Twenty plus years ago, back when I was in graduate school, I got my first copy of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman. At the time, it was a revelation: a book about computer science that actually taught you deep topics in computer science. Every few years, I go back and read this book and learn something new. It’s quite simply the finest computer science textbook that I’ve ever read.

Somewhat interestingly, MIT is now engaged in revamping the introductory course that used Abelson and Sussman’s text, and replacing it with a curriculum that uses Python. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this: while the exercises in SICP do not include topics which might be of interest, such as web programming, realtime programming, or programming window systems, I feel the information presented is essential to a well rounded education. But I’m not going to be dogmatic about this: I’ll wait to see what they come up with. It should be interesting.

Well, my silly cat is at it again. A couple of days ago, I came home and called out the back door for our partially tame, partially feral cat Scrappy. I’ve chronicled his misadventures before. When he didn’t show, I tried the garage, and found him in there. He slowly came in and seemed to be unhappy, so I bent down to pick him up, and found that his fur was covered in saliva (yuck) and he had obviously been in a scuffle again. To make an already long story less long, I took him to the vet, and he got shaved in four places (top of his head, under his chin, and both front legs). Two dozen bites, only one which looked troublesome, but he’s on antibiotics AGAIN. Silly cat.

The stripes on his head are acually scratches, you can see his left front paw has been shaved, he’s got thirteen bites on that leg. His other paw is shaved too.

I’m gonna have to work harder at converting him into an indoor kitty. Anybody have any hints? Success stories they’d like to share?

Loren sent this around our mailing list at work. The original was a huge gif, I converted it into a reasonably small SWF file.

Here is a link to the original, if you have the bandwidth and/or couldn’t view the SWF file above.

[tags]Astronomy, Mercury Transit[/tags]