The occasional scrivener

September is contre-jour month!

Sep 2017 | Sep 2016 | Sep 2015 | Sep 2014 | Sep 2013 | Sep 2012 | Sep 2011 | Sep 2010 | Sep 2009 | Sep 2008 |

After some attempts at a solution at the limit I went back to the Wikipedia page on the divisor function.

Implemented a priority queue for the first time, unfortunately the plethora of modules implementing this in Perl made it hard to choose. Finally went for the POE framework.

Returning to a problem after 3 years. This is slightly optimized brute-force and can be much quicker.

Easing back into PE again. I’m picking off problems in ascending difficulty order.

A snappy, well-written narrative history of the “Red scares” (plural) in the US.

The background of the US involvement against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the revolution is interesting, but the account lacks a through-line of argument. Some pivotal occurrences (such as Hiss vs Chambers) is glossed over.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Adam’s photographs are so well-known as to be worn smooth of all meaning, elevated to vacuous “fine art”, but reading Adam’s descriptions of how they were made, what he was thinking, what eventual mistakes he made et cetera humanizes them and brings them down to a plane where we mere mortals can begin to think: “I could make that”.

This is of course why Adams is known all over the English-speaking (well, American) world as “the greatest photographer ever”. His career as a teacher, coupled with a subject matter dear to the ideal idea of America, as well as his undeniable rigor as a developer of technique, has ensured that.

But sometimes, reading these stories, you glimpse nostalgia for a youthful life of clambering around Yosemite with glass-plate negatives in his rucksack, and the entire future of celebrity, hard work, and backbreaking labor in the darkroom in blissful unawareness.