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"Love is invincible"
(entry title is in greek, iso-8859-7 encoding)

I recently read a book called "The Rule of Four" by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. I will not provide a detailed review, since many can be found on the Internet and in appropriate publications. The authors appear promising but I personally dislike this whole archeological-mystery "genre". I believe that the book would have been much better without ancient mysteries and modern crime stories. Simply put, some parts of the book, especially those that deal with university life and the young people's quest for identity and meaning, are occasionally brilliant.

I selected a short quote that particularly impressed me. A truly Kundera-esque analysis of "love is invincible" appears in the text, delivered by the father to his young son, the protagonist. The interpretation of the phrase is melancholic but interesting. Popular understanding of the phrase is that "love can help us overcome all difficulties" or "we can achieve anything for the sake of love". Contrary to these beliefs, the father points to the drawing of Eros[1] (Έρως) holding a sword--instead of the usual bow and arrows--and viciously killing its/his foes. Love/Eros is strong, but is not necessarily an ally. Eros is a powerful force that we cannot resist. The original phrase, drawn from Antigone (Αντιγόνη), a tragedy by Sophocles, provides the context to which the authors are true. Love/Eros is no better than madness because it makes people defy ethics, logic and law.

For those familiar with the original tragedy text this explanation is immediately apparent, but for me this revelation caused a shift in perspective. Far too often we hear that Love/Eros is a force for good, a power that helps us. Love/Eros is a power to which we are subjected and this is--in a way--a tribute to its greatness and its inherently dangerous nature. This is perhaps the most important lesson of youth.

PKT


[1] I need to make a slight distinction between "Eros" and "Love". In Greek, "Eros" is an urge. It possesses a playful but aggressive quality, it is a strong but unreliable force, unlike "love" that is deeper and more permanent. Eros may lead to love. The sentiment between Romeo and Juliet is eros, for example.

The FPU stack is your friend.

This is an issue that has always intrigued me. Many people, especially in techno-phile web sites like slashdot.org, seem to dislike the x87 fpu stack. Far too often I notice messages that propose an alternatice register-based model, like the one used for integer calculations and logic. This seems very strange to me for two seperate reasons:

• The "stack" structure is inherently very appropriate for formula evaluation. As a matter of fact, those familiar with the Reverse Polish Notation, a (mostly) lost art that was once popular with HP scientific calculators, will quickly point out that it is the quickest way to do formula evaluation without parentheses. It is a mathematical fact that all formulas can be evaluated in a stack based model, as long as the stack has enough space. Admittedly, the stack model can be a bit cumbersome at first but this is only a matter of habit and does not make it inferior to a register model.
  
• Back in the days where the fpu was an extra component--anyone remember the 387?--floating point instructions where very, very expensive. The co-processor did not have its own bus and it used bandwidth from the main processor (40MHz FSB * 32bit plus overhead for 386DX40). Things have changed a lot since. With the arrival of the Pentium processor, the first x86 processor to include by default a decent fpu (note that the 486 had DX and SX versions, so not every 486 chip had an fpu--plus it wasn't that great), the relative cost of floating point math had plummeted. A significant example is the transition from integer based 3d mathematics, as seen in Doom source code (486 era), to floating point based 3d mathematics, as seen in the Quake source code (Pentium era). The unlucky competitors in that period where Cyrix and AMD, whose "Pentium-class" processors would always get severely beaten in Quake fpu intensive benchmarks, even though they offered good integer performance. A little known fact about the Pentium fpu was that Intel had made the fxch instruction extremely fast by allowing it to execute in parallel with every non-dependent instruction. This essentially means that since the Pentium processor anyone can use the fpu stack like a register set by freely executing the fxch instruction. There it is. Quit whinning and use the fpu however you like.

PKT

P.S. Note that new RPN HP calculators are still being made. These are great tools, but most people think that it propably makes more sense to buy a Palm and throw calculator software on top. Not the same thing, though, for several reasons.