Earl Killian’s Web Page

My name is Earl Killian. This is my personal web page. I like to read (history, politics, fiction, science, science fiction), and these pages contain pointers to a few books I recommend and pointers to interesting things on the web. I like to muse on the way things should be and these pages include some of my thoughts and ideas. I am vegan and a supporter of animal rights, and these pages include a few quotes and pointers on these subjects. I have a strong interest in technology and public policy that will eliminate the world’s greenhouse pollution. I have three battery-only powered electric vehicles (a Nissan Leaf, a and a Tesla Model S 85, and a Tesla Model S 75D, and these pages have some EV analysis. (Sadly, I no longer have the Solectria Force.) I do not currently have a fossil car. I once built a solar (passive solar heating plus PV), straw bale home, but I no longer live there. I currently live in Los Altos. My current home has three solar systems (PV, domestic hot water, and pool) and a heating/cooling retrofit. Finally, my politics, values, and essays here reflect my interest and appreciation for non-violence and pacifism.

The opinions expressed herein are my own and do not reflect upon any organization, despite any association I might have.

Monthly Quote

Quote for February:

Quora question:

Why do many British people not like Donald Trump?

Quora answer by Nate White:

A few things spring to mind.

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem.

For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace — all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.

So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing — not once, ever.

I don’t say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility — for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it’s a fact. He doesn’t even seem to understand what a joke is — his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty.

Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn’t just talk in crude, witless insults — he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront.

Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist.

Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that.

He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat.

He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully.

That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a bully’s snivelling sidekick instead.

⋮

— Nate White

About Earl

• Contact information
  • Addresses, phone numbers, PGP key, etc.
    (for friends only—password protected)
  • My old resume (PDF: 4KB)
    (for friends only—password protected)
    (but I am not looking for employment at this time)
• Off-site pages of mine
  • Earl Killian on Ello
  • Earl Killian on LinkedIn
  • Earl Killian on Twitter
  • Earl Killian on goodreads
  • Earl Killian on Yelp
  • Earl Killian on Facebook (deprecated)
  • Earl Killian on Google+ (deprecated)
• My collections
  • Collected Quotes
  • Past Quotes of the Month
  • Best of rec.food.veg, IMHO
  • Covered passages of Paris walk
  • Mathematical Formulas (use Mozilla to display MathML, explorer isn’t up to it)
  • Links to original publications in science and mathematics (very small right now)
  • My web links (bookmarks, old)
  • Software for download
    • Source code tarballs
      • Speedup of Berkeley MPEG player
    • Perl programs and modules
    • Emacs code
  • Recommended reading — My Favorite Books
    • Non-Fiction
    • Fiction
  • My Icon collection (approximately 400K download)
• My writings
  • Recent publications
    • Improving Instruction Delivery with a Block-Aware ISA
      (I didn’t write the paper, but I suggested the research, so I got listed as an author.)
  • Occasional Commentary (last updated 19 October 2015)
  • U.S. Political Glossary (non-conventional)
  • Aphorisms and Short Thoughts
  • My recipe for how to change things (politics etc.)
  • My notes on U.S. Presidents (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
  • My notes on U.S. Supreme Court decisions (the good, the bad, and the ugly)
  • Why I am vegan
  • SF story backdrops
• Personal stuff
  • Reading queue
  • Recently read books
  • Reference book purchases
  • Courses on tape queue (on cassette tape or CD for listening in the car)
    • Classics of American Literature, Parts I-VII, by Arnold Weinstein
  • Planning to buy (courses on cassette or CD for the car)
    • none at this time
  • Recent courses on tape
• Major programs that I’ve authored or worked on
  • Pixie, predecessor Moxie, and successor Mixie, and associated tools pixstats, moxstats, and mixstats
  • MIPS u-code compiler procedure integrater
  • MIPS u-code compiler code generator (co-author John Ho)
  • Pastel — an off-color language and Pascal compiler (primary author Jeff Broughton)
  • Amber — an operating system for the LLNL S1 project (many authors)
  • Praxis — language definition and implementation (with Bob Morgan and Art Evans)
  • BBN Satellite IMP (minor role)
  • ITS Emacs (the original, in TECO) — a 1% contributor (primary author Richard M. Stallman)
  • CRTSTY
  • Trantor — Communications operating system (with Charles Frankston and Eugene Ciccarelli for Steve Orszag)
• Instruction Set Architectures or extensions on which I’ve worked
  • S-2: a RISC-like successor to the LLNL S-1
    (circa 1984-1985)
  • MIPS III: the 64-bit extension of the MIPS II ISA
    (circa 1987-1991)
  • MIPS V: the SIMD media extension
    (circa 1996, primary work done by others)
  • MIPS MDMX: the SIMD DSP/media-processing extension
    (circa 1996, primary work done by others)
  • MIPS16: the LSI Logic compact code ISA
    (circa 1996, primary work done by LSI)
  • Tensilica Xtensa: compact embedded ISA designed for configurability and extensibility
    (circa 1998)
  • Tensilica Vectra I ISA and prototype (configurable SIMD, non-VLIW media/DSP extensions)
  • Tensilica Vectra II ISA (configurable SIMD, VLIW media/DSP extensions)
  • Tensilica Bitstream coprocessor ISA and implementation
  • Tensilica Galois Field coprocessor ISA and implementation
• Processor micro-architectures that I helped to design
  • LLNL S-2 (simple RISC-like pipelined ECL processor)
  • MIPS R3000 (cache improvements of the R2000)
  • MIPS R4000 (superscalar)
  • QED R4600/R4700 (low-cost, low-power)
  • Tensilica Xtensa (configurability, extensibility)
• My old email addresses
  • MIT
    • EAK@ML (also EAK@MIT-ML, EAK@MIT-ML.ARPA)
    • EAK@AI (also EAK@MIT-AI, EAK@MIT-AI.ARPA)
    • EAK@MC (also EAK@MIT-MC, EAK@MIT-MC.ARPA)
    • and probably EKillian@MIT-Multics
  • BBN: EKILLIAN@BBN-TENEXE (or EKILLIAN@BBNE)
  • LLNL: eak@mordor.s1.gov, eak@s1-c.arpa
  • MIPS: earl@mips.com
  • QED: earl@qedinc.com
  • SGI: earl@sgi.com
  • Tensilica: earl@tensilica.com
• NIC Handles (e.g. whois -h whois.networksolutions.com or www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/)
  • EAK
  • EK32
• ARIN Handles (e.g. whois -h whois.arin.net or ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl)
  • EAK-ARIN
  • EARLKI
• My U.S. Patents
  1. 5,027,270 — Instruction streaming FPO
  2. 5,398,328 — Software endian switching FPO
  3. 5,420,992 — Address and word ISA extension FPO
  4. 5,479,630 — Hybrid virtual/physical cache FPO
  5. 5,568,630 — Extended word size and address space FPO
  6. 5,572,713 — Reverse Endian FPO
  7. 5,574,877 — TLB with two physical pages per virtual tag FPO
  8. 5,696,958 — Method and apparatus for reducing delays following the execution of a branch instruction in an instruction pipeline FPO
  9. 5,864,703 — Method for providing extended precision in SIMD vector arithmetic operations FPO
  10. 5,933,650 — Alignment and ordering of vector elements for single instruction multiple data processing FPO
  11. 6,092,187 — Instruction prediction based on filtering FPO
  12. 6,266,758 — Alignment and ordering of vector elements for single instruction multiple data processing FPO
  13. 6,282,633 — High data density RISC processor FPO
  14. 6,425,076 — Instruction prediction based on filtering FPO
  15. 6,477,683 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
  16. 6,477,697 — Adding complex instructions extensions to a microprocessor FPO
  17. 6,760,888 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
  18. 6,854,046 — Configurable memory management unit FPO
  19. 7,020,854 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
  20. 7,036,106 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
  21. 7,159,100 — Method for providing extended precision in SIMD vector arithmetic operations FPO
  22. 7,197,625 — Alignment and ordering of vector elements for single instruction multiple data processing FPO
  23. 7,219,212 — Load/store operation of memory misaligned vector data using alignment register storing realigned data portion for combining with remaining portion FPO
  24. 7,346,881 — Method and apparatus for adding advanced instructions in an extensible processor architecture FPO
  25. 7,376,812 — Full-Text Vector co-processor for configurable and extensible processor architecture FPO
  26. 7,437,700 — Automated Processor Generation System and Method for Designing a Configurable Processor Delphion
• Programming languages that I contributed to in design discussions
  • Common Lisp
  • Praxis
  • TIE
• Network protocols that I helped define long long ago
  • RFC742 — NAME/FINGER
    Updates
    • RFC1194 — The Finger User Information Protocol
    • RFC1196 — The Finger User Information Protocol
    • RFC1288 — The Finger User Information Protocol
  • RFC788 — Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
    Updates
    • RFC821 — Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
  • RFC733 — Standard for the Format of ARPA Network Text Messages(1)
    Updates
    • RFC822 — Standard for the format of ARPA Internet text messages
  • RFC779 — Telnet Send Location
  • RFC829 — PACKET SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY REFERENCE SOURCES

Sub-content: 2019-02-25 16:13:07

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