Does "I'm Sorry" matter?

So Alan Turing finally received an apology...

... but does it matter? For those who don't care to read the article, Turing was a mathematician and one of, if not THE, first computer scientists. He developed the concept of the Turing Machine, an abstract machine that could perform computations. Modern computers are, in their most basic form, Turing Machines. He helped develop our understanding of what computation means and what we can compute. This man, along with a handful of others, started my field of work.

But his work goes beyond that, even. You see, in World War II, Alan Turing worked at Bletchley Park, where he and a number of other cryptanalysts worked to break German ciphers. Their most famous success was the cryptanalysis of the Enigma Machine, which allowed Allied forces to read German communications. For all the bravery and sacrifice that the Allied troops displayed, without Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park, it's possible (maybe even likely) the war would have gone very differently.

So why does the UK government need to apologize? Well, you see, Alan had TEH GAY! And since faggots are subhuman pedophiles, they must be contained from infecting the rest of us. And so he was convicted of homosexuality and subsequently chemically castrated. Long story short, he committed suicide some time after this (or, if you're of the conspiratorial mindset, was murdered by MI5).

Do I sound a bit bitter over this?

So Gordon Brown came out and apologized. That's nice. I appreciate the sentiment. And really, there's not a whole lot more they could do... he's long dead, after all, and it's certainly not the current government's fault (that I know of).

It just feels... empty.

So... does "I'm sorry" matter?

This will all end in tears

So this semester Mississippi State is offering a course in Compilers. For the uninitiated, a compiler is what translates a programmer's source code into machine code that can be executed by a computer. MSU hasn't offered this course in about five years, and may not offer it again for some time, so I jumped on the chance to take it while I could.

Today we received our first assignment: implement a Lexical Analyzer Generator. A lexical analyzer parses through a string of characters and assigns tokens to different parts of the input. For example, a lexical analyzer for English would produce tokens for nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. So, for example, the sentence "I drove to the store." would get tokenized as . This stream of tokens could then be input into a syntax analyzer to check if the sentence conforms to the English grammar. Now, English being the mess it is, this isn't always an easy task. Programming languages, on the other hand, are typically members of a much simpler class of languages known as the "context free" languages.

The traditional lexical analyzer generator is lex. Our assignment is to reimplement lex (or, more accurately, it's modern incarnation flex). To better help me organize my thoughts for this assignment, I will be posting commentary on lex/flex and our own implementation, Luthor. For anyone not interested in Formal Languages or Computer Science, this might be pretty boring, but you never know.

Feel Like Chicken Tonight

From the always fair and balanced HuffPo:

"An undercover video shot by an animal rights group at an Iowa egg hatchery shows workers discarding unwanted chicks by sending them alive into a grinder, and other chicks falling through a sorting machine to die on the factory floor."

Is it wrong of me that my first thought was that old jingle "I Feel Like Chicken Tonight?"

I dunno... seriously, what did they expect? Farming... even the small, romanticized family farm... is an ugly business at times. And it's not like they didn't have an offer for anyone to take the chicks.

Mark Twain said it best... "Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made."

Chick-Fil-A anyone?

Phil

Hello, world!

So I finally talked myself into doing one of these blog things.

Yes, I'm very disappointed with myself. After all, why should anyone care what I have to say? The internet's signal to noise ratio is terrible enough as is, so why should I add to the digital cacophony?

And yet, here I am.

So... hi!

I'm Phil, a Computer Science student at Mississippi State University trying to decide an optimal strategy of playing this wonderful game we call life. This site is going to be the dumping ground for the pseudorandom number generator in my brain... whatever I find interesting or catches my fancy will go here... odds are that'll range from political to computers to mathematics to economics to religion to professional wrestling. I'm very much a geek, and damn proud of it, thank you.

Assuming this blog catches any sort of audience (and that's a huge assumption, although I'll be posting to my Facebook feed), feel free to comment or whatever... thoughts are always welcome.

More later.

Phil

PS: In case you're curious, the titular inspiration for this blog can be found here