Being There

"...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

          6/6/6 Meets 8/14

          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.

The Enchanted Twilight

Shell Game



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:

Friday, December 5, 1997 To: The executive editor, The New York Times Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday Match the speaker with the speech--
The Speech-- "The son of a bitch stole my..."			The Speaker	Frame of Reference
1.	rosebud	A.	J. Paul Getty	The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97
2.	clock	B.	Joel Silver	Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94
3.	act	C.	Blanche DuBois	The Elysian Fields
4.	waltz	D.	Bob Geldof	People Weekly 12/8/97
5.	temple	E.	St. Michael	Heaven's Gate
6.	watch	F.	Susanna Moore	In the Cut (pbk., Dec. '96) p. 261
7.	line	G.	Joseph Lelyveld	Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97
8.	chair	H.	Kylie Minogue	Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97
9.	religion	I.	Carol Gilligan	The Garden of Good and Evil
10.	wife	J.	John Travolta	"Michael," the movie
11.	harp	K.	Shylock	Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97
12.	Oscar	L.	Stephen King	The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317

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

Afterword:

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   

In the Details



Symbol from the
box-style I Ching

Related material:
The five Log24 entries
ending on August 1



Illustration by Lou Beach
in today's New York Times
article on science and magic

Related material:
A Wrinkle in Time