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For her new novel, Lost and Wanted, which follows Helen, an eminent theoretical physicist and single mother, as she mourns the death of her closest friend, Freudenberger set out to teach herself as much physics as she could. All three of Freudenberger’s previous works of fiction, Lucky Girls, The Dissident and The Newlyweds, focus on cultures she did not grow up in, and for her, as she worked on Lost and Wanted, physics became “sort of another country”, giving her “that heightened sense of experience that I get from travelling”. ’”

The emotional centre of the novel is grief, and while revising the book, Freudenberger lost a close friend, the composer Michael Friedman, who died unexpectedly in his early 40s and to whom the novel is dedicated.

The reason, I think, is that “hacker literature” tends to be dominated by Lisp programmers, and Lisp programmers tend to be ignorant of applied mathematics. It is tempting to declare that most programming problems “don’t need math”, but this is only true in the same sense that manufacturing, or supply-chain management, or baseball, “doesn’t need math”: advanced mathematics seems completely unnecessary to existing practitioners, but only until someone figures out that a particular mathematical concept is the right way to think about the problem at hand. The second reason I am optimistic about the place of mathematics in computer programming is related: the average consumer has more data than ever before, and mathematics can help to make sense of it, or at least make it more beautiful.

“It doesn’t seem to me that there is huge progress on anything.” One cable for Internet & power feels like great progress. Anything else anyone?

3) The computer industry is into consolidation [it’s that time];
the ante gets higher every round, and playing in some kinds of markets
requires a larger level of critical mass … than when you could become
a computer systems company by porting UNIX off the tape and being a company…

One can argue that the MIPS systems business, by itself, didn’t grow
quite fast enough, for whatever reasons. MIPS has, on many occasions, shared early chips with other systems vendors,
even when it would have been nice to hoard every one for ourselves. I’ve seen cases where you ended up with apples-to-oranges
comparisons (like counting all Sun systems in a pot, compared
against HP (or MIPS) workstations small servers, but omitting
the bigger ones, under the justification that the bigger HPs or MIPS
were multi-user systems and hence went on some other report,
despite the fact that many of the bigger Suns were running the
same DBMS-oriented apps as the HPs or MIPS!

Fred said his mother, Bernice, had been convicted of killing a neighbor and served two years in the infamous Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. In her appeal to the state Supreme Court a few months later, Bernice’s own lawyer called the incident “an ordinary negro woman fight” and said that most of the testimonies should be discounted — except for the sole white man’s — because “a so-called solem oath, has little, if any, restraining influence on this character of witnesses.” Hiram has few records of what happened to Bernice during her time in prison.

And the importance of recognising this fact is just one of the many lessons I learnt from Derren Brown, the illusionist, “mentalist” (mind-reader) and writer, whose book Happy explores the philosophy and psychology of wellbeing. View BBC Reel’s video of Derren Brown explaining the downsides of relentless optimism, and the difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”

If you’re not convinced, Brown suggests the following thought experiment: imagine that you woke up one day to discover that you were the only person left living on Earth. Brown argues that a healthier attitude to life comes from the Stoics, the ancient Greek philosophers who argued that we should actively and deliberately distinguish between the things that are within your power to change, and the things that aren’t – which we should learn to accept as a necessary part of life.

At the same time, lots of really cool
things have been happened in gopherspace and pubnixspace, and the
internet lately has at times felt for me as much fun as it did 15
years ago. I think about how much time today’s young kids spend
entertaining themselves watching YouTube videos on tablets, and I
realise that it won’t be long at all until the world is full of young
adults for whom all the companies and devices and services that I think
are ruining the internet will be associated with happy childhood
memories. I’m not any kind of expert on the topic, but I’m moderately interested
in the history of radio and television, and one thing I’ve learned
from reading up on these things is that a lot of people who were
closely involved in these fields in their early days are, today,
tremendously bitter and jaded about how things turned out, with regard
to commercialisation, the public interest, democractic access to the
medium, and all that jazz.

Over the next few years, it became clear that the Mac Pro was an embarrassing, outdated flop that Apple seemed to have little intention of ever updating, leaving its customers feeling unheard and abandoned. Then, in April 2017, out of nowhere, Apple held a Mac Pro roundtable discussion with the press to announce that they were in the early stages of completely redesigning the Mac Pro.1

The follow-up briefing a year later promised that the new Mac Pro would be released in 2019, and publicized the existence of a “Pro Workflow Team” of real pro users working inside Apple to inform the direction of their pro hardware and software. The Mac Pro isn’t actually out yet (and will be very expensive), they still need to resolve the problematic MacBook Pro with its next generation (rumors are promising), and the lack of standalone Apple displays under six thousand dollars really hurts the Mac Pro story.5

But I’m optimistic for the first time in years.

And the importance of recognising this fact is just one of the many lessons I learnt from Derren Brown, the illusionist, “mentalist” (mind-reader) and writer, whose book Happy explores the philosophy and psychology of wellbeing. View BBC Reel’s video of Derren Brown explaining the downsides of relentless optimism, and the difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”

If you’re not convinced, Brown suggests the following thought experiment: imagine that you woke up one day to discover that you were the only person left living on Earth. Brown argues that a healthier attitude to life comes from the Stoics, the ancient Greek philosophers who argued that we should actively and deliberately distinguish between the things that are within your power to change, and the things that aren’t – which we should learn to accept as a necessary part of life.