Cover of The Astronomical Almanac for the year 2026.
It never really seems like the new year until the current Astronomical Almanac arrives. gpo.gov seemed slower than usual, possibly a side-effect of the shutdown(s).
As computing weaves itself into the interstitial spaces of civilization, increasingly every line of code represent an ethical and moral decision.
We need words once again to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally. Only in this way can authentic dialogue resume without misunderstandings."
Pope Leo XIV
(Address to Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, January 9, 2026)
Moreover, in the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents.
"Today, the meaning of words is ever more fluid, and the concepts they represent are increasingly ambiguous. Language is no longer the preferred means by which human beings come to know and encounter one another.
Referencing this important IEEE Access paper from the incomparable David Hestenes and a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/109...
I mainly remember the line 'Yeah, but us loners gotta stick together.'
'Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity.' Pope Leo XIV on X
This was one of the best descriptions I've seen of the summer/winters of AI. FYI, I really got started during the second AI summer.
The third AI summer: AAAI Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture - Kautz - 2022 - AI Magazine - Wiley Online Library onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
Cover to Kernighan and Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style, Second Edition
Kernighan and Plauger's Elements of Programming Style, published in 1974 and 1978, is still remarkably applicable to today's programming once account is made for its examples in Fortran 66 and PL/I. 'Localize input and output in subroutines.' Don't put SQL in your business methods.
I like this mental model in how to think about engineering (including software engineering).
It is a combination of building stuff for production, crafting, commercial production and science.
From the book Software Architecture by Mary Shaw and David Garlan
Root Cause Analysis: Choose from 1 of the following: (1) Network error. (2) Database error. (3) Coding error. Did I miss any? 😉
Barrett, Jeffrey, "Everettian Quantum Mechanics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries...>
'In his personal copy of DeWitt’s description of the many-worlds interpretation, Everett wrote the word “bullshit” next to the passage where DeWitt presented Graham’s discussion of the branching process and Everett’s typicality measure.'
I wish all the people who talk about how much they miss Common Lisp would just start using Common Lisp again.
The first two were when I was in elementary school, the last was 20 years later as an adult, when I realized there were new and very good things still happening in the SF world.
There are 3 books I remember clearly exactly when and where I was when I began reading them: (1) Foundation by Isaac Asimov, (2) Triplanetary by EE Smith, and (3) Pride of Chanur by C.J. Cherryh, in Science Fiction digest excerpt.
We are please to announce that we have passed our first internal milestone (proof of concept) and are proceeding with full development. The initial targets are Java and Postgres, and we hope for an initial public release before the end of the calendar year.
Diagrams comparing the JPA-based Spring petshop model with chenup, showing how JPA generally requires reification of roles but chenup allows 1st-class representation of associations without turning them into 'entities'. JPA Owner and Pet entities are replaced by a PetOwnership association.
chenup is a new persistence architecture based on our 30 years of experience with full OO and ORM approaches. The most important (but not the only) feature is the elevation of associations to 1st-class status, as shown in the JPA vs chenup diagrams below (based on the Spring pet shop example).
Instead, LocalDate should be reserved for those dates that are applied with reference to a location, but where the location is not tracked or used, particularly for legal purposes. Birth date is the canonical example.
I keep seeing java 'LocalDate' used to mean the date where the application is being run. An example of this is in the Spring Petclinic application, where it is used to represent the data of an appointment. This is not a good use for it.
In practical terms for system designers, reification imposes a structure on our systems that is not inherent in the real world.
Terms such as 'slave' represent a similar reification of a violent relationship rather than an objective entity.
In the medical world, the phrase 'people, not patients' emerged at least as early as 1985. The point is that a 'patient' is not an Entity but a reified role in an association, and that it is unethical to treat a person as simply a patient.
'Reification' is a standard term in object-oriented analysis. There is over a century of analysis of why this is a bad, even unethical, idea.
And even if, as a group, a typical member has a property, the individual may not.
What properties are shared by all instances of a taxon? Generally speaking, only the property of having a common ancestor (in modern monophyletic taxonomy). There is no property that evolution cannot alter over time (except historical ones, like common ancestry).
Biological taxonomy is a common but terrible example to use for object-oriented analysis and design in statically and class-based approaches.
This totally broke when we need to model satellites tethered to the space shuttle. You had to integrate the combined state vector together, applying constraint forces (Lagrange multipliers).
We were doing orbital mechanics. Our 'monads' were space shuttles in earth orbit and satellites they rendezvoused with. All forces were massively one way (primarily Earth's gravity and atmospheric drag). Each orbiting vehicle had its own state vector that could be separately integrated.