<div dir="ltr">Sorry, Norman. Thanks for the kind words and the clarification!<div><br></div><div>Robby</div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Norman Gray <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:norman@astro.gla.ac.uk" target="_blank">norman@astro.gla.ac.uk</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
Robby (and Matthias), hello.<br>
<div class="im"><br>
On 2013 Feb 10, at 21:05, Robby Findler <<a href="mailto:robby@eecs.northwestern.edu">robby@eecs.northwestern.edu</a>> wrote:<br>
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> Is this intended to be sarcastic? Do you believe the creators of something (that they give away even) are not free to plan for its future?<br>
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</div>Sarcastic? Ermmm, no, it was not intended to be sarcastic. Really not. Indeed, in a couple of decades of posting via uucp and smtp I think this may be the bit of any text I've written which has been most diametrically misunderstood.<br>
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My remark was intended to be straightforwardly laudatory. Matthias's call seems a fine manifesto for a better and highly parenthesised future, and the sort of thing that should probably end up blu-tacced to somebody's wall, with or without a highly contrasty picture of Matthias (who may or may not be photogenic, I don't know).<br>
<div class="im"><br>
I see that Matthias says:<br>
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> I see myself much more as the Milton Friedman of the Lisp family than some fake clone of a murderer-terrorist :-)<br>
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</div>Friedman and the Chicago School? Hmm, I'm not entirely sure where we're going there.<br>
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Guevara? I was intending to invoke iconic optimism rather than the messy intricacies of brute history, and bracketing this with 'We hold these truths...' was intended to evoke other iconic optimisms (rather than messy intricacies). However I think this may have been a poor choice, since he (and as it turns out Friedman) are figures with radically different valencies here and in the various Americas, and are ipso facto a poor choice for apothegms.<br>
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I don't think those valencies are obviously useful to discuss on-list. In case it's not clear: any negative personal connotations a reader detects in these remarks, that reader should consider retracted.<br>
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Oh dear....<br>
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Best wishes,<br>
<div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5"><br>
Norman<br>
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--<br>
Norman Gray : <a href="http://nxg.me.uk" target="_blank">http://nxg.me.uk</a><br>
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK<br>
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