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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Fri, 07 May 2004]
Some dating options
Saw this on some blog's banner ad. At least in this respect, India is so much better than America. In India, you can have mom running for seat on a BJP ticket and son running on a Congress ticket(the Scindias). In U.S., it seems Republicans only want to date other republicans :-)).
Ben Bitdiddle and company
In one of my courses here, I ran across the cast of characters that make
up the background stories in assignments. The cast seems to pretty
consistent, especially in CS systems courses. Google tells me that the
character names have spread beyond MIT but I have a feeling that these
names ultimately originated in MIT.
So the main character in most stories is Ben Bitdiddle. Its probably stupid to ascribe specific levels of intelligence to various characters but I think I have seen a pattern. Have blog, will speculate. As for Ben- well, he has lots of initiative. He's always willing to try new things viz. designing new chips and writing weird programs. He oftens starts companies to market these ideas. Ben, however, is rather unimaginative. His attempts are invariably bogged down in some techinal problems and his attempts at solving them are rather naive and can almost always be improved. Enter Alyssa P Hacker. Alyssa, the uber-hacker, is the one who'll tell Ben that there is a better way of doing things. At this point, the problem set usually turns towards you and asks you to help Ben do what Alyssa says can be done. Alyssa is kinda zen-like in that sense.
There are some other characters that show up often. Louis Reasoner is typically a partner in crime with Ben, helping him design new chips and write weird programs and start companies. I can't make up my mind about how smart Louis is meant to be. But the feeling I get is that she's Ben's lackey and a rather dim one at that. (hint: "Alyssa says this can be done in .... Show Ben and Louis how this can be done. Louis is not too bright, so remember to comment your code"). Another major character is Cy D Fect. As the name suggests, Cy is typically involved when his design/program has unintended consequences. Then there's Lem E Tweakit who's forever making half-baked optimizations to Ben's stuff. There are a couple of other PHB types: Oliver Warbucks and DeWitt Aull etc. but I have only heard of them.
So what prompted this long speculation? I sighted "our genomic hero: Ben Basepair" in the final test of my Comp Functional Genomics class. Not a bad name, waise.