nerd1951.com

The other day someone told this joke at lunch:

Rene Descartes walked into a bar and ordered two drinks. After he finished them the bartender asks, “Would you like another?” Descartes replies, “I think not.” and promptly disappears.

If you slept through your “Evolution of Western Thought” class and didn’t get the punch line, it was Descartes who said “I think therefore I am.”

Well this joke set off a post-lunch email storm of “enhancements.” Since we are all EE’s and software engineers the enhancements mostly revolved around physics. Here is an edited version with the enhancements. Thanks to my coworkers Cyn, Andy, and Tony for their contributions. I take personal responsibility for the parts that are just dumb.

So, Descartes is sitting at the bar and finishes his drink. The bartender asks, “Would you like another?” Descartes replies “I think not.” and disappears. Sitting down the bar is Werner Heisenberg. The bartender rushes up to him and excitedly asks, “Did you see that?” Heisenberg replies, “I can’t be certain.” Albert Einstein is sitting at the next stool. The bartender exclaims, “Al is that possible?” Einstein quips, “It depends on your frame of reference. It’s all relative.”

Then the bartender goes over to a table where Steven Hawking is seated. He looks at what Hawking is writing on his computer screen: “Actually Descartes did not simply disappear. He had accumulated so much mass while sitting on that bar stool for two hundred years that he collapsed into a singularity. Then he started to slowly evaporate, as virtual particles escaped from his body long enough to not recombine with their virtual anti-particles, languidly dissipating his mass, but in a fit of probability most unlikely, the process sped up by a factor of billions and billions and the evaporation appeared to take place instantaneously — at least on the time scale that humans are accustomed to.”

Meanwhile as we hear the strains of “As Time Goes By” played on a tinny piano, Humphrey Bogart is sitting at a booth in the back, pouring himself drinks from a bottle of whisky. “Of all the gin joints in all of time and space they have to come walking into mine,” he says to Carl Sagan who is sitting across from him. Sagan replies, “I know, why there must be billions and billions of gin joints in the universe!”

Early the next morning while driving home, Heisenberg is stopped by a cop. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” “No,” Heisenberg replies, “but I know exactly where I am!”

My presentation at the local IEEE Communications Society Washington DC Chapter) went pretty well. I had a good turn out, between twenty and thirty people. This was a very different crowd than I’ve had at the Embedded Systems Conference. Most of these engineers were not using C++ now but were looking at it for future projects or projects that are just starting up. I think this bodes well for adoption of C++ as an embedded systems programming language.

There is a lot of development of software defined radio products in the area (Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington, DC suburb). These systems usually require very high performance DSP code. I was surprised to find that some of the engineers in the audience were considering using C++ for even these applications. I find this surprising, not because C++ is ill suited for demanding high performance applications. I was surprised because I found engineers who were willing to overlook the C++ stigma of inefficiency and overhead.

Just when I was ready to chuck all of this C++ stuff and go be a Java Enterprise developer, I found that there are communications and embedded software engineers out there who are excited about adopting C++ and want to learn more.