what i did over my summer vacation

For a while, I have been worried about accruing some kind of audience. While not the worst thing in the world, I don't need much of an audience right now, and, I figure, it's better to be afraid of something silly like being famous than to worry about something Important.

Furthermore, now that I have escaped from the Frugal Empire, I can start innovating again, as I feel as if I'm in a space now where you are allowed to talk to other people and they're allowed to talk to you.

And so, as Guy Kawasaki says, time to eat like a bird and poop like an elephant.

I have been eating like a bird more than I have been pooping like an elephant, in the last some years, but that's changing some, as I grow up and figure out that my elephant poop is no worse than many other people's. In fact, it sometimes smells better.

I also may not need to worry about expressing my ideas in such a compressed and abstract, referential form, herein, as I'm writing for myself, partially, and it's not a big deal if people understand only some sketch of what I can envision.

In my last email to sliceofpizza, I cited Einstein, who also said "A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?" and noted that what Hoare said about the existence of bugs also seems to apply to intelligence and insanity...

With that in mind, let me poop like an elephant some more.

Abstract:

"In order to efficiently design a Very Large-Scale Data center, we extend John McCarthy's cell-based list processing architecture to scale infinitely, using the design principles that Tim Berners-Lee applied to the Web. Inspired by modern forms of Alan Kay's Smalltalk (Squeak and Ruby), which elegantly combine VMs with a message-based language, we propose an easy to use metadatacode system called Slippers, and attempt to accomplish what Lynn Conway's VLSI did for integrated circuits, and make it easy for a skilled graduate student to quickly implement a VLSD."

Besides Einstein and Turing, I suppose I am inspired by these four people, among others. Roughly ordered by decade, John McCarthy, Alan Kay, Lynn Conway, and Tim Berners-Lee.

I've been finding, when I go back and read their original works, that so much of their original visions have been distilled and made overly simple or, worse, overly complex.

It's been said that "worse is better" but I think that even that view has been interpreted in many different ways. I suppose I believe that once in a while, some visionary comes along and describes her forrays into the future. But, most can only grasp some small slice of it, and thus they run with those small slivers, but that is enough to change the world.

These fractions may not be complete, and so every so often, someone comes along and rediscovers what was once said so very long ago.

This seems like a noble task to try, working towards some synthesis, restoring the sheen of some lost but greater glory.