I’ve been thinking about Turing machines a lot, and doing some reading about them. The basic explanation, if I can remember it: there’s a machine that can read this paper tape (probably mylar if it was invented now). The tape looks sort of like a piece of movie film or something, and each square can hold a 1 or a 0. The machine can also move the tape left or right, to read another square. The machine has in internal state, which is basically like one memory location that holds a number. The machine is also constructed to follow a ruleset. The ruleset is a bunch of if-then statements that distate tape movement and the storage of new items on the tape. So, “if the tape says 0 and the current state is 20, change the current state to 27, write a 1 in this position, and move the tape left”

What the hell does all this mean? Turing designed this thing (on paper) in 1936 as the solution to a problem about designing a machine that could solve any mathematical problem without being physically rebuilt or modified. This seems pretty stupid if you’ve got a pentium on your desk, but back then, it was a big deal. And if you’ve ever worked with assembly language, you know the similarities between a Turing machine and a simple (i.e. non-Intel) processor. A Turing machine is sort of like a one-register RISC processor, except it addresses a bunch of paper tape instead of a bus.

It’s amazing that there are things in the Rumored to Exist draft from two months ago that I’ve completely forgotten about. I was just editing down an excerpt for the next zine, and I found about 10 pages of really incredible stuff that I don’t remember writing. So that’s pretty cool.

I have about four different things going on at work and in my mind, and I can’t just focus on one. Over lunch and last night, I was trying to edit some stuff for the zine, today and yesterday I was trying to learn enough javascript to fix something at work, I started thinking thismorning about how I could rewrite my auto-index program for this journal so it would include table support, and on the back burner is this game I’m writing. Lots of things to think about…

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I guess the tables thing works now. It really makes the list of journals look small though. And I’m not sure if there’s some weird year-2000-esque bug that will cause the whole thing to fail at the end of the year. It sorts the stuff in alphabetical order, not numeric. So 12/25/71 goes after 9/16/97. And if I start writing next year it will look like this in the list: 9/16/97, 9/16/98, 9/17/97,…

I no longer advocate Details magazine as a worthwhile publication. At one time I said it was a good read for its price, but all of the good parts have vanished in favor for their idiotic new look. Plus they have these 200 page advertizing layouts that are disguised as genuine articles that pad out most of the articles that are not there anymore. And what’s with this “Details guy” thing? They make it sound like every person who is anybody in my age demographic wears $4000 suits with $400 shoes, works out for 40 hours a week, climbs mountains or visits Europe on the weekend, does the “club scene” every weekend (also) and lives in New York City or in the Valley. It’s total bullshit. If that is my generation, I want to file for emancipation and go join the baby boomers with their mutual funds and quiet vacations to Lake Tahoe. Anything but this.

I saw the first Back to the Future movie last night, and now I want to own a DeLorean. I also want to own a bunch of useless/useful scientific gear. I watched a lot of movies yesterday, many of the same genre, but on accident. I saw Wargames, then some HBO movie about a Soviet sub with a reactor fire, then Independence Day, then I went home and saw Back to the Future. So all but one had some military theme to them, and three mentioned DEFCON.

In about two minutes of searches, I found several comprehensive DeLorean pages. They cost about $20,000 new, but sold for much more, and appreciated way more. I did see one of these at Universal Studios, but it might have been a fake. Oh, you can find a used one that needs some work for $12K-$14K, and a pristine one for around $20K-$30K.

I’ve always been interested in ham radio even though I don’t like CBs or walkie talkies. I can never hear what the people are understanding. My dad had a CB back when fucking everybody had one, and it seemed interesting, but I never got into it - I was only 6. He also had a set of walkie talkies which were fairly cool - the type with six foot antennae. We used to run around the neighborhood with those bastards, playing army or star wars or whatever. But they took about 600 batteries each, so there were only one or two times we had both radios going.

The packet radio thing sounds cool - the idea of having something like the internet but without all of the ball and chain connections to the computer industry sounds pretty cool. But I don’t know what I’d use it for, since I seldom use my modem and computer at home these days. It would also be cool to get some 2 meter antenna radio and talk to people on the Mir and in China and everything, but I guess I can do a lot of that on the computer, and I don’t.

Today’s been a geek day, because I’ve been trying to figure out JavaScript for the first time today. I have always considered it useless, but now I think it might be cool to write some kind of book catalog search or something with it. As long as it isn’t some annoying dialog box that comes up and says “My Site is K00L! Come on in!”.

I plan to blow 50 or 60 bucks at the grocery tonight. I’m hoping for a good evening.

It’s one of those days. The temperature has changed enough to make me think that it’s fall. And with every change of season, I feel like I’m transported to some other year, or era. When the fall leaves are rustling and it gets chilly enough to need a jacket, I think about sitting in my mom’s driveway in Indiana, listening to Metallica - Master of Puppets and replacing a heater coil in a ‘76 Camaro.

It doesn’t help that I watched about an hour of some MTV “Hey! Remember the 80’s?” show last night. It was the one about 80s metal bands. A lot of it was about the hair bands like Cinderella and Poison, and it was amusing to see all of them broke and destitute, hair cut and money gone. It was odd to see George Lynch. He was in Dokken, which although they were trying to do the whole fringe jacket and tight pants thing, were somewhat musically talented. Anyway, George Lynch is now an amateur bodybuilder in Arizona, and was probably the most well-spoken of the bunch. He looked totally different with short hair, a tan, and riding around on a mountain bike or lifting weights. It shows you how much you can change in 10 years.

I listened to a tape last night when I was running that I made 10 years ago. Me and this guy Jia used to make comedy tapes, sort of Cheech and Chong types of things, and I dug them out of the closet. I actually listened to a mix I made on the backside of one of our tapes of a lot of the bands I was into in high school. Some of it had classic stuff like Hendrix, Grand Funk, and Led Zeppelin, but it also had some Saxon, Anthrax, and Metallica on there.

I know I’ve changed a lot since high school, but one of the things I miss is that in high school and in a lot of college, I had a real thirst for music. I spent a lot of money on tapes - when I got my first non-food job in high school and started working in the mall, I would buy at least one tape a week, every week. Even then, there were so many other things in the tape racks that I wanted to buy but couldn’t because of money. Now, I can walk into a CD store with a roll of hundreds and not find anything I REALLY want to buy. Sure, I could buy that Black Sabbath back catalog, or the Iron Maiden CDs that I only have on vinyl. But there isn’t a kind of music I LIKE anymore. I don’t know what new stuff I would want to get into. Although there is some cool older stuff, I want something new - something recorded in the digital age, something with good production, a lot of energy, and a reverberance that makes me want to go out and buy all of the artist’s albums. I had this back when metal ruled the world, but now I don’t. There aren’t any metal bands, and I’m not sure I’d even want to listen to them if they were out now. I’m sure they would be some band like Winger with some samples and a drum machine to sound more like Chemical Brothers or something. Oh well - metal caught me unprepared when I first started listening to old Maiden and Motorhead - maybe the next cool thing will, too.

I read far more about the liver than I’d ever need to know last night, and studied Gray’s Anatomy for about an hour, finding out what hooks up to what. The problem with Gray’s is that it was written about a million years ago, so it doesn’t talk about modern surgery - just old fashioned sawing and forking apart a cadaver. Things haven’t changed much there, but it would be nice for more detailed medical information. I have an encyclopedia from 1972, but that doesn’t exactly give me the latest in surgical techniques.

It doesn’t matter too much. I worked my worry into a frenzy last night, thinking my spleen would explode in my sleep, and when I got to the doctor today, he said I was fine. I’m glad I don’t have hepatitis or something, but I was hoping for some simple, treatable condition that would go away after a prescription or two, and allow me to go back to my previous diet of Cokes and Quarter Pounders. No such luck.

Why is everybody suddenly lactose intolerant? Why weren’t people on the Old West lactose intolerant? Did they start adding stuff to milk to make it worse? Have cows mutated over the last 5 years? Has there ever been a US Astronaut that was lactose intolerant? Did they drink something else in space, like maybe a soy milk? I wonder about that.