Message from the Chair of the UNC Computer Science Department (personal phone number elided):
Dear Friends,
It is with great sadness that I must share the following update on the health of the Department Founder Dr. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. I know how much Dr. Brooks has meant to the department, to computer graphics, to the world of computing, and to each of you. So I wanted to reach out and pass on the following message from his son, Roger Brooks.
Dr. Samarjit Chakraborty
Chair, UNC Department of Computer Science
– Begin Forwarded Message –
Subject: Frederick's condition and his Hope
Dear ones:
As you may have heard, on Saturday my father came home from the hospital into hospice care. He spends most of the time sleeping. When (slightly) awake, he is only slightly responsive, and not able to respond verbally to questions. He seems to be in no pain and no particular discomfort. He is eating and drinking small amounts, but far from enough.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. has fought the good fight, run the good race, been an outstanding husband and father and mentor and friend of many . . . and is now fading away. His hope and his coming joy, in death and in life, is in his Lord Jesus Christ, who I know will welcome him with “Well done . . .”.
The hospice nurse tells us that my father may live several days to 10 days or so.
You may share this information with all who would want to know. I know that I am missing email addresses for beloved friends which exist somewhere in my parents’ contact lists, and I apologize that I do not have time to dig for those.
With family and aides around, we have ample help. If you would like to come and visit my mother, or bring your last respects and prayers to my father, please just call the house first. Close friends are welcome, but it is hard to predict in advance when things will be busy or peaceful.
Kori Robbins, associate pastor at Orange Methodist Church, visited yesterday and prayed what I thought was exactly the appropriate, loving, and merciful prayer, which she tells me she adapted from Douglas McKelvey's A Liturgy for the Final Hours. We ask you to join in this prayer:
O God our Father,
O Christ our Brother,
O Spirit our comforter,
Fred is ready.
Now meet him at this mortal threshold
and deliver him to that eternal city;
to your radiant splendor;
to your table and the feast and
the festival of friends;
to the wonder and the welcome
of his heart's true home.
He but waits for your word.
Bid him rise and follow,
and he will follow you
gladly into that deeper glory,
O Spirit his True Shepherd,
O Christ his True King,
O God his True and Loving Father,
receive him now, and forgive his sins,
through the blood of his Savior Jesus Christ.
Plenty of people have this ability - the vast majority of people in my personal & professional life take responsibility for their mistakes, own up to them, and try to make them right. Even my four year old occasionally does it.
The problem is that we've created a system where political and corporate discourse does not allow these people to rise to the top, and selects for people who deflect and never admit wrongdoing. Given a large enough audience, there is always some vocal minority who will crucify you for any mistake. If you wish to lead an organization or institution with a large stakeholder base, you learn to never admit the mistake, because if you do you will soon not be leading that institution. This is why we can't have nice things.
I think there's a relatively simple fix, but it'll probably never happen because it's contrary to why we have leaders in the first place. If the masses crucified leaders for mistakes they made but didn't admit rather than mistakes they admitted, the incentive would be to avoid making mistakes, not avoid admitting them. But this would require that everyone "trust but verify", and that they do (or at least believe) independent research into the performance of their leaders. The whole reason we have leaders and specialization is so that the masses do not need to perform this time-consuming and intellectually-draining work. This is also why we can't have nice things.
I've been asked this a few times. I'm not completely sure about all the keys for this. Looking back -- and also at the process today -- it seems to be a combination of things, and somewhat loosely connected.
The first thing to notice is what happens if you accidentally dial into the middle of a movie on TV you haven't seen for 20 years. How long does it take you to recognize the movie? And how often can you remember pretty much what is going to happen next? Then ponder that when you saw the movie the first time you didn't know you were going to be tested with just a few frames 20 years later!
There have been many studies over the years about just how good and detailed is visual recall. Much of the best recall is "prompted recall" usually via an image or some other sense (smell is a biggie).
You've also heard about Cicero's "mind palace" where when he was giving a speech in the Senate he would walk in his imagination around his villa and revisit parts of his speech that he'd associated with objects in his house.
This is also possible to do with ideas. It's a kind of relaxation from the parts of your brain that do general thinking (Kahneman's "System 2") and just letting the ideas be "configurational" (like images or sounds, where many can exist at the same time). A lot of the associations are kinds of analogies and metaphors.
In any case, we all have tremendous memories for some kinds of things, and it seems to be difficult to remember other kinds of things (perhaps things that are further from sense memories are more difficult). But it seems that a lot of the sense memory system is happy to remember enough "hybrid stuff" to then allow better recall of the more distant stuff.
One of the things I had discovered to a small extent in 3rd grade was that one can read "faster than actually thinking", and that a lot of the thinking would still be done. Looking back, I think this is like the kinds of background thinking we often do when we are working on a problem -- this seems to work also for reading. (It is also connected to how sight-reading in music is done (next comment).)
There's lots more, but one last thing here. Though I got to music early, I got to classical keyboards late -- in this case the organ -- and thus got a chance to watch myself learn to sight read three staves of music for hands and feet. (I found this quite a painful process for a few years, especially at my age.) But it has quite a bit in common with the mechanics of reading and remembering texts (with the addition of a lot of fine muscle memory that has to be taught what to do).
The essential transition is to gradually learn to detach from being "on the notes" to being able to see a few bars ahead (like what you do when you are reading aloud to someone), being able to perform with the meanings you just saw, while gleaning new meanings ahead and remembering them for the performance a few seconds later. It's basically a pipe-lined buffered process which anyone can learn to do, but which most do not learn easily (it was difficult for me).
If you can also tie the buffers to something that is in long term memory, you have a good chance of remembering it when something like it re-cues the memory. Most musicians wind up with a kind of double memory (they can remember the music more easily than the muscle movements). I think this also obtains in text reading and remembering.
> You're blaming Nvidia. You should be blaming SoftBank and Masayoshi Son: bunch of fucking hucksters misleading people and making bad investments.
You shouldn't be blaming bad investors. They pay for their decisions with their, or more often somebody's else, money.
Blame the collective ownership of means of production, which in form of public companies have dominated the Western world for the last 30+ years.
When people think of of selling their business, which is their life's work, as a raison d'etre, something is really messed up with the business culture in that person's coutnry.
Dear Friends,
It is with great sadness that I must share the following update on the health of the Department Founder Dr. Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. I know how much Dr. Brooks has meant to the department, to computer graphics, to the world of computing, and to each of you. So I wanted to reach out and pass on the following message from his son, Roger Brooks.
Dr. Samarjit Chakraborty Chair, UNC Department of Computer Science
– Begin Forwarded Message – Subject: Frederick's condition and his Hope
Dear ones:
As you may have heard, on Saturday my father came home from the hospital into hospice care. He spends most of the time sleeping. When (slightly) awake, he is only slightly responsive, and not able to respond verbally to questions. He seems to be in no pain and no particular discomfort. He is eating and drinking small amounts, but far from enough.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. has fought the good fight, run the good race, been an outstanding husband and father and mentor and friend of many . . . and is now fading away. His hope and his coming joy, in death and in life, is in his Lord Jesus Christ, who I know will welcome him with “Well done . . .”.
The hospice nurse tells us that my father may live several days to 10 days or so.
You may share this information with all who would want to know. I know that I am missing email addresses for beloved friends which exist somewhere in my parents’ contact lists, and I apologize that I do not have time to dig for those.
With family and aides around, we have ample help. If you would like to come and visit my mother, or bring your last respects and prayers to my father, please just call the house first. Close friends are welcome, but it is hard to predict in advance when things will be busy or peaceful.
Kori Robbins, associate pastor at Orange Methodist Church, visited yesterday and prayed what I thought was exactly the appropriate, loving, and merciful prayer, which she tells me she adapted from Douglas McKelvey's A Liturgy for the Final Hours. We ask you to join in this prayer:
O God our Father, O Christ our Brother, O Spirit our comforter,
Fred is ready.
Now meet him at this mortal threshold and deliver him to that eternal city; to your radiant splendor; to your table and the feast and the festival of friends; to the wonder and the welcome of his heart's true home.
He but waits for your word. Bid him rise and follow, and he will follow you gladly into that deeper glory,
O Spirit his True Shepherd, O Christ his True King, O God his True and Loving Father, receive him now, and forgive his sins, through the blood of his Savior Jesus Christ.
Roger Brooks Sr.