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Welcome to Earl’s Web Page
Last modified: Tue Jun 30 21:37:40 PST 2009
Greetings!
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 a
battery powered electric vehicle (a
Solectria Force)
and I am on the board of the
Electric Auto Association,
a non-profit that promotes EVs, and these pages have
some EV analysis. I built a a solar (passive solar
heating plus PV),
straw bale home, but that is covered at
Build It Green’s Santa Clara County Home Tour 2006, Home #3.
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.
Table of Contents
Monthly Quote
Quote for June:
Much has been written about panics and manias, much
more than with the most outstretched intellect we are
able to follow or conceive; but one thing is certain,
that at particular times a great deal of stupid people
have a great deal of stupid money…. At
intervals, from causes which are not to the present
purpose, the money of these people—the blind
capital, as we call it, of the country—is
particularly large and craving; it seeks for someone
to devour it, there is a plethora;
it finds
someone, and there is speculation;
it is
devoured, and there is panic.
— Walter Bagehot, Essays on Edward Gibbon
About Earl
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Contact information
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My collections
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My writings
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Personal stuff
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Reading queue
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Fiction/Literature
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General Non-Fiction
- Strategies for the Green Economy, by Joel Makower.
- Burmese Days, by George Orwell.
- Portable Nietzsche, by Friedrich Nietzsche.
- The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando De Soto.
- The Digital Person, by Daniel J. Solove.
- The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, by Steven Pinker.
- All Things Censored, by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
- Invisible Heroes, by Belleruth Naparstek.
- The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots, by Irene Maxine Pepperberg.
- Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It, by John Seymour.
- Our Inner Ape: Power, Sex, Violence, Kindness, and the Evolution of Human Nature, by Frans de Waal.
- When Technology Fails: A Manual for Self Reliance & Planetary Survival, by Matthew Stein.
- Living Silence: Burma under Military Rule, by Christina Fink.
- Thought without Language, by Lawrence Weiskrantz.
- Kamikaze Diaries, by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney.
- The Complete Anti-Federalist, by Herbert J. Storing.
- Zen-Brain Reflections, by James H. Austin.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
- The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
- The Tinkerer’s Accomplice, by J. Scott Turner.
- The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, by Plutarch.
- Divine Wind, by Kerry Emanuel.
- The Complete Kama Sutra, translated by Alain Daniélou.
- In Spite of the Gods, by Edward Luce.
- Climate Change 2007 - The Physical Science Basis, by IPCC.
- Climate Change 2007 - Impacts, Adaptation, by IPCC.
- Climate Change 2007 - Mitigation, by IPCC.
- The Economics of Climate Change, by Nicholas Stern.
- The Backyard Beekeeper, by Kim Flottum and Weeks Ringle.
- Red, White, and Brew, by Brian Yaeger.
- Iconoclast, by Gregory Berns.
- FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street, by Frank Partnoy.
- Street Fighters, by Kate Kelly.
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Science/Technical
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Building
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Gardening
- Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, by Toby Hemenway, John Todd.
- Golden Gate Gardening, by Pam Peirce, Pam Dardick.
- Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, by Rosalind Creasy.
- The Nursery Manual, by Liberty H. Bailey.
- Manual of Gardening, by Liberty H. Bailey.
- The Outlook to Nature, by Liberty H. Bailey.
- Rodale Book of Composting, by Deborah L. Martin.
- Botany for Gardeners, by Brian Capon.
- California Landscape Garden: Ecology, Culture, and Design, by Mark Francis, Andreas Reimann.
- Healing with Whole Foods: Asian Traditions and Modern Nutrution, by Paul Pitchford.
- Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth, Kent Whealy.
- Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry.
- Western Fruit, Berries and Nuts: How to Select, Grow and Enjoy, by Robert L. Stebbins, Lance Walheim.
- Introduction to Permaculture, by Bill Mollison, Reny M. Slay. Seeds of Change
- Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual, by Bill Mollison. Seeds of Change
- Permaculture Two, by Bill Mollison. Seeds of Change
- New Roots for Agriculture, by Wes Jackson.
- Wild Lilies, Irises, and Grasses: Gardening with California Monocots, by Nora Harlow.
- The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control, by Barbara Ellis.
- Living Fences, by Ogden Tanner.
- California’s Wild Gardens: A Guide to Favorite Botanical Sites, by Phyllis Faber.
- The Gardener’s Table, by Richard Merrill & Joe Ortiz.
- Food Not Lawns, by Heather Flores.
- One Straw Revolution, by Fukuoka.
- The Soil And Health, by Albert Howard.
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Woodworking
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Textbook reading queue
- Power Electronics: Converters, Applications, and Design, by Ned Mohan.
- Fundamentals of Power Electronics, by Robert W. Erickson.
- International Economics, by Paul R. Krugman and Maurice Obstfeld.
- Partial Differential Equations, by Walter A. Strauss.
- Introduction to Partial Differential Equations and Hilbert Space, by Karl E. Gustafson.
- The Colossal Book of Mathematics, by Martin Gardener.
- A Wavelet Tour of Signal Processing, by Stephane G. Mallat.
- Abstract Algebra, by David Dummit.
- Introduction to Hilbert Spaces With Applications, by Lokenath Debnath, Piotr Mikusinski.
- Classics on Fractals, edited by .
- Fundamentals of Renewable Energy Processes, by Aldo Da Rosa.
- Ecological Economics, by Joshua Farley, Herman E. Daly.
- Shapes, Space, and Symmetry, by Alan Holden.
- Regular Polytopes, by H. S. M. Coxeter.
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Planning to buy
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Fiction
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General Non-Fiction
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Technical
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Textbooks
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Building
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Gardening
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Woodworking
- Recently read books
- Reference book purchases
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Courses on tape queue (on cassette tape or CD for listening in the car)
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Planning to buy (courses on cassette or CD for the car)
- Recent courses on tape
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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)
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Instruction Set Architectures or extensions on which I’ve worked
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S-2: a RISC-like successor to the LLNL S-1
(circa 1984-1985)
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MIPS III: the 64-bit extension of the MIPS II ISA
(circa 1987-1991)
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MIPS V: the SIMD media extension
(circa 1996, primary work done by others)
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MIPS MDMX: the SIMD DSP/media-processing extension
(circa 1996, primary work done by others)
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MIPS16: the LSI Logic compact code ISA
(circa 1996, primary work done by LSI)
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Tensilica Xtensa: compact embedded ISA designed for
configurability and extensibility
(circa 1998)
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Tensilica Vectra I ISA and prototype (configurable SIMD,
non-VLIW media/DSP extensions)
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Tensilica Vectra II ISA (configurable SIMD, VLIW media/DSP
extensions)
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Tensilica Bitstream coprocessor ISA and implementation
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Tensilica Galois Field coprocessor ISA and implementation
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Processor micro-architectures that I helped to design
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LLNL S-2 (simple RISC-like pipelined ECL processor)
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MIPS R3000 (cache improvements of the R2000)
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MIPS R4000 (superscalar)
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QED R4600/R4700 (low-cost, low-power)
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Tensilica Xtensa (configurability, extensibility)
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My old email addresses
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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
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NIC Handles (e.g. whois -h whois.networksolutions.com
or www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/)
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ARIN Handles (e.g. whois -h whois.arin.net or ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl)
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My U.S. Patents
- 5,027,270 — Instruction streaming FPO
- 5,398,328 — Software endian switching FPO
- 5,420,992 — Address and word ISA extension FPO
- 5,479,630 — Hybrid virtual/physical cache FPO
- 5,568,630 — Extended word size and address space FPO
- 5,572,713 — Reverse Endian FPO
- 5,574,877 — TLB with two physical pages per virtual tag FPO
- 5,696,958 — Method and apparatus for reducing delays following the execution of a branch instruction in an instruction pipeline FPO
- 5,864,703 — Method for providing extended precision in SIMD vector arithmetic operations FPO
- 5,933,650 — Alignment and ordering of vector elements for single instruction multiple data processing FPO
- 6,092,187 — Instruction prediction based on filtering FPO
- 6,266,758 — Alignment and ordering of vector elements for single instruction multiple data processing FPO
- 6,282,633 — High data density RISC processor FPO
- 6,425,076 — Instruction prediction based on filtering FPO
- 6,477,683 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
- 6,477,697 — Adding complex instructions extensions to a microprocessor FPO
- 6,760,888 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
- 6,854,046 — Configurable memory management unit FPO
- 7,020,854 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
- 7,036,106 — Automated processor generation system for designing a configurable processor and method for the same FPO
- 7,159,100 — Method for providing extended precision in SIMD vector arithmetic operations FPO
- 7,197,625 — Alignment and ordering of vector elements for single instruction multiple data processing FPO
- 7,219,212 — Load/store operation of memory misaligned vector data using alignment register storing realigned data portion for combining with remaining portion FPO
- 7,346,881 — Method and apparatus for adding advanced instructions in an extensible processor architecture FPO
- 7,376,812 — Full-Text Vector co-processor for configurable and extensible processor architecture FPO
- 7,437,700 — Automated Processor Generation System and Method for Designing a Configurable Processor Delphion
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Network protocols that I helped define long long ago
Good stuff found on the web
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Financial Crisis
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Commentary
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Music
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Humor/Satire
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Economics
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Hydrocarbons
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Fool Cells
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Media
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Politics
My heroes
There is no single reason I see some figures and not others as
heroes, but one pattern does emerge. My heroes are individuals
who I recognize for seeing truth that other their contemporaries
could not, successfully communicating this truth, and often
thereby changing the world in some way. Usually both their
accomplishments and methods are worthy of praise. Some of these
people profoundly changed the world. They were or are not
perfect, and fault could be found, but I find their examples
inspiring. Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein’s were not the
only great scientists. Darwin’s work revolutionized the way we
look ourselves and ushered in an era where science supplanted
faith and superstition in much of the general population.
Einstein’s genius was coupled with a social conscience (his
pacifism in militant environments), and with free thinking and
non-conformance that has been all too rare in scientists. I
recognize George Orwell, Rachel Carson and Ralph Nader for their
illustration of Margaret Mead’s observation that a committed
citizen can change the world. Carson’s Silent
Spring ignited the environmental movement, and Nader’s
long career standing up against the powerful showed how to use
the legal system to hold power accountable, even if just a
little. George Orwell in his essays and fiction shows that
penetrating observations beyond the conventional wisdom are not
only possible but also that fiction can shape societies (Mark
Twain and Noam Chomsky are two others with penetrating
observations). Off with the blinders! George Soros, while he
acquired wealth in less than exemplary ways, shows that wealth
can be put to political use in enlightened ways. Mohandas Gandhi
and Aung San Suu Kyi both demonstrate courage that I can only
aspire to in working to effect change non-violently.
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Aung San Suu Kyi
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Ralph Nader
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Rachel Carson
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Charles Darwin
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Literature.org
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Infidels.org
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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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George Soros
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Albert Einstein
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George Orwell
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