"...it would be quite
a long walk
for him if he had to
walk straight across."

Swiftly Mrs. Who brought
her hands... together.

"Now, you see,"
Mrs. Whatsit said,
"he would be there,
without that long trip.
That is how we travel."

-- A Wrinkle in Time,
Chapter 5,
"The Tesseract"

Related material:

To Measure the Changes,

Serious Numbers,

and...

Balls of Fury

          Today's Pennsylvania Lottery:

Related material:

The five entries ending
on August 9th with
The Amalfi Conjecture

and Log24, 8/14--
A Writer's Reflections.

Part I:

Overview of Unix

at pangea.stanford.edu

Last revision August 2, 2004

"The Unix operating environment is organized into three layers. The innermost
level of Unix is the kernel. This is the actual operating system, a single large
program that always resides in memory. Sections of the code in this program are
executed on behalf of users to do needed tasks, like access files or terminals.
Strictly speaking, the kernel is Unix.

The next level of the Unix environment is composed of programs, commands,
and utilities. In Unix, the basic commands like copying or removing files are
implemented not as part of the kernel, but as individual programs, no different
really from any program you could write. What we think of as the commands and
utilities of Unix are simply a set of programs that have become standardized and
distributed. There are hundreds of these, plus many additional utilities in the
public domain that can be installed.

The final level of the Unix environment, which stands like an umbrella over
the others, is the shell. The shell processes your terminal input and starts up
the programs that you request. It also allows you to manipulate the environment
in which those programs will execute in a way that is transparent to the program.
The program can be written to handle standard cases, and then made to handle unusual
cases simply by manipulating its environment, without having to have a special
version of the program." (My italics.)

Part II:

Programs

From my paper journal
on the date
"Good Will Hunting"
was released:

Postscript of June 5, 2003:

"...while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of
space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time...
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events...."

-- Vladimir Nabokov

Part III:

The Bourne Shell

See also
the recent comments
of root@matrix.net in
Peter Woit's weblog.

"Hey, Carrie-Anne,

what's your game now...."
-- The Hollies, 1967   

From the front page of this
morning's online New York Times:

In the details:

Stephen B. King,
a Hallmark creative director,
with some of the new
greeting cards based
 on topical themes and humor.

From yesterday's Log24 entry:

When you care enough

to send the very best...

From a llnk to Aug. 1
in yesterday's entry:

Epiphany

Box-style I Ching, January 6, 1989

(Click on image for background.)

Detail:

Related material:

Logos and Logic 

 and Diagon Alley.

Logo design by Anton Stankowski

When you care enough

to send the very best...

"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte

Related material: As noted, Kernel of Eternity, and also John Tierney's piece on simulated reality in last night's online New York Times.
Whether our everyday reality is merely a simulation has long been a
theme (as in Dick's novel above) of speculative fiction. Interest in
this theme is widespread, perhaps partly because we do exist as
simulations-- in the minds of other people. These simulations may be
accurate or may be-- as is perhaps Gopnik's characterization of
Philip K. Dick-- inaccurate. The accuracy of the simulations is seldom
of interest to the simulator, but often of considerable interest to the
simulatee.

The cover of the Aug. 20 New Yorker in which the Adam Gopnik essay appears may also be of interest, in view of the material on diagonals in the Log24 entries of Aug. 1 linked to in yesterday's entry:

"Summer Reading,"
by Joost Swarte