Famous last words

Gauss the famous mathematician is known for his last words:

More light

I used to think this was because he saw a brightness ahead as he began his final exit. But when my grandmother died, the last thing she said was

More water

Which leads to realize that Gauss actually was asking for more light in the room, that had started to go dark for him. I was thinking that I could make a joke at the end:

More or less light

Harvie the Seagull

There was a seagull hanging out at the Woods Hole Waterfront Park. He had really nice lines:

I decided to make him my bestie:

I even named him Harvie Wheeler. He seemed to hang out at the park and I actually changed my morning walk to pass this place and see if "Harvie" was around. One time I brought him some bread but he was not interested after the first nibble. But I thought it was probably not a healthy place for a seagull to hang out and get used to. I saw him begging for scraps at the end of the summer, from people eating their lunches at the park, and imagined him failing to develop good seagull hunting habits. I think he had a parent that was still feeding him mid-summer and them got lazy and stayed in the park.  

Later Harvie appears to be gone and  I saw the remains of a half-eaten seagull down the street. I guess he was not prepared for the fox that hunts along there. 

What is "pain" as a software concept?

I was thinking about how "pain" could be used as a programming concept. Found the answer in

Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines

by Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio

They say that feelings are the response to a system being out of equilibrium.

So then a good answer to my question is to allow every subroutine of a "system" to be passed a pointer to its "environment", as well as pointers to other "neighboring" system subroutine's state, and have an automatic mechanism for comparing the curret subroutine's internal state to this environment and neighbors, to come up with a vector of disturbance from equilibrium. Each subroutine can then take exactly the same form as a 'switch' statement on the values of the disturbance vector. Pain would then be considered to be some of the case statements within this 'switch'. In a simple version, the disturbance is a real valued number and pain is a threshold that affects the subroutine's behavior.

Note in passing that a system would simply move towards death, if all that mattered was equilibrium. There needs to be a larger "equilibrium" driving a system out of local equilibrium, if the system is to do any work. For better or worse, such ideas lead the conversation forward and connect "pain" in a useful way to other programming constructs.

The Levallois Technique

From Wikipedia. Note that the back side may show a "bulb of percussion". The front side has a few flakes removed.

Now consider this from Woods Hole. I think it was in the sand and clay below my yard and I found it in a pile of excavated dirt for the new foundation:

 It has a bulb of percussion and signs or "erraill.

 Additional back-side flakes.

 Side vide of bulb

Darn nice piece of quartz, unlike anything else in the yard.