Learning Lisp, or Back from the Shadows Again
Late last night, my life changed in three hours. A kid called in to Leo Laporte and asked what language he would recommend to a young person to get them started in programming. To my delight, he recommended Lisp. He said something to the effect of: “Don’t use C or C++, use a real man’s programming language, use Lisp.” This inspired me to get back into this wonderful language. It also dovetails nicely into something else about which I wanted to rant: why I don’t want to go back to college.
I first became exposed to Lisp while taking an artificial intelligence course for two semesters. I learned it strictly in that context, only using it to solve silly academic problems, never really grasping its potential. For me, a structured learning environment seems stifling. They didn’t even mention Emacs once. This seems highly illogical, given they practically wrote the entire thing in Lisp. Of course, it does use a specialized dialect, so perhaps that explains it, but nevertheless. It probably wouldn’t have mattered, since at the time I could only access their Linux system over a non-error-correcting modem over a noisy phone line – just awful!
It seems interesting to me that learning Lisp in such a setting and in such a context prevented me from continuing to use it. For one thing, it had a negative association. I love programming, but college just makes thing seem dry and uninteresting. This ties into the other reason, the context under which I learned it. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days trying to write a function to draw a weighted graph or something, I want to rock out and do something cool that I will actually use in my day-to-day life. Why else would I want to program? Of course, “they” will tell you in their snobby way that “You have to learn that life is hard, and that you can’t always do what you want.” I reply by saying that I became blind at birth, and figured that out at about age four. Don’t patronize me!
For these reasons, I sadly relegated Lisp to the back of my mind, assigning it to the dusty corner reserved for purely boring academic matters. Once I escaped without a degree, I continued on a fairly ordinary course for a weirdo Discordian programmer. I picked up Perl, and learned a bunch of other cool things, but I always felt something missing. C gives me a headache, Java remains rather inaccessible to the blind, Python seems like a waste of time (I don’t want to spend all my time counting stupid white space), and so on. I mainly concentrated on learning Linux, since it had since become quite accessible, thanks to Speakup. I love FORTH, but sadly it doesn’t get much use. I craved something powerful and trippy. Yet, I never considered Lisp – after all, I wanted to actually do real stuff.
Now that I think about it, perhaps the universe had begun gently nudging me in this direction for some time. Goddess works in mysterious ways. First, I got into Firesign Theatre. One of their albums, We’re All Bozos on this Bus, has a computer-generated character called Dr. Memory. The fact they wrote this in the early seventies fascinated me – obviously they had access to one of the early AI labs, and this turned out true.
Next, I got into Emacs, which I linked to above. I’ve really come to enjoy it, though I still need to tweak it more. I could spend a long time doing that, and I still have a lot to learn, but feel very impressed with it. Unlike most editors that you may know, the Emacs executable file actually contains a Lisp interpreter for a specific dialect, and most of the editor actually resides in Emacs Lisp source code. This seemed really cool, since it allows infinite customization – how many editors do you know that have an adventure game, an Eliza program, and Mayan calendar routines?
These three features have a special place in my heart. I’ve always loved text adventures and text games, growing up using the first computer usable by the blind, an Apple II/E. One day at around age seven, I ran a version of Eliza, written in Apple BASIC. Eliza acts like a psychotherapist, dissecting the user’s input, parsing it, and sometimes outputting it in a modified form, often with humorous and sometimes even insightful results. It inspired Dr. Memory referenced above, and as it would turn out, it would inspire me as well. I had just ran the program, leaving it in memory. I didn’t really know any commands, so my little kid curiosity just said to start typing in things. I typed in “LIST” figuring it would list something, and in this case it listed the source code to Eliza. It clicked in my head that this told the computer what to do, and I knew right then that I had to learn how to do this too.
So this brings us back full circle to the present. After hearing the recommendation to learn Lisp, I quickly found Practical Common Lisp. It’s opening letter to the reader joyfully allayed my concerns, and convinced me that I should give Lisp a second chance. I now learn it on my own time, for my own reasons, in my own way, at my own pace, with my own pleasant associations. I value the time I spent learning it in college, but I do far better learning things on my own, and I know I will enjoy it even more. I love Lisp!
Cacao Powder, Raw Power!
I love cacao, the raw form of chocolate, as anyone who knows me or reads my blog regularly knows. For a while, I have used cacao powder primarily, due to its convenience. When I ate Taza chocolate, as detailed in a previous entry, I fell in love with it, and sensed a difference. I just found out why.
Confusion has always existed regarding the difference between cacao, cocoa, cacao powder, and cocoa powder. Strictly speaking, cacao refers to the raw unprocessed form of chocolate. Cocoa refers to the processed form of cacao, commonly used to make chocolate. One might think therefore, that cacao powder simply refers to ground up nibs (bits of cacao beans) in an unprocessed raw form, and that cocoa powder refers to a processed powder. One might also assume that something labeled “Raw, Organic Cacao Powder” would not have any processing. However, you know what they say about what happens when you assume: it makes an ass out of you and me.
I recently wanted to purchase some Cacao powder from NutsOnline. They offer the best prices and fast shipping. To my dismay, I saw the following warning:
This product is heated during the manufacturing process and is not considered raw.
I felt shocked and disgusted with myself for not noticing this. Now I understood the difference. Some quick searching confirmed my suspicions. Most cacao powder refers to the separated mass of the cacao, with the fats removed, and often gets heated to as high as 350F! Some does not, and some cacao powder even does just refer to the ground nibs, but most cacao powder has the fats removed, and heating of course destroys many of the beneficial ingredients. Taza uses the whole bean, giving it a fuller flavor. This explained everything, and I could taste and feel the difference.
Fortunately, NutsOnline offers another product, Cacao Paste, which does not employ heating, and as soon as I used it, I could again taste the full flavor and feel the difference. Oof! Boom! Yeah!
The moral of the story: Just because something advertises itself as raw organic Cacao powder does not make it so. It depends on the manufacturing process. It may actually not use excessive heat, but it most likely does, and most likely has the fats removed. I need all the beneficial fat I can get! I feel somewhat betrayed, but will give credit where due: at least NutsOnline put that honest warning. Go for the paste, even though you can’t measure it as easily, buy Taza, or find some other way to guarantee that you get the full raw product to enjoy the full raw Cacao experience. Don’t make the same mistake I did!
Big Boom!
I write this article under strange circumstances. On Sunday, we had a thunderstorm. It quickly escalated into a very severe storm, with wild lightning and mad thunder. With a crash, the power blinked off, and the phone went dead, and did not return. The net went with it. A hum filled the air, coming in through the open windows. A 12,000-volt power line had fallen to the ground. Sparks and arcs burst forth as the rain continued to fall, thunder and lightning continuing as well. The air resonated with the loud 60 hertz hum, and the awful sounds of the electricity sounded truly terrifying. I felt afraid to touch anything metal. From the depths of my past, Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” played in my head. I ran around the house to try to hear more, and returned to the computer room. The brutal sounds continued. I hoped my hair wouldn’t start standing on end. Visions of electric death filled my head, and I smelled some smoke.
This continued for fifteen or so minutes. Trucks then began to arrive. The transformer went off and on momentarily, but continued. Someone yelled: “Sir! Get back in your house!” I felt glad that I decided to stay inside and avoid the urge to check it out for myself. Trucks and people began working, the fire department and electric company had come. Finally, they shut off the transformer, but power remained on. Work continued long into the night and early morning. At some point, I did indeed lose my power, before getting it back again later. I still have no phone or Internet as I write this, and will have to wait to get online to publish this article.
Whenever I lose power for an extended time, I find myself having similar thoughts. These mainly revolve around how much we depend on electricity, and wondering what people did before we had it. These thoughts then become refined, and I begin reflecting on how electricity alters our behavior patterns. I also note how good it feels to not have an electric smog surrounding me, and wonder what I can do to experience this while experiencing electricity’s benefits.
As soon as the realization hits that power probably won’t return immediately, everything changes. All the devices that seem so futuristic immediately seem like useless relics. Walking through a room with computers feels like walking through a museum of ancient dust-covered non-functioning exhibits. Having electricity transforms the present into the future. Not having it transforms the present into the past. It amazes me how much humanity accomplished without it. Imagine getting on a boat in England as my ancestors did, setting sail for a far off land never to return, and with no way of communication. I can’t!
Along a similar vein, I can’t help but wonder what exactly people did without electricity, especially once the sun went down. Did religious leaders really need to tell their flocks to be fruitful and multiply? I’d think that after sunset, they wouldn’t have much else to do! Electricity makes it possible to do things at all hours of the day. You can listen to music, watch a television show, communicate, eat, work, anything you want. It also makes it less necessary to interact with others, and they probably did a lot more of that in the past as well. Battling and babbling with Verizon’s automated customer service computer demonstrated this point. Today, when I went to the bank to get some cash, I couldn’t use the ATM, and actually had to go inside and talk to a human to get it. Weird! Perhaps having electricity messes with our heads more than not having it.
How do we bring balance? I thought of meditation techniques, EMF balancing devices, things of that like, then an answer emerged from another angle, perhaps indicative of the effect. Do things that don’t require electricity. Good luck with that.
Verizon came out the next day to fix the problem. Their automated tests claimed that they could get a dial tone on my line, and could ping my router, both of which I doubted. “Tell them to actually call your number.” suggested my Mom. Whatever, they dispatched a technician. He determined that the outside box got fried, as well as the plug to my router. I told him of the tests, and he said: “I don’t see how that’s possible.” Don’t believe Verizon’s somewhat freaky automated service. It also weirded me out how the cell phone distorted its hold music to sound like satanic industrial music, or something. Anyways, he fixed the problems, and I returned online. I meant to publish this article sooner, but have gotten immersed in learning Emacs. I’ll have much more to write
about that, for sure.