Thursday, May 31, 2007

Lone Scherfig





I saw two great movies recently, both by Danish director
Lone Scherfig (who sadly lacks a Wikipedia entry).
The movies are Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and
Italian for Beginners.

Wilbur takes place in an anonymous town in Scotland.
The plot focuses on the suicidal Wilbur and his kindly
brother Harper who own a used bookstore. After
yet another botched suicide attempt, Wilbur moves
into the bookstore, Harper's home, so he can be watched
over. Things get messy when Harper falls in love with
a bookstore regular and they are married.
While the plot is a thought-provoking one, the real
intensity of the film comes from Wilbur's extraordinary
complexity, contrasted with Harper's somewhat self
deprecating goodness of heart. I was going to try
to write more, but after reading A.O. Scott's review,
I realize I should just point you there. I could do no
better, and certainly much worse. My favorite line
in that review:

"In less sure -- and also less dry -- hands, the story of two
brothers dealing with the fact of death might have melted
into sentimental slop, one of those life-affirming pictures
that make you want to kill yourself. Instead, ''Wilbur Wants
to Kill Himself,'' which begins with a suicide attempt and
ends in a graveyard, with plenty of trips to the hospital
in between, makes you glad to be alive.

Italian for Beginners is a beautiful Dogme film, revolving
around a group of Danish adults taking a beginning
Italian class. There is almost no plot but for
a humorous and touching development of at least 6
intriguing and delightful characters. Drama is always
shocking to me in that, unlike in opera, so much can
be done with so little. (I'm thinking particularly of
Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman). Here in
Italian for Beginners, with the Dogme (lack of) effects
that make it seem like anyone could pick up a camera
at Best Buy and make a great movie. A heartwarming
thought.

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

The Humble Programmer

This weekend I spent an enjoyable 15 minutes reading Edsger Dijkstra's 1972 Turing award lecture, entitled "The Humble Programmer". It is an entertaining collection of stories, advice, and philosophizing from one of the pioneers of theoretical computer science. The most relevant piece of advice from a more modern programming language perspective is "... the requirements that no loop should be written down without providing a proof for termination nor without stating the relation whose invariance will not be destroyed by the execution of the repeatable statement." Even when not strictly using Hoare Logic to reason about code, the advice is good. Indeed, my advisor seems to have this ingrained in his programming. Much of his code is instrumented with invariants. He asked me last week why a particular list of inference rules for eta-expansion of a term terminates. While the termination seemed so clear I didn't even think about it before, actually finding a measure of termination helped me understand the judgment better.

A nice observation is that we should "restrict ourselves to the subset of the intellectually manageable programs". This made me smile. On the one hand it seems obvious. How could we do otherwise? But then recalling a few of the programs I myself have written, I felt chided and humbled. The thing I liked most about the paper is the respect for the difficulty of programming. His last paragraph is worth repeating: "[The computer] has already taught us a few lessons, and the one I have chosen to stress in this talk is the following. We shall do a much better programming job, provided we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers."

Monday, May 28, 2007

shulman

I heard a great viola concerto last week by the composer
Alan Shulman .
It was his Theme and Variations arranged for string orchestra.
His son was at the performance, and gave a short speech beforehand.
Shulman played cello for the NBC orchestra under Toscanini.
According to his son, Toscanini was very supportive of the outside
(musical) activities of his musicians. He was at the premiere
of the Theme and Variations, and was recorded to say, in response,
(in my phonetic Italian) "Semplice ma belle", "simple but lovely".