The State of the Onion
by Larry Wall
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Pages: 1, 2, 3, 4
[DangerBall]
But now I have this other psychological mystery I'm trying to solve. Maybe it's just some kind of compulsion, but I know deep down that I have to talk about screensavers for this speech. But why? Why, why, why, why, why? It's irrational and illogical.
So that's what the rest of this talk is about. It all ties in with what happened to me last year, and it also all ties in with Perl.
So about what happened to me last year: I had a mutation. That's nothing new — people have mutations all the time. So do screensavers. Many screensavers, such as this one, are based simply on showing you a mutating object, moving around the screen. That's pretty natural for screensavers. After all, the original purpose of screensavers was to save your screen, and that meant not putting the same picture up in the same place for an extended period of time. Of course, a blank screen would serve for that just as well. But, ya know, a blank screen just isn't very interesting. So we get these various mutator objects instead.
[Cubenetic]
This one does interweaving cubes.
[Engine]
Here's a cute mutator. The little engine that could, if you will...
[FlipFlop]
This one does flip flops. Being good at flip-flops is a prerequisite for designing computer languages. At least, I find that I have to do frequent flip-flops in the design of Perl 6. I probably shouldn't over-generalize that to other language designers, who by and large are smarter than I am.
[Gears]
Here's a picture of Perl 5. It's cool.
[Gears (planetary)]
Here's a picture of Perl 6. It's just the same as Perl 5, only cooler.
Planetary gears are very scalable — you can get a large increase or decrease in revolutions out of them. For that reason, planetary gears are often used in the engines of high-performance turboprop aircraft. Definitely industrial-strength stuff.
[Bouboule, 3d]
This one's kind of ugly, but then it's supposed to be viewed in 3D using those red/blue glasses. For some reason it reminds me of my stomach when I'm not feeling so good.
Which reminds me to get back to the subject. Mutations. I had one, in my stomach. It's a pretty well understood mutation, as these things go. It's the sort of mutation that produces a stomach tumor.
[Mirrorblob, color]
As I stood in this exact spot a year ago, I told you that I'd been in the hospital for four days with a bleeding ulcer. What I did not know at that time was that the ulcer was on a tumor the size of my fist toward the lower end of my stomach. I did not know that I would have the lower half of my stomach removed two weeks after OSCON. I did not know that I would have complications, and complications on my complications, recursively. I did not know that I'd be spending a total of two months in the hospital.
I was pretty ignorant back then.
You see, when you have bleeding ulcers on your vacation in Kauai, the doctor there tells you that he saw the ulcers, but he doesn't tell you that he saw them on a tumor. What he does tell you is to see a gastroenterologist the moment you get home. After all, he doesn't want to ruin the rest of your vacation. Never mind that you've spent it in the hospital.
[SpeedMine]
So after last year's OSCON I go in for another gastric endoscopy. That's where they slide a tube down your throat to look at what's down there. This is rather unpleasant, so they use what's called conscious sedation. They spray numbing gunk in the back of your throat, and put you partway under. You can kind of remember it afterwards, but not the bad bits.
[Spotlight (camels)]
Then the doctor looks around, much like our ant spotlight we had earlier. He can't see too much at a time, but he spots the tumor, and takes pictures of it. He can't tell how big it is, because endoscopes are monocular, and you can't really tell how close you are to what you're looking at.
A lot of screensavers are based on the spotlight metaphor. Here's another:
[Bumps (camels)]
And another.
[Zoom, lenses (camels)]
In this case, the size of the spotlight is the whole screen, like one of those useless digital zooms on your digital cameras. But it's still just viewing one portion of the picture, whether that's part of a camel, or part of an elephant. Or part of your stomach. My stomach, in this case.
[Goop]
At this point my gastroenterologist refers me to a surgeon. Since we don't know how big the tumor is, I have to drink a bunch of coconut-flavored white gludge and go in for a CT scan. I don't like coconut. I don't like white gludge. But I do it anyway. It makes some of your body less transparent than other parts. Some screensavers are about transparency. Others are about opacity.
Like the distinction between fermions and bosons, objects in screensavers have to decide whether to bounce off each other or allow overlap. And if they overlap, whether one of them hides the other or not. In this case, we see through the overlap. Many screensavers just pile things on top of each other, like this:
[Cynosure]
I find these screensavers disturbing, because they remind me that with the passage of time, everything old gets covered over by new things. It's a metaphor of past, present, and future.
After my CT scan, the surgeon calls my wife even before I get home, and asks if I could go into surgery the very next day to have the tumor removed. She says yes. So I do. Sometimes the future is closer than you think.
General anesthesia is not like sleeping. My dreams usually kind of look like this:
[Pipes]
But general anesthesia looks like this:
[Blank]
You have no present, just a past, and (hopefully) a future. You don't dream — it's just a big blank until you come out from under.
Then they put you on morphine, so you won't hurt. Instead, you itch. Did you know morphine makes you itch? Boy, does it ever. And you have really weird dreams. Dreams kind of like this:
[Bubbles, fastest, no hide]
Or this:
[Lament]
I had really weird dreams on morphine. Didn't like those screensavers. But a wonderful poem came to me — it started out "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree." But I can't remember the rest of it.
Just kidding. But the place I did visit in my dreams was Xanadu, and it wasn't a very nice place to be. I prefer normal dreams.
When I was awake, I thought I was choking to death because of the tube down my nose to my stomach. I wasn't, but I thought I was. It wasn't until I cajoled a nurse into looking down my throat with a flashlight that I was mollified. That nurse became my favorite nurse, in a Florence Nightingale sort of way. I had several other favorite nurses too, for various reasons.
But then I had complications. As some of you know, twenty years ago I went blind in my right eye due to a case of shingles in my cornea. Shingles is just a recurrence of chicken pox virus.
So here's a screensaver called "NerveRot".
[NerveRot]
I love this screensaver, in a perverse sort of way. It's so...so...in your face. It's unnatural in so many ways. It looks like a fractal, but its fractal dimensionality isn't constant.
I don't love real nerverot. And shingles is a form of nerve rot, one of those things that kicks you when you're down. And I was down. I got a shingles infection on both sides of my head, which was unusual. It took me several days to figure it out. Fortunately, they have drugs to suppress it. But instead of getting out of the hospital in five days, it took ten. The good news was that my pathology analysis results came back saying that the excised tumor looked relatively benign in all respects except for its large size.
The bad news was that I was home for only twenty-four hours, and had to go back to emergency. I had never been more nauseous in my life, and to compound that, I found that even if I wanted to, I couldn't upchuck due to spasms in my esophagus. If you've ever had a tube down your nose, you'll know that you never want to have one again, but I was so miserable that I asked for one. It was a great improvement.
[Compass]
This screensaver was written to be nauseating, and I think it succeeds admirably in that. In fact, it really bugs me that I don't know why it has two needles pointing in different directions. I had far too many needles going in various directions when I was in the hospital. I hope that other needle there isn't the altimeter.
Anyway, this reminds us that an open source project needs a leader who has a good sense of direction, who doesn't change his mind continually about things like, say, how double-quoted strings ought to process interpolations, or which bits of the parser should work top down, and which bottom up. If you can find such a leader for Perl 6, that would definitely be an improvement over me. At least in some respects. Of course, I have the advantage of rules one and two. Rule 1: Larry is always right. Rule 2: Larry will still be right even after he changes his mind. Now I'm thinking there should also be a Rule 3, just in case. Rule 3 would say that Larry does not need to continue to be right after he's dead.
