Mars Saxman / Archives

Friday, the 26th of April, 2002

How Rent Control Drives Out Affordable Housing by William Tucker. An essay arguing the opinion that rent control strategies, by partitioning the housing market, drive rents up in non-regulated apartments and drive availability down by encouraging people never to leave once they've found a place. It has pretty graphs that make it convincing.

Monday, the 22nd of April, 2002

Sam Phillips - I Need Love

I left my conscience like a crying child
Locked the door behind me put the pain on file
Broken like a window I see my blindness now

And I need love not some sentimental prison
I need god not the political church
I need fire to melt frozen sleet inside me
I need love

Driving into town tired and depressed
Like a flare a street light burst and SOS
Peace comes to my rescue
And I don't know what it means

And I need love not some sentimental prison
I need god not the political church
I need fire to melt frozen sleet inside me
I need love

Broken like a window I see my blindness now

And I need love not some sentimental prison
I need god not the political church
I need fire to melt frozen sleet inside me
I need love
I need love
I need love

I need love

Tuesday, the 16th of April, 2002

My latest graphics project is page two of a four-page layout I designed nearly a full year ago. It was going to be part of an exhibition titled "Words" at the Aurafice coffee shop, but I grew overwhelmed by the amount of work rendering my ideas in pen and ink required and gave up with only fragments of two pages completed.

Since then I've done an increasing portion of of my graphics work on the computer, and I decided to revisit the "Medusa" idea to see how it went together. This went well enough that I may end up finishing the other pages as well.

Friday, the 12th of April, 2002

The Victorians developed a complex "language of flowers" in which each variety had a certain meaning. A selection of blooms could convey an entire sentence. The flowers depicted on a note-card might contain more information than the note itself. Called "floriography", the custom was introduced to England in 1818 with the publication of "Le Langue des Fleurs" by Charlotte de la Tour.

Thursday, the 11th of April, 2002

Five hundred miles south of the Japanese mainland sit the Bonin Islands. The group's main island, Chichi Jima, was settled in the 1800s by a small group of several dozen British, American, and Polynesian colonists. The islands were later annexed by Japan, whereupon half a century of colonization swelled the island's population to over 7000. All were withdrawn to Japan during World War II. The original colonists, who had generally not intermarried with the later Japanese arrivals and bore visibly Western features, were not very popular and following the end of the war received permission to move back to Chichi Jima. The island remained under U.S. administration and served as a backup nuclear submarine base until the late sixties when it was returned to Japan.

The Soviet Union originated the "missile defense shield", building a ring of interceptor launch facilities around Moscow starting in 1962. This was scaled back following the ABM treaty in 1973, and an attempt at modernization was begun in the 1978. The U.S. military has never seen it as an impediment to the effective bombardment of Moscow, and since the fall of the Soviet Union it has become unlikely that the system's upgrade will be finished. Still, it is noteworthy for being based not on the U.S. "Star Wars" program's notoriously difficult "hit to kill" strategy, but on a classically Russian brute force technique: multi-megaton nuclear interceptors that blast everything in the sky into fragments.

Monday, the 8th of April, 2002

We throw our fates in the black pacific
Dashed free of our wretched home
In fingertips we crawl together
We seek the scourge of the goddess' hair

We're raising a new land
Reaching deep to the heart of the sea

Steam, boil
Water, meet fire
Prick deep to the heart of the matter
Steam, boil
Water, meet fire
Tonight, will you be my god?

You've never seen anything like it
Only the kraken, and he won't tell
What wraps when Pele and Neptune
Lash their embrace in a blazing well

Steam, boil
Water, meet fire
Prick deep to the heart of the matter
Steam, boil
Water, meet fire
Tonight, will you be my god?

Friday, the 5th of April, 2002

I just finished implementing a PEF linker for my new compiler. This means that the process will now run completely, from the original source code to the finished application. The baby still has a lot of growing up to do, but it's out of the womb now.

I don't know quite how I feel. It's nice, and satisfying, but it's not like the utter magic I felt the first time I did this.

There's a thrill you get when you see your first computer program get up and do its thing - shaky, it may be, but you're still proud of it. It's alive, and you made it! The same thrill comes again when your first compiler spits out its first program, which then gets up and runs: you've long since grown accustomed to writing programs, but writing a program that creates programs is like becoming a grandparent.

And this, I suppose, is what grandparents feel like after their kids have visited the maternity ward a few times: it's still cool, but you've already spoiled the first one, so the novelty has started to wear off. This is, after all, the fourth compiler I've written, and the second to generate standalone executables.

Ahh, well. It's been fun writing it anyway and there will be much more fun in the months ahead. It will be a challenge, getting it to link against the runtime library and crunch great big multi-megabyte user programs instead of the dozen-line tests I've been working on.

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