Greek Astronomy Trouble

Here is another astro-funding crisis… The National Observatory of Athens is apparently threatened with a 30% cut in state funding, and convert it into a private institution. There is a petition you can sign here. (I was alerted to this via a tweet from Astronomy Blogger Stu.) I don’t have any more detail.

NOA is five institutes in one, doing much more than regular astrophysics, including the rather groovy NESTOR underwater neutrino detector.

I suppose given the dire problems Greece is in, this is not an entirely surpising development. But it is very depressing and extremely short sighted. Science and technology is investment for the future, not luxury expenditure.

I signed the petition.

Goodbye World

Another sad day for the computing world – a few days back Dennis Ritchie died. Yes I know I am a bit slow off the mark. This wasn’t a mega-news story like the death of Steve Jobs, but you can find a few news articles  at the BBC, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and Tech Crunch. Of course the public at large knew almost nothing about Ritchie, but he was more important to the creation of the modern world than Jobs. He invented the C programming language and co-created Unix with Ken Thompson. These things underly the Internet, the Mac, the iPhone and Android. There is a straight line from C to Java to C# so even Microsoft is not a Unix-free zone.

I have in front of me my copy of “The C programming language” by Kernighan and Ritchie. One of the many remarkable things is that it is an inch thinner than all my other computing books. It is a paradigm of clarity.

Apparently the news was first broken by Google’s Rob Pike. Here is his very nice follow-on posting on Google Plus.

Rob Pike’s posting and the Tech Crunch article have lots of comments from distressed geeks. Somebody said inventing Unix is like inventing air. I think even folks who hanker after VMS would agree that in practice we all breathe Unix. Ny favourite comment from the Tech Crunch stream was from Mike Church in Malvern, who said :

#include <stdio.h>

int main(int argc, char** argv).
{

fprintf(stdout, “Goodbye World!\n”);.

exit(0);.
}