Pun Salad

So when I heard that Harold Ramis had passed away, I went to his IMDB page. And just the "Writer" category has: Ghostbusters; Groundhog Day; SCTV; Caddyshack; Meatballs; Stripes; and (last but not least) Animal House.

The world just got significantly less funny. RIP.

Most of [Ali's] hangers-on had nothing to do with boxing. One night we went to a nightclub. There must have been a dozen people at a big table and everybody was ordering drinks and every kind of food. When the waiter brought the desserts, Ali got up and stretched, said it was a little stuffy in the restaurant, and left. I was pretty quick to get out too. That was the kind of thing that that story was full of. Ali just didn’t want to pay the bill.

Holy cow, what a fine show. Only problem is, when I'm out in the real world… That guy over there with the metal-band shirt? Meth addict! Two guys just sitting in that car? Meth dealers! That restaurant that nobody ever seems to go to? Money laundering for the meth trade!

It's probably a good thing I read Jacob Sullum's "Meth Mouth and Other Meth Myths." Bottom line:

Over-the-top warnings about methamphetamine—encapsulated in the slogan "Meth: Not Even Once"—aim to scare people away from a drug that might harm them (but probably won't). By contrast, Hart argues, exaggerating the hazards posed by methamphetamine causes definite damage by encouraging harsh criminal penalties (such as a five-year mandatory minimum for five grams), fostering distrust of accurate warnings about drugs, suppressing useful information that could reduce drug-related harm, driving users toward more dangerous routes of administration (as efforts to reduce meth purity, if successful, predictably would do), and justifying ineffective policies that impose substantial costs on large numbers of people for little or no benefit (such as restrictions on the methamphetamine precursor pseudoephedrine, a cheap, safe, and effective decongestant that is now absurdly difficult to obtain). In other words, hyperbole hurts.

Although Breaking Bad's overall theme is probably still on point: becoming a drug criminal is probably not good for your family, friends, or your own self.

For a number of years I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. More recently I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming languages (i.e. everything except, perhaps, plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to this discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so.

The editor, Niklaus Wirth, stuck on the title "Go To Statement Considered Harmful"; the "Considered Harmful" phrase took on a life of its own.

But after 46 years, the go to statement is still claiming casualties, as this Wired article about Apple's recently-revealed iOS vulnerability in its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) code. If you know any C or C++, you'll get a chuckle out of the bug.