Daily Life in an Ivory Basement

Here at MSU, we just had a 40th anniversary celebration of the Computer Science department. As it happens, Carl Page (Sr.) was a founding member of CSE at MSU, and so his son, Carl Page (Jr.) came and participated in a panel. In response to my question about what we should be doing in the CS department to better prepare our students for the future, he commented that our recent move towards Python was good, and that we should push towards more open-source involvement as well. I'm happy with both of those opinions :).

While talking about Python, however, Carl said:

Python is a scrappy little language that plays well with others.

Well, that, or maybe it was:

Python is a crappy little language that plays well with others.

Hmm, which was it??

--titus

I have a habit of occasionally sending odd e-mails to my postdoc lab mailing list, for reasons that I cannot adequately explain. Here's the latest one:

Dear Bronner-Fraser Lab,

I would like to thank you all for your private letters of support;
between the blizzards of Colorado, the floods of Texas, and the
red-v-blue fighting in Michigan, it's been a tough year for us newly
independent Bronner-Fraser-ites!

Now that McCain has withdrawn his cadre from Michigan and Obama has
successfully captured the bastion of Michigan State (strategically
located next to the capitol of Michigan!), I expect the out-and-out
party fighting to die down, at least in the streets of Lansing.  While
fiercely partisan Reds will probably continue to snipe at us for a
while, Obama continues to clear Lansing block-by-block in his advance
with forces of crushing superiority.  However, the newly added wrinkle
of the pro- and anti-bailout forces (or, as they're known locally, the
Inflationists and the Depressionists) leads me to believe that we are
not long for peace here; more on that soon.

Overall, we've been very lucky.  Our compound is located far enough
away from densely populated areas that we haven't been affected much
by the fighting, and some of our local friends who are less fortunate
have bolstered our ranks.  Armored vehicles continue to roam the main
roads, but again, we're not close enough to them to be affected.  We
do have a local supply of drinking water, and so far the mine fields
are holding up; I do worry a bit about the ammo situation, but I've
directed everyone to switch away from automatics until we get a new
shipment in.

Internet has not been interrupted, although this is a mixed blessing;
I've had to stop communicating with one of the few remaining die-hard
conservatives I know, because his e-mails were correlated with attacks
by the local McCain militia.  I have come to believe that he was
hitting me with pro-Palin blogs as a distraction technique, although I
quickly saw through the tactic -- even the conservatives don't think
she's viable any more.

Anyway, I'll continue to keep you all updated as the fight continues.

best,
--titus

Please send ammo!