M O N D A Y M I L L I O N *

This morning I came up with a notion for a Monday Million because of several things I saw on TV last night. Perhaps today's date adds a bit of poignancy to what I was reminded of - but not necessarily.

First I watched the first half of the movie "Path to 9-11". What a mess! The terrorists, the goverment agents on the ground trying to stop terrorism, the handcuffed beaurocrats that ought to be able to make things happen. The movie did pretty much identify the "bad guys". But also shown were so many (countless) people caught between them and us in tugs of war of ideaology, cross fire of danger in terms of actual bullets and bombs but also in terms of the psychological horrors that they must endure. This is not limited to the risks that agents and informants take with regard to themselves and their families. I have feelings about terrorists that I don't need to describe. But I also have painful empathy for innocent people whose lives are destroyed, of kids whose lives may never materialize into anything we would consider pleasant and fullfilling.

Not wanting to watch the previews of part two of the movie - partly because I didn't want to get too much visualization of that day's (this day's) event's even though I want to watch the show to get some sense of what all was happening to try and prevent it... and what failed - I switched to the documentary channel to fill in 20 minutes before the nightly news.

There, Verona and I saw a documentary about a photo journalist who has had the "opportunity???" to be in some pretty nasty places while some horrific things were happening. Things I've known about - probably most of us have known about. When we tuned in, he was recounting his experiences in Sarajevo where ironically ethnic cleansing of masses of Islamic people was the atrocity. It was on such a big scale. I don't know numbers but it was horrendous and my impressions were not a function of any number higher than just one.... just one person, nameless, a man, a woman that stopped to help the man, or a child who was innocently riding on a city bus but just happened to be in the rifle sites of a sniper that decided to take that particular shot. Any one of so many thousands upon thousands of people so ruthlessly slaughtered was enough of a number for me to be heartbroken that such things have ever happened.... let alone that they continue to happen in other parts of the world as I'm typing right now.

In several parts of Africa, similar "ethnic cleansing" or just sheer plays for power and money result in terrible deaths to millions of innocent people. Withholding food supplies and using starvation is a weapon - there and in Sarajevo. But in other documentaries I've heard/seen the evidence of brutal butchery..... of people. Each person... each individual of all the millions that have so struggled and died is a tragedy of nearly incomprehensible sadness when you emphathize just a bit with that individual's plight. Its more than I can stand to think of very much. But what I don't want to do even more than think of it on that level for long is to forget or to be unaware of it having happened, of it continuing to happen. I'm at a loss as to how I can be a means to effect change. But I will not turn away from the terrible knowledge of it.

The burden of knowing such things, of realizing more will come is indeed a heavy and unsavory one. I don't know how to save one life in those places. But I want to remember that those lives exist, existed... that they are/were people with feelings just like us. We remember and make monuments to great heroes and leaders in our wars. That is okay with me. But somehow I think each of us need to make at least some space in our hearts for a monument to individuals that have lived such terrible and tormented moments well beyond physical suffering that must be unbearable in itself.

*Or multiples of, significant fractions of, or give or take a few dozen, or thousand etc. Point is... things mentioned here include a LOT of inidividual elements of concern.

M O N D A Y M I L L I O N *

There are plenty of things in this world that are overwhelming. Some can be that way just one at a time. Some are because they hit you from all sides at once. And some because the sheer volume of them is so huge its quite hard to really grasp the magnitude of it.

Every so often, I've contemplated the number 1,000,000 and will occassionally try something to allow me to see how big that is... or how many it is.

For instance, once I thought I'd see if I could type a million periods (not one at a time... with a computer you can type 10, then copy and paste to 100, then copy and paste to 1000, etc etc and it wouldn't take all that long). I wanted to see how many pages it would took to display them. I don't recall how it turned out. I'm thinking that I didn't finish it for some reason, any number of which are probably readily apparent to most of you wondering about anyone that would even consider doing such a thing.

Another million-experiment is one that I did complete... in fact I did so a number of times because it not only gave me a glimpse of "million-magnitude" but it demonstrated something else that I found quite interesting.... even somewhat amazing... something that we are all affected by. I thought up the experiment more to get a grasp of computers' processing speeds and just used 1 million as the limit for the experiment.

It was back when we had our first computer - first generation Mac (1984 model) but well into its life at our house. It was after Myke and Mom had much newer computers and not too long before we got our first PC in 1994 because I did this experiment on all of those computers.

To put some context to this, I will tell you that when the first Mac came out in 1984, it BLEW anything else out there on the market of home computers, and even office computers I'd used in the park service, AWAY to an impressive degree. To me owning a Mac was like someone driving a Ferrari through a parade of VW Vans.

One of my favorite things to do on that first computer was to dabble in programming and would often quite impress myself, if not others, with some of the nifty things I could make our computer do. It was fun to learn different programming tools and see what you could use them for. Some of my programs were quite lengthly and had numberous sections of pages of code each.

But the "million-experiment" was a really simply program. It would just count from 0 to one million while displaying the current number on the screen.

The first version was only about 5 or six lines long. It used a black screen and displayed the current number in a single data field. 1, 2, 3, ..... 101, 102, ....234,516, 234,517 etc etc. But before it even got to 10,000 I realized the program was slower than it could be and I tweeked it by adding another 15 or 20 lines of programming so that instead of erasing the entire number and printing the entire new number, it just did kinda like the old (prior to digital) odometers did on your car. It only incremented the "ones" column until it had gone through 10, then kicked the "tens" column up one number, and so and and so on. The revised program was amazingly faster and I mention all this cause I kinda felt pretty smart figuring out such a simple thing, and how to make it better.

At this point you are probably thinking. Well surely it coulda counted to a million quicker than I could have rewritten the program.

Well here's the deal. A million is BIG.... was way big then.... and WAY WAY BIG with version one of my program. After it got up into the thousands I was already looking at my timer.... yeah I had a kitchen timer cause I was pretty sure it was gonna be a matter of minutes at the most... and started doing some math on how long it was gonna take. I'm not going to tell what that projection was here... just that it would have been something like 2 to 5 times longer than what I was fairly sure I could do with a new version. And even if it was only gonna be 2 times as long, I didn't want to wait even THAT long.

Well, here is how it went.

Finished up and started running "Million.exe" v2.0.000.00.0.000.0.0000.0.00000.0 about 8pm. Watched it a while and was fairly sure I had the program working as efficiently as it could be. With the timer and again doing the math I realized that I needed to set our alarm clock to 3:15am so we (yes Verona was as excited about this as I was.... ha ha... and hardly... but she was a good sport as she always acts interested in my "endeavors") could see the number approach 9 9 9 , 9 9 9 and switch to 1, 0 0 0 , 0 0 0. I'd done good math and sure enough within 10 mintutes of waking up we watched the digits flicker column by column toward a straight across row of nines.... which we really didn't hardly see because the tens and ones columns were flickering along pretty fast... and soon it STOPPED COLD on 1,000,000 and I smiled. And yet, I was still quite amazed that it took the Bindblowing Speed of the MAC 7 1/2 hours to count to a million.

A million was really big! (And yes, I did have the thought that "I wish I had (not a nickel") but a buck for everytime that one's column had clicked to the next number. Followed shortly by "the buck stops here"... looking at "1,000,000" in the center of the black screen.... that the bucks stopping there would be just fine with me.)

Well the whole idea of this blog entry was to give you a sense of millionness, millionarity, million-magnitutous etc etc.

Oh... and for those curious about how computers have gotten faster.

I ran the program on Mom's computer (est 1990 model) and it took only 30 minutes!

A short while later I ran it on Myke and Cheya's new computer and it took only about 10 minutes!

When we got our first IBMish PC I ran it again and it took 7.5 minutes which surprised me because the processor speed was listed several multiples faster than Myke and Cheya's. (I don't recall those processor speeds, but the lenghts of time for running the Million Program have stayed in my mind for some reason).

It occurs to me that computers are much much faster now than the last time I ran that program 12 years ago. If I ever figure out how to run a BASIC program on Windows XP I would like to try it again and see what the new time would be.

But the point of this blog is that a million is pretty huge.

Other MONDAY MILLION entries will be about things of similar magnitude*. In fact my first thought along this line is what I will write in a few minutes. But I just felt that I should share some sense of what a million is.

Incidentally, this blog entry contains 6927 characters. You'd have to copy and paste it 144.323 times in order for the whole bunch to include 1 million characters.

*Or multiples of, significant fractions of, or give or take a few dozen, or thousand etc. Point is... things mentioned here include a LOT of inidividual elements of concern.

F R I D A Y F I V E

Five things I like best about retirement

1. 8:00am Monday
2. 8:00am Tuesday
3. 8:00am Wednesday
4. 8:00am Thursday
5. 8:00am Friday