Rand and Rickover; Interesting Similarities
For some reason, this popped into my head while listening to Ayn from khalling's post.
Both Rand and Rickover were very intelligent, sharp, cutting, and spoke with blinding clarity. Both from Russia (Rickover from Poland, at the time occupied by the Tsar). Both jewish heritage. Both wildly successful in establishing a philosophy, Rand's Objectivism and Rickover's Nuclear Navy.
Do others see the parallels and/or have other observations about their similarities, or other connections?
I knew another much older engineer, while working early in my career, who was also from Russia, It shocked me to hear it. Absolutely no accent, whatsoever, and he came to the US at 14. Also very, very sharp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G...
Both Rand and Rickover were very intelligent, sharp, cutting, and spoke with blinding clarity. Both from Russia (Rickover from Poland, at the time occupied by the Tsar). Both jewish heritage. Both wildly successful in establishing a philosophy, Rand's Objectivism and Rickover's Nuclear Navy.
Do others see the parallels and/or have other observations about their similarities, or other connections?
I knew another much older engineer, while working early in my career, who was also from Russia, It shocked me to hear it. Absolutely no accent, whatsoever, and he came to the US at 14. Also very, very sharp.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G...
Grace Hopper was very cool too. Love the idea of microseconds in the length of wires! However, COBOL was not a good language. I agree with her aim, but that language is just yucky!
COBAL has served its purpose and is slowly dying off.
Now I just use Mathematica which uses Wolfram Language.
Agree APL is a mess, unnecessary now with Maple, Mathematica, MathCAD and MatLab or even C libraries. I looked over FORTH once. Not sure why. Think it was for an HP data acq system.
I thought COBOL was overly wordy. So much to type to do simple things. If you understand math and functions, I thought COBOL was an impediment. I saw no advantage for it over FORTRAN, or even the structured BASIC languages that emerged (of course, much newer). I agree it served its purpose.
I'm in management now, so not much time at work for programming. We do a lot of simulation of electrical systems. I really likes SABER/VHDL-AMS, but it has gone away. Simplorer took up where SABER left off, but it doesn't have the user base, so we are using MatLab/Simulink, which now has a charge-conservative toolset in SimScape, where you can write VHDL-AMS again! I do get to mess with this, but it is so infrequent, I am a klutz. On a good day, I get to look over results, and task people to make new runs.
Things have really improved, though so much of my stuff has gone obsolete with no way to use all those floppy disks and DOS stuff. I wonder when DVDs will go obsolete for some new storage system? All to the good though. I do number theory and sometime need to do million digit math which would be way to slow on previous generations of computers. It is amazing how far things went back before electronic calculators where there were slide rules and some sometimes fun to watch mechanical calculators doing multiplications and divisions. I recall photos of some guys at the Skunkworks with slide rules working on the Blackbird stealth spy plane. That was back in the days when log tables were still useful.
BTW, I'm pretty sure you can run OS9 on a Raspberry PI. Cool little OS.
The good old days. Glad they are gone, glad they were here.
That's how I feel about the good old days: glad they were here but even gladder they're gone.
When the 32S was discontinued, it acquired value as a collectible. I sold it and its box and bought a 33S. I still like the feel of an HP with real buttons much better than any app.
Totally agree with you about the feel of the keys and the weight of the calculator.
The worst example was the three dimenisonal filing program i forget which company they bought to get it. Foxpro i think. Excellent. THe MS Version featured a sample and if you didn't need many changes could be used as is but for most businesses no. Building your own eventually bogged down the computer and it crashed for no space available. You may remember the little lines you drew from one device to another which decided where whatever was to be stored, upgraded, cached, archived etc. THe MS version did not erase the lines when you erased them on the screen. Soon it was a mass of straight line spaghetti. Their answer was hire a programmer. We thought about it and did. Two high school kids. they worked with the small mom and pop businesses and then up to one's more advanced in needs and paid for college Wasn't that big a deal IF you knew what you guys know but for a veteran computer crasher it was Audie Murphy time. Two years i ran into someone suffering through that same program manual on the London subways. Same problem. she was a programmer. but had missed that solution. But she bought me dinner! Ha ha her company sent me a check. So that's my whole career in your career field. Must have been the demo dude background from the Army. Fire In the hole! And I never envied you bubble heads. parachutes don't work underwater.
...but he was wicked smart, and there would be no nuclear navy without him.
I just posted a discussion which so far, hasn't been disseminated in the Gulch. Oh well, I'll give it a shot.
I never met Rickover, but know many that had. Some of his first NR leaders, I knew pretty well. One told me that he learned more from Rickover than he learned from his parents!
My friend always has this quote somewhere in his living or working space, and many today have not idea what this means:
"RESPONSIBILITY
“Responsibility is a unique concept... You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you... If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, or ignorance or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”
― Hyman G. Rickover"
No control rods in the voting booths. Just China Syndromes.
From what I hear, he should've retired, but the issues with General Dynamics at the time may have made him too angry to let go. Too bad he couldn't have done it on his terms.
No. American English and Californian do not count as multi-lingual. Unfortunately our education system does not understand 'find a need and fill it' and prefers multi-illiteracy.