Glass Maze » lkf

Little-Known Facts: The First Programmer

lapsed.cannibal — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 13:28:32 +0000

It is generally believed that the first “programmer”, in the modern sense of the word, was Ada Lovelace, who wrote theoretical code for Charles Babbage’s never-built analytical engine. But this is untrue. The first programmer was, in fact, Mad Annie Splatterkill, born in 1562, a prolific and insane serial killer who, when she wasn’t roaming the streets of Elizabethan London eviscerating gentlemen and eating their wives, spent her time writing the first known instance of a binary sort, devising increasingly elegant Fibonacci sequence generators, and expounding at some length on the relative merits of tail recursion. Unfortunately, her audience was more often than not (1) illiterate; (2) unversed in the finer points of computational theory; and (3) headless. The only known record of her considerable brilliance is preserved in a flat in London, whose walls are covered with what is generally believed to be the first computer program — a lovely, concise piece of code, written in blood, that implements an ingenious algorithm she called Dead Gentleman Sort. a tight little O(log n) affair developed in a language of her own devising. Her genius died with her, alas, on a gallows in the center of London. Her last words — “Fuck yer fucking friend functions! ‘Tis a blatant violation of the principle of encapsulation, ye addled halfwits!” — befuddled all present, and put many out of sorts. But all regained their good cheer when she managed to gnaw off her executioner’s ear, just before the trap door opened beneath her feet, and whisked her away from a world unprepared for all she had to offer it.

Little-Known Facts: Intelligent Zombies

lapsed.cannibal — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:03:04 +0000

The problem with being an intelligent zombie is that you’re forever trying to eat your own brains. For just slightly intelligent zombies, this is only an occasionally debilitating issue — you’ll sometimes find them gnawing at their reflections in mirrors that they’ve had the misfortune to stumble upon in their shamblings. But eventually the mirror breaks and they move on. The real victims here are the very intelligent zombies, who actually figure out how to eat their own brains, usually through some gut-wrenchingly horrible — but ingenious — rube-goldberg perversion. Once the deed is done, however, these poor creatures revert to the normal dumb zombie mode, and are free to roam the decimated countryside in the traditional vegetative haze, looking for brains other than their own to consume.

Little-Known Facts: Columbus’ Fourth Ship

lapsed.cannibal — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:52:03 +0000

It is a little known fact that there were actually four ships that set off with Christopher Columbus on his historic journey to discover America: the Niña, the Pinta, the Santa Maria, and the Exploding Flower Turtle of Sparkle-Spam — this last containing a troupe of surrealist Prussian clowns who made it their life’s work to follow famous adventurers around the earth, leavening the drudgery of their endless journeys with a steady stream of nonsequiturs and heavily ironic self-referential hipster pranks.

Little-Known Facts: Gravity

lapsed.cannibal — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:51:26 +0000

All of the popular theories that purport to explain the phenomenon of gravity are utterly wrong. The truth: each of us is attended by a troupe of invisible gravity fairies whose only job is to settle on our bodies and, using their collective weight, keep us from careening off the surface of the earth and into space. Since your typical gravity fairy weighs about 6 ounces, all humans have thousands and thousands of these creatures resting on them at any given time. The heavier you are, the more fairies you have. The morbidly obese have millions of fairies straining to keep their charges down, and the burden occasionally proves too much for them: which is why you sometimes see extremely overweight people suddenly rocket into the sky — a phenomenon, I hasten to point out, for which the traditional theories of gravity have no explanation.