This one really touched me, so I’m posting it here even though I’m still a little reluctant to believe Obama represents the change I’ve been hoping for. In any case, I know he represents hope for a long-ago downtrodden sense of self-respect for blacks in this country, and for that reason a part of me really does want him to win. For the sake of unity and hope, and maybe even some positive change.

The Scheme package we use in class (DrScheme) is based on MzScheme, which is a popular and fairly standard version of Scheme. But it’s also very slow. According to these benchmarks, it’s 10 times slower than C on average, and 5 times slower than (Steel Bear) Common Lisp!

Of course, that’s still loads faster than Ruby, but it bothered me that something as similar to Lisp (and requiring the same amount of brain-wrangling for its parentheses) would not similarly share its speed. Well, it turns out that there several variants of scheme compilers that outperform MzScheme. Here are two interesting benchmarks (Twobit, Gambit) that put Chez Scheme (commercial) and Gambit Scheme (open source) on top.

Gambit Scheme claims to be as fast as C in some cases, which is a pretty ambitious claim. I’ll be checking it out soon.

Citigroup has barred investors in one of its hedge funds from withdrawing their money, and a new leveraged fund lost 52 percent in its first three months, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

— CNBC

I very much enjoyed reading about the benefits of functional programming over at Defmacro.org. The author, Slava Akhmechet, goes into some detail about several important advantages that I’ve been trying to enumerate for myself:

1. Unit Testing: Since there are no reference to global variables or external state in FP, unit tests can focus precisely on the function that needs testing, without the difficulty of setting up a particular state before calling the function.
2. Debugging: Again, without references to global variables or external state, debugging is simply a matter of drilling down to the problem.
3. Concurrency: As a mathematical abstraction, functional programs have the potential to be reasoned about by the compilers and interpreters that run them. As a consequence, concurrency becomes a compiler option rather than a difficult-to-implement coding pattern.
4. Hot Code Deployment: I would love to do this on a web server some time! No more software down time.
5. Higher Order Functions: As an alternative to object-oriented programming, this feature caught my eye. I’ve been thinking in terms of closures for quite some time (thanks to Ruby) but I’m still getting used to the idea that OOP isn’t necessarily the best way to do things in every circumstance.
6. Currying: This lets you build up functions from other functions. The typical example is in defining the “inc” function: it is simply the “add” function with the number “1″ bound to it for every subsequent call. No need to write a function to do that, just define “inc” in terms of “add”.
7. Continuations: This aspect of FP (and other languages, such as Ruby) is fascinating. It’s very nearly an assembly language instruction, longjmp, but with the added benefit of an environment where variable state is stored. I like how Slava compares this with putting a computer to “sleep”—when the computer wakes up, it’s like nothing happened, even though time elapsed.
8. Pattern Matching: Nice, but in agreement with the article, pattern matching doesn’t seem all that revolutionary. I could be wrong.
9. Closures: Slava points out that this is a bridge between the OOP world and the FP world. In a special way, closures allow the formal lambda calculus to have a little exception to its strict recursive environments: closures can also access their parent environment in addition to their own.

I highly recommend this article for anyone who’s been thinking of functional programming and wants a “big picture” view. Excellent examples of real-world usage and some fun history to boot

News on the net travels quickly I guess: David Walker resigned today. He is the one who has been sounding the alarm within the government accounting office regarding the huge deficit and out-of-control debt that burdens the American people. Here’s the press release that I received by email from The Daily Reckoning:

David Walker Resigns as U.S. Comptroller General

“As comptroller general of the United States,” says David Walker, the federal government’s top accountant, ”there are real limitations on what I can do and say in connection with key public policy issues, especially issues that directly relate to GAO’s client — the Congress.”

You may recall, we’ve been traveling with David for more than a year documenting his efforts to educate the public on the fiscal issues challenging the country. Our film, I.O.U.S.A. featuring Mr. Walker among other luminaries, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19, 2008.

Despite the “very difficult” nature of Walker’s decision, he has chosen to leave his post at the GAO to become the president and CEO of the newly founded Peter G. Peterson Foundation. He made the announcement to Congress today.

“While I love both my job as comptroller general and the GAO,” said Walker, “I love my country more. And I believe that leading this foundation represents a unique opportunity and will be good for my country. My new position will provide me with the ability and resources to more aggressively address a range of current and emerging challenges facing our country, including advocating specific policy solutions and courses of action.”

As the head of the Peterson Foundation, Walker will oversee the billion-dollar endowment of Pete Peterson – former Commerce Secretary, the founder of the Blackstone group, The Concord Coalition, and legendary advocate for government fiscal responsibility. Chief among Walker’s duties at the Peterson Foundation will be the funding and advocating of projects that will enhance public awareness of fiscal imbalance, government deficits, and nuclear proliferation.

“We are at a make-or-break point in American history,” Mr. Peterson said of his new foundation. “The entitlement monster is unfunded. We are dangerously dependent on foreign capital, our health care costs per capita are twice the level of the developed world. The goal is to integrate public policy and charitable giving and to answer this question: How do you educate a public that has become largely inert?”

It’s now up to David Walker to answer that question. Walker’s resignation, coupled with the launch of Peterson’s fund, has broad implications for the future of fiscal responsibility in the United States, and more specifically, the development of our documentary, I.O.U.S.A.

“The foundation is also going to end up funding other related efforts,” Walker told the Federal News Network in and interview this morning, “including potentially supporting one or more documentaries designed to get the message to millions of Americas… because they need to know in order to make more informed choices at the ballot box.”

Pretty funny parody:

I just wish he were joking.

Today’s the day in Utah. Let’s go change the status quo!

You can find your precinct by address here (or by looking at your voter registration card), and find the corresponding voting location here.

Here’s a little note about casting your vote if you’ve never done it before. How you actually mark the ballot changes from county to county. (See Doug’s comment)

Good luck!

Kelty and I just watched The Color of Paradise (1999) by Iranian film director Majid Majidi. It is a beautiful story of an 8-year-old boy born blind, and his father, whose misfortunes in life have left him with little reason to believe in a merciful or kind God. The story ends unexpectedly, but gave us a sense of hope that there might be healing to come soon in their lives.

One of the most visually impressive aspects of this film is the countryside itself. I had no idea Iran’s mountainous regions were so beautiful. As our friend Victoria put it, “I thought Iran was a desert!” Majidi seems to use his films to show his optimism and the beauty he’s seen in life—much like an earlier age in America when theater was more innocent. Of the films I’ve seen from him, all are clean and uplifting.

In the past 3 days, Middle Eastern countries such as Iran and other nearby countries such as Egypt and India have lost internet bandwidth to and from their countries due to the severing of 3 sea cables. What’s peculiar about today’s severed cable is that it is the last of 3 sea cables that connect Iran to the rest of the world. According to Internet Traffic Report, Iran has been completely isolated from the world.

What’s going on? Is it just coincidence or is this a military operation? Or something else?