Some time around 2010, give or take a year, I was on one of these family holidays with all the uncles around. Some treasure unearthed from grandpa’s eclectic bookshelf made the rounds. Someone had randomly taken the book out and after a few pages started reading a bunch of memorable passages out loud to the […]
Processors, Part One: the Past. The Architecture
How to widen the bottleneck of processing? If the solution were trivial, it wouldn’t merit a post – in fact the workarounds are of the kind that’s easy to invent but hard to formalise. Like the megapixels are not a true indicator of the quality of a camera, or the decibels are not a true […]
On so called low-level and performant languages
Last time, we dug into a new debate: are languages really decoupled from the hardware that runs them? Are the semantics of a language modelling mainstream hardware, and should they? Can we escape to new models of hardware, and new models of semantics? We saw that Backus made a good point arguing that languages have […]
Backus on Von Neumann at the Turing Award
On a previous post, we talked about Von Neumann’s Turing Complete model for a computer. A CPU, some Memory, and I/O. It was beautiful, but it had its disadvantages, and an unfortunate legacy. Today, John Backus will lead our journey through these matters. Enter Sandman: Backus 32 years later, a thorough critique was addressed, ironically, […]
To See or Not to See
Saturday, Greven. Standing in a concert crowd I was making faint attempts at doing a few quick sketches of the front man jumping about when a lady next to me remarked how enviable such skills … — It’s a sort of remark I dislike more and more. Nothing against flattery, I’m too vain to refuse […]
The Von Neumann Architecture, a friend and a foe
Von Neumann, another star from Göttingen, gave the next important step in computation after Turing (checkout my previous post for Turing’s first step), in a way that, to this day, you can’t talk about computers without talking about Von Neumann. Which came first: the Hardware, or the Software and Languages? In an analogous way to […]
What has Turing given to us
Last time, I mentioned to have befriended Alan Turing. Who? You might fairly ask. Why? Those who already know him might add. Let me answer those questions. Three years ago (pretty accurately), Leon and I were passing by Göttingen. It was our first bike trip, and along the road, we agreed this city was a […]
How I befriended Alan Turing
While Leon has been learning about arts, and he as been writing about it, I caught up with a hobby of my own as well, but I have been silent about it. I befriended Alan Turing. And it’s time I talk about it. Let me keep it short so I can get to the point. Some […]
Cuts
Intaglio and relief printing are two complete opposites in my practice. I greatly admire those who manage to convey textures in a woodcut (e.g. sheets like this by Klaus Magnus: Berlin façade, 1973), but so far I fail to go very far beyond outlines. This limitation makes my relief prints the by far most conceptual […]
We are just a few
Hitchhiking to Antwerpen set a new record for how many cars I needed: Münster – Lichtendorf (near Dortmund), – Remscheid, – Aachen, – Genk, – Hasselt, – Antwerpen; six in total. In Belgium I was dropped at ramps instead of service stations, and not at very lively once, yet both times picked up within five […]