On Handling the Data

Against a student's faulty program, I might scrawl "infinite loop" or "uninitialised variable". Against a broken SF story, a Turkey City Lexicon reader might scrawl "Cozy Catastrophe", "Signal from Fred", or "Squid in the Mouth". Or "AM/FM". The classic AM/FM story must be Heinlein's The Day After Tomorrow: six men in an underground citadel, sole remnant of the US Army after invasion by the PanAsian Empire, take up a dead colleague's discovery of the electrogravitic spectrum, the magnetogravitic spectrum, and the electromagnetogravitic spectrum. Maxwell via Hertz to tractor beams and transmutation in a month: ultimate humiliation of the PanAsians, and I wish my hardware behaved like F*ck*ng Magic rather than the backlash and hysteresis of Actual Machinery. So, and with last week's Murphy's Law comments in mind, I want to point you at a very non-AM/FM short story that I was pleased to rediscover online: M.I. Mayfield's On Handling the Data.



March 15, 2009
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/on-handling-the-data/228700554

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