Friam - Re: Unix Nightmare

Friam

Re: Unix Nightmare

Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 22, 2016; 2:00am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Unix-Nightmare-tp7587974p7587980.html

Frank -

I used to have semi-lucid dreams whose setting was inside of a VM of some kind... being a Unix-head myself, it often had a lot of Shell like idioms but it also had many of the flavors of the kinds of higher level tools I might have been using about that time. I remember early Objective C flavored dreams, CURSES library dreams, APL dreams involving projective geometry, Prolog dreams involving natural language understanding, and eventually VR and mixed reality dreams. In fact the latter two I would say I still have, though they are polluted/mixed with myth-dreams based in various archetypal tropes. I think I dreamed in mathematics during my introduction to calculus and later to group theory. During my first class in Quantum Chemistry I swear I dreamed in the superposition of quantum states. I also sometimes dream in poetry.

${\displaystyle {\hat {H}}|\psi (t)\rangle =i\hbar {\frac {\partial }{\partial t}}|\psi (t)\rangle }$

I feel ya brother!

- Steve

On 10/21/16 5:49 PM, Frank Wimberly wrote:

I first learned Unix when I went to work at Bell Labs in 1978. I was only there for two years but over the next 18 years at Carnegie Mellon I used Unix workstations or time-sharing systems almost constantly. The other night I had a dream that involved Unix. I am not saying the dream made sense. Dreams often don't. For some reason I had a feeling that someone had modified my system by replacing the cat command with a shell script that didn't behave the way cat should. I decided to use the which command to find where the fake cat script was located in the file system. But then I thought how can I examine the script without using cat. I was going around in circles about this until I sort of woke up. I realized that I could use ed to look at the script. Then I went back to sleep. Sometimes my memories of my dreams aren't accurate.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Santa Fe, NM
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