Subject: funny biographies

From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 13:19:40 +0300

Some people know how make fun of themselves, and write funny stuff when asked
for a biography. One example I just found is in Rob Pike's "Acme: A User
Interface for Programmers" (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/93/1-03.ps.gz).
He writes:

  "Rob Pike, well known for his appearances on "Late Night with David
   Letterman", is a also a member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories
   in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he has been since 1980, the same year
   he won the Olympic silver medal in Archery. In 1981 he wrote the first
   bitmap window system for Unix systems, and has sense written ten more.
   With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with Brian Kernighan
   he wrote The Unix Programming Environment. A shuttle mission nearly
   launched a gamma-ray telescope he designed. He is a Canadian citizen
   and has never written a program that uses cursor addressing."

I wonder if all these amazing things are true, or it's just a joke...

Another funny is Stallman's 1983 (http://www.stallman.org/#humorous%20bio):

  "I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to the
   MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1971. My hobbies include affection,
   international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics, recorder, puns,
   science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically get paid for doing
   the last one. About a year ago I split up with the PDP-10 computer to
   which I was married for ten years. We still love each other, but the world
   is taking us in different directions. For the moment I still live in
   Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old memories. "Richard Stallman" is
   just my mundane name; you can call me "RMS".

Anybody know of other examples? :)

P.S. yes, this posting is yet another example of my wacky world of wild
associations ;) Reading about E. Dijkstra death, I got reminded of the
first time I heard of him, or actually saw his face (see mention in
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/85/face.ps.gz). From there, I somehow
got dragged into browsing some of Rob Pike's articles, and then I even
found an apparently unrelated "Dykstra" (sheibadel lechaim arukim), 
in http://www.bell-labs.com/user/dwd/5620faq.html. That bell-labs.com site
sure has a never-ending amount of interesting information...

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Thursday, Aug 8 2002, 30 Av 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Martin Luther King said "I have a dream",
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |not "I have a plan".

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 16:24:54 +0300

On Thu, Aug 08, 2002, Nadav Har'El wrote about "[hackers-il] funny biographies":
>...

I did a little more surfing in http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/, where
that funny biography is repeated, and at least some of it is beginning to
make sense. In his bibliography, the first article he wrote is listed as:

  R. Pike, White Light Observation of a Solar Flare, J. Roy. Ast. Soc. Can.,
  Vol. 68, pp. 330, 1974.

So both the "shuttle mission" and the "Canadian" parts may be reasonable,
the second probably more reasonable than the first.
It appears that until 1982, his main (paid?) research was in physics. See
also http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/rob/robs2.jpg

According to http://www.infoplease.com/ipsa/A0874804.html, Pike did *not*
win any olympic silver medal in archery in 1980 (!).

The only evidence of Pike appearing on Letterman was the relatively famous
1990 email from Dennis Ritchie (see http://www.unixica.com/html/trk.html)
which claims:
   "Ritchie is the only one [from Ritchie, Kernighan and Thompson] who has
    met five people who have appeared on David Letterman (Penn, Teller, Rob
    Pike, Mayor Koch, and the guy who raised the biggest hog in Ohio)".

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/labscam.html has the story of Ritchie
meeting Penn and Teller, Pike's friends. Also, in an interview with Penn
http://www.sincity.com/penn-n-teller/wired-penn.html, one can even read:
   '"Give me 30 or 40 more IQ points and I'd be right there alongside Rob,"
    he says, referring to Rob Pike, one of his best friends. ("Rob and I are
    stupidly close.") Pike also happens to be a "scary-smart" computer
    scientist at Bell Laboratories, AT&T's research lab and patent mill,
    across the Hudson River in New Jersey.'
The Penn interview then continues to describe that "labscam" incident,
where Pike, Ritchie and the magicians Penn & Teller played a practical joke
on their (Pike and Ritchie's) boss Arno Penzias. By the way, for people
without a Physics background, Arno Penzias is a Nobel Prize laureate, for
his discovery of the 3-kelvin background radiation which "proved" the
big-bang theory).

I couldn't find online any more direct evidence of Pike appearing on Letterman.

By the way, try Pike's cheesecake: 
http://www.lysator.liu.se/etexts/recept/us/cheesecake-1.html

A slightly more meaningful (and more recent) contribution of his is his
pessimistic article "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant" - see HTML
version in http://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~ejones/writing/systemsresearch.html

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |         Thursday, Aug 8 2002, 30 Av 5762
[email-masked]             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Microchips: what's left at the bottom of
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |the bag when it reaches you.

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From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 08 Aug 2002 16:58:30 +0300

> win any olympic silver medal in archery in 1980 (!).

The 1980 Summer Olympics (held in Moscow) were boycotted by many
Western countries (because of the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afganistan;
Salt Lake City was luckier in 2002). The USA certainly didn't take
part, and probably neither did Canada. Canada certainly didn't win any
medals, according to

http://www.80s.com/Entertainment/Sports/Olympics/1980/summer.html#final

IIRC there was an alternative event in Fountainbleau, France.  Maybe
he took part in that? I could not find info on that from one quick
Googling.

Another possibility: a Bell Labs (or ATT?) Olympics. ;-)

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked] 
"IBM is a pretty big company." [W. Gates]

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From: "Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2002 22:15:06 +0200

> Interface for Programmers" (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/doc/93/1-03.ps.gz).

I found another set of silly biographies, in a book I'm reading titled
"Seinfeld and Philosophy" (it's a book about everything and nothing :))

A funny example: (references like [?] are my own)

  "Jennifer McMahon[1] is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Centre
   College[2]. She has published on Sartre and aesthetics. Both
   existentialist and equestrian, Jennifer spends most of her time thinking
   about "nothing," and experiencing the nausea [3] that results from
   feeding her horses a steady diet of Beefarino [4].

:)   

(explanations for people who need them:
[1] http://www.centre.edu/web/academic/faculty/mcmahon.html
[2] A liberal-arts college in Kentucky: http://www.centre.edu
[3] Nausea is a popular metaphor in existentilist writing. See for
    example http://www.almac.co.uk/personal/timw/books/nausea.htm.
    It's also a reference to [4]:
[4] Seinfeld episode 121 (aired 1/4/96), "The Rye". Kramer drives a horse
    and buggy and feeds the horse Beefarino; you'll have to see the episode
    to see what happens next ;)
)

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |       Tuesday, Nov 5 2002, 1 Kislev 5763
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