mburns's Journal: Reviving my Scientific Motivation Series

Yipes, where did my writing style go to in that last commentary!

Anyway, I want to point to my old series on scientific motivation (originally posted to the effect of stark silence on news:sci.physics).
Its location, rather than republishing it here, is:
Scientific Motivation

I descended into the realm of fiction last week. Pournelle and Niven's "the Mote in God's Eye" was advanced in its ideas. I would have given a lot in 1974 for the concept of a pocket computer, or for the realization that natural selection acting on groups will create specialization for the individuls in the group. Not even S. J. Gould was clear about this result in the 1980s.

So, there are variant temperaments in humans - pressed into being by natural selection acting on social groups. I count giftedness, ADHD, the concrete type, the anxious type and the bullying type as distinct styles, and all with plausibly their own distinct bell curve. Yes, I think it is Langsdon who mentions that giftedness is more frequent than allowed for by a single bell curve.

I did something to relieve my feature envy of other programming languages. I sat down for two days to write an extension which accomplishes the concatenating together of namespaces in Tcl as easily as concatenating strings - giving me the essence of the style of multiple inheritance by objects. Tcl now only lacks the significant features of lazy evaluation, static compilation (Tcl/Tk is entirely run-time interpreted in its behavior by specification), and "continuations". How can Tcl/Tk even benefit from typing mechanisms? It's not that I expect a tutorial in response. Other Tcl people have already done the same extension, and if I were less fussy I would adopt the single-inheritance object language package that is already recommended.

--
Michael J. Burns

Re: Reviving my Scientific Motivation Series

[anti-auctor]

You're style is always impeccable Michael. It's better than Zeppelin when you try really hard, and you do so often enough, which is a feat in this day of scribes and fakes), I've witnessed it several times. Now, if I comment on Langdon and that ilk, I may puke (sorry, it's not personal).

Let us set the single record of the universe completely straight - why should we deprive ourselves of adjectives?! -

In Wittgenstein's ('lately quartering' - that would be a reference to Beethoven's late Quartets, which btw

Re: Reviving my Scientific Motivation Series

[mburns]

Thanks for the compliment. I should try hard more.

It's interesting that I haven't studied Wittgenstein as much as I could have.

--
Michael J. Burns