parenthesis.

I went for a second ride tonight, because the roads were busy and I was on my own I stuck to the bike trail where possible and let me tell you the bike trail was crowded, so in honour of Tom Benda I have a new LISP, Lots of Idiotic and Stupid Pedestrians! I want someone to explain to me, if the trail is clearly marked with the symbol for a bike to the right and a pedestrian to the left, why are there so many pedestrians on the bike trail? And if I say "on your left" why does their brain turn that into "move to your left"? No wonder serious cyclists avoid bike trails, car drivers are morons, but pedestrians are oblivious morons... wait a second, most car drivers are pretty oblivious too... well pedestrians are worse, marginally.

I want a gun, no bullets you understand, just blanks, so I can make a really loud and scary noise, maybe scare people into waking up... I doubt it would work.

I forgot to mention previously, I bought new wheels for my bike, Mavic Ksyrium SL, bought new tires too, Hutchinson Fusion2. My bike looks too good for me frankly, I feel like a bit... no a lot of a poser on her, but with those new wheels, damn if she isn't fast, and suddenly I don't feel scarred really leaning into corners.

Here's another random thought, notice my bike has picked up a pronoun. But it is definitely a woman, besides being way to light to be a guy (mountain bikes would be male and I guess hybrids are... hermaphrodites?), she is very unforgiving of mistakes and had to be handled very gently, but when everything is good with her, damn if she isn't one helluva ride. Besides, with those new wheels, my bike is way, way too sexy to be male.