John Bender

The PDP-11: Bittersweet memories of an ancient computer.

I saw this post about the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-11 mini-computer on Ars Technica and it brought back a flood of unexpected memories. For some people, a song from their youth brings forth a flood of memories, for me, my madeleine...

Lobster Vision! (an Investigation of the Percept)

Last year, during the height of the pandemic when many universities shifted to remote learning platforms, I was privileged to be able to audit a class at the Harvard Divinity School taught by Jay Garfield. One of the texts we read was...

Learning to type math, in LaTeX!

Or rather the typesetting program, (not typing in rubber, that would be a different type of “fun”)Last semester I decided to take a combined linear algebra, real analysis, and vector calculus class online (Math E-23A at Harvard Extension...

Congratulations Angela!

You are the winner of the 2021 Ice Classic!The last patch of snow melted last night at 8:30 PM! Angela had the closest guess, so she is the winner of this years Ice Classic. Angela, check your email later today! For everyone else, thanks for playing...

Dennis’ Adventures in the Deep.

A story by Arcturus BenderOnce upon a time there was a giant isopod named Dennis. He went on a mission to a cave. The journey was long and the cave was spooky. He unpacked his tent and slept at the mouth of the cave. The next day he went inside. It...

Happy New Year (a month late!)

It has been a while since my last update. Last year was quite exhausting for everyone, between pandemic fatigue, full time work-from-home (ok, not that unusual for me), school-from-home (our normal), work demands and various projects we have been...

An Ancient Egyptian Poem from 4000 years ago.

Welcoming DeathThis is a poem I translated from Lesson 7 of Hoch’s Middle Egyptian Grammar today. It is from The Dispute between a Man and his Ba from about 4000 years ago (1900 BCE). I am sure the translation could use some more work, but I...

Typing in cuneiform.

As you may recall, I am participating in the GlyphStudy study group learning Middle Egyptian. I use a program called JSesh to type Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some of my fellow students are in the process of forming another study group to learn the oldest...

One, Two (of a kind), and More

(Note: All that follows is based on pp. 28-9 of Hoch’s Middle Egyptian Grammar)Yesterday I mentioned that the adjective was declined (that is, has endings added to it to differentiate number and gender). I really did not describe what I meant...

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