Or more likely, it’s just that I think slower than she talks.Īnyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. Or maybe it’s just that she can talk faster than I can think. She can read out loud faster than I can read silently. Actually, those of you who know Gloria will realize that she probably does her verbal processing down in the microcode. My wife’s verbal processor is a fast compiler. I often think that my verbal processor is a slow interpreter. What they see externally has to be filtered through my verbal apparatus, which is actually quite limited. On the other hand, my mind is like a screensaver that no one can ever look at, except maybe me, and God. I have great empathy for all of them, because that’s how I think… I think… A number of screensavers are based on cellular automata. After all, he’s TheDamian.Īnyway, the game of Life is sort of the prototypical example of a cellular automaton. Incidentally, this screensaver is a variant of Conway’s Game of Life. It’s a kind of recursive problem, you see. Screensavers, and why I have to talk about them today, and why I have to talk about why I have to talk about them today. But be that as it may, that’s what this talk is about. One of the things that bubbled up recently was that the subject of this talk had to be screensavers. Everything gets compared with everything else because the entire stew pot is bubbling like crazy. Things bubble up to the surface unbidden, and evolve in unexpected directions. On this level, my mind is in a continual ferment. That’s how well I think on Damian’s level. Do you see any goals in this picture? Do you see any efficient search strategies? Do you see anything resembling speed here? And no, I didn’t have a goal in mind when I picked them. And yes, that is where I got all my slides from. Yes, this is the famous Ant Spotlight screensaver. Here, on the other hand, is a picture of how well I think on Damian’s level. It’s very good that we have Damian on the Perl 6 design team, because we need someone who thinks like that.
He may have to backtrack occasionally, but he’s very goal-oriented, and knows how to backtrack gracefully. It doesn’t matter what the problem is, he’ll find a way to solve it eventually. It’s a picture of how Damian thinks.Īs most of you know, Damian is very clear-headed and determined. Especially since there’s only a 10% chance that it has to be a good speech.
Plus I had the hubris to think that it didn’t really matter what my slides say - I can probably wrap a speech around them anyway. That’s a virtue, right? And I was Impatient. Now the particular reason this speech is going to be lousy is that I made up all my slides before I knew what I was going to talk about. You can just get out Damian’s notes and start ticking off all the rules I’ve violated. You’ll probably get more out of this speech than anyone else - mostly as a kind of negative example. Those of you who attended Damian Conway’s Presentation Aikido seminar yesterday will be sure of it. So I’m giving you fair warning that this is probably going to be a lousy speech. After we get to number 10, we’ll know which one of mine wasn’t … Probably number 9 or number 10 … According to Sturgeon’s Law, 9 out of 10 speeches are crap. You see, 10 is kind of a magical number for speeches. I only have two more speeches to go after this, and I’ll be up to 10. Welcome to my eighth State of the Onion speech.
By the way, for any screensaver that wants random images (such as VidWhacker), I used a directory full of strange camel pictures (some of which I processed to make even stranger, just for those of you who think the phrase “strange camel” is redundant). If you want to play along at home, start up xscreensaver-demo and click on the screensaver named. Note: All comments in square brackets are X screensavers that I ran for my slides.