Julia is a programming language widely loved because it is fast — maybe ten times faster than MATLAB and Python. No surprise that people are excited, eh?

Well, yes, it is a surprise, in fact a paradox, an oddity of our times. Computers have been speeding up exponentially for a long time, and according to the Top500 list, each 15 years brings another factor of 10000. Today’s top machines are rated at 10¹⁶ floating-point operations per second, whereas fifteen years ago it was 10¹² and thirty years ago 10⁸. So Julia’s speed is equivalent to just three or four years of progress up the Moore’s Law curve. Why is this exciting?

I think the explanation is that these supercomputer benchmarks have lost contact with the machines most of us actually use. My machine runs at around ten gigaflops, a million times slower than the Top500 champion, like a high-end computer of THIRTY YEARS AGO. To get much faster, I’d have to learn a new way of computing. The top machines have millions of processors—“cores”—and it takes special methods to exploit them. Most scientists don’t bother.

The politically correct view is that in the end we will all learn these special methods, but I don’t believe it. I think the machines will do more of the adapting than we do: that ways will be found to let us program in the old ways and still benefit, even if imperfectly, from massive parallelism. The human brain isn’t optimal either, but it manages to use a billion processors.

[9 February 2015]

Last night before the conference banquet here in Seoul we were shown a film advertising Hanyang University. I wrote down three examples of curious English.

(1) The University’s goal: “Developing leaders with global characteristics”
(2) Its attitude to the future: “Fearless of change!”
(3) Its highest aim: “Practicing love”.

None of these phrases would have appeared if the script had been written by an Oxford professor. But this is Asia’s century. Let’s look more closely.

#1, I think, is just a random offbeat choice of words, good for a chuckle.

#2 requires more analysis. I’d have chosen a less martial expression like “embracing change” or “embracing the future”. But that would have been limper than “fearless of change!” with its somehow Asian accent, and who am I to say they’ve made the wrong choice? To the billion who’ve learned English as a second language, “fearless of change!” may speak better than anything I’d have cooked up.

And what about #3, “Practicing love”? In my ears this comes across as just plain kooky. But who am I to say how it may sound to others less finely Anglotrained, whether it may communicate, in Global English, something genuine?

[10 August 2014]

We started the Thames Path this weekend, right up at the source near Cirencester, and the weather reports warned us that temperatures would be freezing.  So I wore long underwear.  We were pretty comfortable, though, not too cold.  I forgot I was wearing it.

So you naturally start thinking to yourself, maybe the long underwear was unnecessary?

Well, there’s an obvious fallacy here.  Very likely I was comfortable precisely because I had put on extra clothes; and this suggests a general principle.  When something is quietly going well in your life, some of the credit may be due to you. Not putting on too much weight?  Congratulations — you may have pretty good eating habits!  Getting along ok with friends and family?  Bravo — you may be a rather agreeable person!

[4 February 2015]

Yesterday the knuckle of my left index finger was hurting. I couldn’t type normally, or hold a cup of coffee.

Twenty years ago this would have been a painful knuckle, end of story. But I’ve reached the age where my trials are tripled:

PAIN. I didn’t like the pain. Same as twenty years ago.

WORRY. There have been hints lately. Is this an early sign of arthritis or some other chronic condition of old age?

SHAME. Absurdly, this may be the worst of the three. I don’t want to hurt, and I don’t want to be old, but most of all, I don’t want to be perceived as old by others or by myself. If I have arthritis, that lands me in a new category for all the world to see. I’ll suffer twice the pain, please, if it can be pain with no significance.

[6 January 2015]

The Dutch East India Company was the most powerful company the world has ever known. It was the first multinational corporation and the first to issue stock, and had the power to wage war, found colonies, negotiate treaties, execute convicts, and mint coins. It was much bigger than the English East India Company and for a century was the main conduit of wealth into northern Europe. It made the Netherlands fabulously rich, brought tea and coffee and chocolate into our lives, and transformed Amsterdam and Jakarta. It founded Cape Town. It founded New York.

In Amsterdam last week, we went to the VOC museum, which is large and excellent and includes a spice trading ship we crawled over from fo’c’sle to quarterdeck. There were twenty or thirty other tourists at the museum.

Vincent Van Gogh was a Dutchman who lived 37 years and produced beautiful paintings, including striking self-portraits. The story is well known of his dramatic final years, featuring a quarrel with Gauguin, mutilation of his ear, commitment to a mental institution, and death from a gunshot wound. In Amsterdam we went to the Van Gogh museum too. There were two or three thousand other tourists there.

[8 January 2015]

My sister and I spent nine years of our childhood on a voyage around the world by land and sea.

This statement is true, though we didn’t notice it until our father pointed it out to us. The first leg of the journey, in 1956, was on a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic from England to the USA, when our father was returning from a sabbatical at Cambridge. (In America we paused to spend eight years as kids growing up in a suburb.) The rest of the journey unfolded in 1964-65 during his next sabbatical. First we drove across the USA and took a freighter to Australia. Seven months later we sailed to Athens by passenger ship. Trains and a rental car got us to Holland, and finally, a ferry to England completed our circumnavigation.  (Shortly thereafter we flew to Boston and commenced the remainder of our lives.)

A nine-year voyage around the world!  I am Marco Polo, I am Magellan!

[6 December 2014]

Kate and I and her parents attended midnight service last night in Iffley’s beautiful Norman church, St. Mary’s, and I learned a fine point of Anglicanism in the early 21st century. It seems that  communicants who prefer gluten-free wafers may mention this to the vicar, who will accommodate them accordingly. Note how neatly this option reflects the fact that the Eucharist is merely symbolic. If the wafer actually turned into a piece of the body of Christ, gluten wouldn’t be an issue.

[25 December 2014]

As Kate and I walked along the Thames last night, just below Folly Bridge in Oxford, we were tickled to note that it’s boathouses on the left, houseboats on the right.

[18 October 2014]

A man stood up and I thought, that’s my brother-in-law Dana!

Then he turned to another angle and I thought, no, that’s my nephew Adrian!

The funny thing is, I’ve never noticed that Adrian and his father look much alike. But this stranger looked like both of them.

[12 October 2014]

I’ve long enjoyed the fact that there’s an evolutionary explanation of why trees do such a good job of providing shade. The function of leaves is precisely to catch the sunlight, and any sunlight that gets through to the ground is a missed opportunity.

Natural selection helped me out in another similar way just now. I was cleaning up the hallway after a visiting upholsterer left some duck feathers on our floor. Nothing is easier, I dicovered, than vacuuming up duck feathers! A little thought reveals that this is because evolution, as it were, has optimized duck feathers precisely for vacuumability: they are designed to be as light, and as good at catching the breeze, as possible.

[14 October 2014]