Some random castle

Mine tunnels

Mine tunnels under the Rhenfels castle. These tunnels were dug under the battlefield and filled with gunpowder, and used successfully to blow up opposing forces. (Hopefully all the gunpowder is gone)

Roofs of Rothenburg

A view of Rothenburg from the room where we stayed. You can see the beams with a pulley sticking out from the top of the buildings. They were used to raise grain for storage in the top of each house.

Each resident was required to store a year´s supply of grain, in case of seige.

Palm trees in Germany?

We are now in Lindau, in the southern tip of Germany.

Night watchman

Sue with the night watchman in Rothenburg. He gave an entertaining and informative one hour tour of part of the city.

German travel learnings

Things I have learned in traveling in Germany.

1. German kezboards have the y and z keys reversed. This often seems to add a German 'accent' to the tzping.
2. Changing locations in the morning (moving stuff from one city to another), and jumping right back on the train again to spend the afternoon in a different hot and crowded city an hour away is very stressful, and not a good idea.
3. Bread rolls sold in the store in sealed plastic packages ought to be baked before eating.
4. Adding bubbly (carbonated) water to coffee substitute does not make it taste better.

Travel Update

We traveled from Bacharach (on the Rhine river) to Cochem (on the Mosel river), and also spent an afternoon in Trier looking at the Roman ruins. Also we visited Burg Eltz, a well preserved castle still owned by the Eltz family. The castle was never attacked, and only successfully sieged once.

After that, it was off to Göttingen to visit Fred, Heejung, and Hannah (and Dave S was also there). It was good to see them.

Unfortunately, I caught a cold (or some such illness) and had a 101 degree fever (that's Farenheit, not Celsius). I mostly recovered by the time we left Göttingen.

Now we are in the medieval walled city of Rothenburg.

Guten Tag

Sue and I have been in Germany for a few days now. There was a long line to check-in for the Air India flight, but otherwise the trip over went smoothly. The first day (the day we arrived), we went to Bacharach, on the Rhine river.

We are now in the land of Castles R Us. To stay awake, we went for a walk, and went up to the ruins of an old church (Werner Kappelle), and then up further to an old castle (Burg Stahleck), which is now a youth hostel. There were some good views from the top of the castle.

Chief Lounging Officer

The member of the household most deserving of the title "Chief Lounging Officer"

Do computers feel pain?

Imagine I fire up the old Apple IIe,and write a BASIC program

   10 PRINT "OUCH, IT HURTS"
   20 GOTO 10

and run it. Would I think the computer is in terrible pain?

On the other hand, it wouldn't be much different than if I made a podcast of me repeatly saying "Ouch, it hurts" in a monotone. Listeners most likely would perceive me as quoting the phrase, and not being some expression of my state of being. (Fortunately for you, this is only a thought experiment - I'm not going to make such a recording)

Now if I were to scream the phrase, adding emotional content, the listener would likely have a reaction, even if they knew that I was acting, and not really in pain.

It seems that the more human-like the reactions, the more we identify pain (or pleasure) in other creatures (or things).

(topic shift)

What if computers screamed when they segfaulted (ie the program crashed)? (Other than having lots of screaming computers at work.) Would this C program be an act of cruelty?

int main()
{
   int *p = NULL;
   int q = *p;
}

Run this program, and a bunch of unhappy laptops will show up at your door along with a mainframe they keep calling 'Bubba'.

Or what if computers put up a dialog like this when the disk drive was nearly full, "I'm stuffed, I can't store another byte. Please compress some files or delete some files to relieve my full feeling, and I'll work much better".

Of course, we might be rather indignant that the computer is expecting a compassionate response from us when it never seems very sympathetic. In fact, the computer seems downright pyschopathic in it's lack of empathy and regard for our feelings and the frustration it causes us. (In fact, I'm going to run that segfaulting program a few more times just to get back at it. Take that you stupid machine!)