vivdunstan

Some musings from me, prompted by last week's graduation ceremonies at Dundee University, plus this week's graduation ceremonies at St Andrews University.

Now up to 51/53 of the year entries chosen and filled. Was highly amused when I mentioned before dinner to Martin that I'd just added a "certain programming book". And he knew immediately which one it was. Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language. Which was a life saver in 1991/2 during a particularly problematic (lecturing wise) portion of my computer science undergraduate degree at St Andrews.

Watching another Treadwells recorded talk, and laughing when the speaker said "You don't need to note the references to books etc., I have a bibliography for you." Yeah right. Brings back memories of some St Andrews CS lectures in 1993/4 when a couple of us had to go along in person months afterwards to ask insistently for copies of the slides we were supposed to get and why we had been told not to take any notes at all! Anyway another good Treadwells talk.

I'm working my way through a subset of the Treadwells of London talks available for members, getting through all the ones I fancy before I cancel my recurring monthly membership subscription. Tonight's talk was from an archaeologist speaking about ritual deposits, especially in private houses between the 16th and 19th centuries. Fascinating. Possibly too many slides for the time allotted, but I certainly wasn't bored!

I'm continuing my reread of The Fellowship of the Ring. And the party have just got through Moria. But I was struggling hugely to visualise in my mind the different rooms and levels that the party were going through, especially later on in their time in Moria. But I can remember a time when I could visualise them clearly. For many years. So this seems to be something I've lost since, or can't do now anyway. It's not that I'm not remembering the Peter Jackson movie version. But my image of the journey through Moria was memorably different from the movie I saw in 2001. I remember clearly having "thoughts" about the film's depiction of Moria, and how different it was from how I imagined it looked ever since I'd started reading the book for the first time as a young child. But now I can't really visualise any geography at all as I read.

Relatively recently I tried an aphantasia online test. And scored highly. Which would fit with my struggles to visualise things in my mind now. Including faces. Even very close family! But I'm now wondering after this LOTR rereading experience if it's something that I've developed more in recent years. Perhaps as a result of my progressive neurological illness.

When I was young I could visualise things, and draw from images in my mind. However when my neurological illness started in 1994 at age 22 I quickly noticed my ability to think abstractly diminishing. Rather a big problem for a computer science PhD student needing to program. I quickly lost the ability to program effectively in lots of languages. Though at the time I just coped as best as I could. It's more distressing looking back.

So yup, I wonder if visualisation is another loss with time, perhaps due to my long term illness. It's partly also why I dreaded designing cover art for my latest IFComp game. But hey, got there!

Curiouser and curiouser anyway. I am enjoying my LOTR reread despite this. Next up Lothlorien.

Just realised Martin and I - plus pal Andrew - graduated 30 years ago today at St Andrews University! We hope to get video clips soon, but the uni haven't got them to us yet. Meanwhile here's the Dundee Courier page from that day, 6 July 1994. Listing the 3 of us - me and Andrew Computer Science, Martin Astronomy + Physics.

Good spurt of IFComp game coding. Inform 7/10 is a largely declarative language, very like coding in Prolog. But sometimes you have to go imperative. And I've just coded a ridiculously large set of nested IF ... OTHERWISE ... statements to handle a key situation. Now approaching the end of the game, though still have masses of earlier stuff to go back and finish off writing properly.

A new month, time for another infographic showing the books I am mainly reading. A mix of fiction and non fiction, biography, computing and poetry.

Me to Martin just now: “It’s like an Occam folding editor!” as I try to explain cut/spoiler sections in DreamWidth blog posts. That won’t make any sense except to fellow computer scientists possibly of a certain vintage. But sharing for them! I can still vividly remember coding Occam in the Edge basement Sun lab on the Scores in St Andrews in the early 1990s.

Finally installing Python3 on my new Mac so updated my family reconstitution code from Python 2 to 3 (very easy). Running both versions in test sequence produces identical results, core output and GEDCOM file. And the Python 3 runs 3 times faster than Python 2! This is reconstituting nearly 7000 baptisms and 3000 marriages at Melrose parish in Roxburghshire (Scottish Borders) before 1800. Putting children into families with parents, and outputting family groupings as a GEDCOM file for import into a genealogy program. This is the only Python program I've ever coded. I was a computer science PhD student when my neuro illness struck at age 22 in 1994. I had to drop out, and have barely coded since. But something must have stuck! The pseudo code was easy to convert into Python, even for a newbie.

Current reading, mid Nov 2022. For fiction The Snow Spider by Jenny Nimmo and Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh. Non fiction Terry Pratchett bio by Rob Wilkins, Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh by Phil Dodds, Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince, and Hello, World! by Brian Kernighan.