Today's formal peer-reviewed journals grew out of a custom of researchers who generally had totally different lines of work other than scientific research. For example Pierre Fermat managed to totally stymie dozens of generations of the very finest mathematical minds with his Last Theorem, despite not being a Mathematician by trade but a Judge.
The worlds largest telescope prior to the construction of the one hundred inch reflector on the peak of Mt. Wilson just north of Caltech was not built by a University astronomy department but by an Amateur Telescope Maker just such as myself, it's just that he was a bit more flushed for cash than I could ever hope to be. If memory serves me it was seventy-two inches in diameter.
Clock-Drive guided astrophotography had yet to be invented, so William Herschel looked through an eyepiece, then called out his observations to his wife who sat taking notes in one of the dimly-lit windows of their British countryside mansion.
Until actually quite recently from a historical perspective, academic work was primarily a hobby conducted by amateurs whose only funding came from their own pockets, but the tradition of sharing their results in writing that all of humanity might benefit came from the tradition of reporting their results by spamming all their colleagues with handwritten letters written in Latin, the one language that everyone knew how to read back in the day.
I hope you will understand that I am not at liberty to be too specific, but perhaps you will finally understand why I don't put much time, energy, effort or attention into solving the problems in the software that provides my daily bread, nor do I bother with any more web design aesthetics than absolutely required to make my websites both usable to people and juicy to Google.
Today I rang up the Portland office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ask whether they were open to the public on Saturday. While I expect it's staffed 24/7, they don't have the resources to deal with personal visitors outside of visitors.
But the FBI agent I spoke to was curious to know why I was too impatient to wait until after the holiday, so I got the idea in my head that it would be totally cool to ask him what what the connection was between Ortho Snail and Slug Death, any flavor of Kool-Ade Mix other then lemon, Hydrogen Peroxide disenfectant, a teaspoon, a water glass or small bowl, a medium-sized mixing bowl, a box of table salt, ice and a coffee filter.
I expect that poor fucker must have had a hard time getting through grade school because he regarded my brain teaser just the about the same way as if I had just urgently told him that it could not possibly wait until Tuesday for me to determine whether the Portland FBI bureau had Prince Albert in a can.
He didn't exactly start shouting at me, but he was pretty pissed off, but I've been in just this same place before so I was completely sympathetic to his concerns. After I finally was able to explain myself, I had his rapt attention.
"But how much difference can just one person make?" he asked. I don't doubt he feels just that same frustration himself in his own line of work.
"I can't actually make the difference happen, but there is something about the way I think that makes it trivially easy to come up with this stuff on a damn near continuous basis."
The fact that I hardly ever manage to get enough sleep, with what sleep I do get being incredibly irregular, has nothing whatsoever to do with medication noncompliance or mania as you sorry lot are so fond of so cluelessly asserting.
I've long grown sick to death of clearly explaining that this is the result of my Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Whereas few if any of you sexual predators would know mania if it bit you, my OCD was diagnosed by my psychiatrist Dr. M. back in Nova Scotia in 2004, after he had been treating me regularly for several months.
I regard him as the very finest psychiatrist I have ever known, and he attended a top medical school, he actually met me in meatspace, so maybe he got it right and you don't.
The mechanism of OCD is quite simple: one ruminates - that is, constantly repeatedly worries over - some repititious, stereotypical thought that one cannot ever get out of one's head despite that it fills one with overpowering anxiety.
No one can tolerate that kind of anxiety for any length of time and so struggles desperately to find some way to calm oneself. It turns out that carrying out some repeated, stereotyped physical behavior is quite calming. Consider for example riding a bicycle at a modest pace, idling away at a musical intrument for a while, or entertaining your pork sword for my own personal best of twenty-seven solid hours.
One's chosen compulson is discovered more or less randomly, with the reason why one chooses a particular compulsion over others being an as-yet unsolved problem that the mental health community has been beating at with little success for decades.
Most commonly those comforting compulsions are, at best, a serious time sink that while not causing damage to one's directly, interfere with one's ability to enjoy any manner of human life. Thus the wife of some TV comedian whose name escapes me somehow, late one night discovered her Obsessive-Compulsive husband straightening the fringes on all the carpets.
My mother really does hallucinate filth everywhere she looks, because I have been completely unable to find the slightest speck of dust or anything so much as a micron out of her place anywhere she's lived since I left home for Pasadena in September, 1982.
I had the idea at first that she just finds cleaning to be a pleasant way to relax, but in reality she hates cleaning with a passion.
She would like nothing more than for her house not to be completely overwhelmed with filth and corruption, so that she would not be so weary and overburdened, as well as having more time and energy to devote to what she really does enjoy, which these days is primarily attending meetings over supper or lunch with some batshit insane large number of ladies clubs.
About a year ago I became completely convinced that my mother was going to drop dead of a heart attack or stroke if I could not find some way to convince her to stop cleaning RIGHT NOW and just get some fucking sleep. I finally was able to do so, and helped her transition to dreamland with some William Ackerman guitar recordings.
I closed her door gently, figuring she was down for the night, but less than an hour she sprang out of bed then went at her carpet like a mad woman.
I know a whole lot more about nuclear weapons, nerve gas and the like that anyone outside of the military, diplomatic or arms control communities has any rational reason to.
My reason for that is that my particular ruminations concern stuff like global thermonuclear warfare, the destruction of all life on Earth through comet strikes or nearby Supernovae, or small scale forms of death and destruction such as profoundly senseless handless violence, as typified by Wall of Voodoo's heart-warming Carol:
The very best way to keep that stuff out of my head is to stay constantly busy with just about anything. Doing any activity of any sort of all - say, practicing piano scales for a solid day - keeps me from having to deal with the fact that the president of Iran is completely convinced that he was sent here by Allah (My His Name Be Blessed) to bring about the return of The Mahdi, or the Muslim Messiah.
The Shi'ite Muslims regard the Mahdi as having been in hiding for I think fourteen hundred years, whereas the Sunni consider him not to have been born yet.
In any case, upon his return he will transform the entire Earth into an eternal Muslim paradise.
I've never been quite clear why President Ahmenidijad or however his name is spelled would figure that totally vaporizing what the Muslims also regard as Their Holy Land might be a good way to roll out The Mahdi's red carpet. But clearly he does, and works tirelessly to get the word out by regarly praying before the entire United Nations Generally Assembly in New York City for the Mahdi's return.
I shouldn't have to keep beating into the heads of anyone that the Prez of Iran is batshit insane, but because he's a good-looking, well-dressed, happy, friendly guy who works really well with that unshaven GQ Magazine look, everyone has been buying his bullshit that all those Uranium Hexaflouride centrifuges as well as their reactor are but for the peaceful production of electricity, despite that Iran is damn near drowning in oil.
Even if you never read any of Solving the Software Problem, of course you would by now know the gist of it because I haven't shut up about the damn thing for a couple of years now.
I've been stressing over the North Koreans since January or so of 1994, the Iranians for three or four years, the Syrian VX nerve gas for the same amount of time, software bugs in nuclear reactor control systems since I read Peter Neumann's piece about it in Scientific American in the early 90's, the fact that the tall chain link, barbed wire fence all around the industrial area at Mare Island Naval Shipyard might well have been seventeen feet tall, but because it didn't actually reach all the way down to they ground, myself and my dear old friend Jeffrey Coates were easily able to crawl underneath it, then have the time of our lives roaming all around one of the United States Navy's most important installations in 1968, at the very height of the Vietnam War.
I typically come up with new material for Solving the Software Problem as I struggle desperately somehow to get it out of my mind that I may get to sleep. This typically happens for two or three hours every night. I've suffered that very same Obsessive Insomnia over some gruesome, worrisome, horrifying topic for as long as I have had conscious memory.
Other than the proper names of people I meet, I have a damn near photographic and encyclopedic memory. I don't need to keep a notebook to ensure new results are not forgotten.
What I decided just today to refer to my lifetime of endless worry as "The Metapor of the Burden" as a result of the fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the United States Secret Service, the United States Marine Corp - but not the Navy, they just hung up on me angrily - as well as the Vancouver, Washington Police Department all listened to me with rapt attention when I asked if I might point out to them some glaringly obvious problems that are so plainly apparent that any schoolchild could easily see them, that for the most part they understood instantly what I was on about, and agreed to pass on the written material that I'll be preparing to the right people.
In response to that FBI agents rhetorical object of what I could possibly do all by myself, I replied that I would do more or less what Isaac Newton did when he clued as all in to The Law of Gravity, then as a result of looking into the gravitation of extended objects, Symbolic Integration.
"What I can do all by myself is to write down the results of my research, then privately pass my papers on to those such as yourself to ensure that they fall into the right hands."
I hope you can forgive me that I will never, ever tell you what I told any of these incredibly dedicated and patriotic servants.
Until today, I could never come up with any way that I could ever forgive myself for never contributing to any solution of what I regard as the very most serious software problems of all, because simply to point out the existence of those problems might result in the destruction of all life on Earth forever, should the word get out about the incredibly refreshing sports drink one can prepare from any flavor of Kool-Ade mix other than lemon.
Many of you work in some capacity in the commercial website operation. No doubt you do some log file analysis. You will easily see that most United States National Defense and Law Enforcement Agencies analyze their logs as well.
One good way to suggest that their staff read a diary, story or comment that you post that might be helpful or interesting to them, would be to link their websites directly from your material.
This also helps your SEO, by linking to what is known in the business as "Authority Sites". The reason that helps is that the search engine people know that link spammers tend to link to only their own websites, whereas those who are trying to contribute to something of real value link to sites where additional information may be found.
Here are the people I spoke with today:
No doubt you will all be overjoyed to hear about how pissed of my mom was to answer the call when a police officer rang me up on her land-line today.
I expect she figured I'd been up to no good, but I said, "No Mom, that's just my buddy Officer Tim Thompson. I'm not in trouble, SJPD Sergeant Sousa is."
I'll just have to let you meditate on that last bit for now, but quite likely you figured I was just grandiose when I pointed out to the good Sergeant "Listen You Goat Fucker, You Fucked With The Wrong Guy."
He really did.
Despite all my worries about Syrian Nerve gas and the fact that the Israelis have three hundred Hydrogen bombs and a whole bunch of different ways to deliver those particular parcels, I really really do take a great deal of comfort and relief in the words of Edward Bulwer-Lytton:
The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword
Your Servant,
Jonathan Swifth
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