Ad Infinitum

Where I come from, we call that a close race, especially this early on when we’re not even at the halfway point. Obviously in the coming weeks, things may change, but for now, it’s still close.

The South is virtually the Clinton’s backyard, and no one at all should be surprised that Hillary did well there. But, many of the upcoming primary states will be more favorable for Sanders. 

And while I’m on the subject, nothing beats going outside and actually voting, or getting face-to-face commitments to vote from family and friends, but anyone who wants to help make the next round of primary states more favorable for Sanders can phone bank here: https://go.berniesanders.com/page/content/phonebank 

AGAIN, for clarity: Super delegates do not actually cast their votes until this summer in Philadelphia, at the Democratic National Convention, in JULY. And unlike “earned” delegates (that’s regular people like you and me) who have already voted in the primaries, THEIR “votes” (the ones they that haven’t made yet) can still change from the candidate they pledged, to the candidate who has popular support.

Until very recently, most reputable media outlets did not include super delegates in their overall delegate vote counts, or at least they made it a point to clarify the difference between unalterable “earned” delegates who have already cast a ballot, and “pledged” super delegates who haven’t even voted, and who may yet change their pledge to vote with the people. 

(If you still think that a promise to vote is the same thing as an actual vote, then consider this analogy: an acquaintance asks you PayPal them $500 today, and they “promise” to pay you back. But they quietly add the condition that they’ll pay you back IF things go well for them. Only then will they repay you. Later on. In July. Probably. Suddenly that promise doesn’t seem quite as secure, does it?)

ALSO: Please note that on Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton largely won the reliably red states, the same states where Democrats don’t have a prayer of winning in the general election. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders won in traditionally Democratic states. More importantly though, he won in some hotly contested swing states. This is an extremely salient (and under reported) point, because it punches truck sized holes in the false, but popular media narrative that Sanders is somehow a “risky” vote for women and/or Black people; or that Sanders is somehow unelectable, despite the fact that Hillary has much higher unfavorability rates than does Sanders, and despite the fact that in poll after poll, Sanders repeatedly does better than Clinton against Trump, Cruz and Rubio. 

Contrary to the Clinton campaign’s slick political messaging, the fact is that Bernie Sanders is the candidate who has a better chance of beating the Republican nominee in November.

Finally: Yes, Hillary won Massachusetts, a traditionally blue state, by razor thin margins. But the impact of Bill Clinton illegally campaigning for Hillary INSIDE of polling places cannot be over-emphasized, especially in close races. His Secret Service detail caused voters additional wait times, and may have turned some voters away for security reasons. I have no doubt Sanders would have won the state if not for Bill Clinton’s “accidental” tampering.

This made me so anxious, you don’t even understand!

Playing with a 1980′s IBM PS/2

I found an old IBM this weekend, and I learned the Pascal language just to play with it. The IBM is a 1989 PS/2 (so far as I can tell, but it may be older), or Personal System 2. These computers first came out in 1987 as IBM’s third generation of personal computers, you can read more about their history here.

Programming the IBM

While poking around on this computer’s DOS prompt I found a directory that contained all of the previous user’s programs - the most recent of which was edited in 1992. I noticed that the programs were written in the Pascal programming language and that I could make new programs with the included turbo IDE (Integrated Development Environment):

After downloading the free pascal compiler on my Mac, I started learning the language. I began writing pascal programs on my Mac to transfer to the IBM, but when I tried to load the programs into turbo I found that they were corrupted because I had not accounted for the carriage return character in DOS. In UNIX systems only the newline character (denoted by ‘\n’) is needed for newlines, but in DOS the carriage return character is also needed (denoted by ‘\r’, then ‘\r\n’ together). So I wrote a quick bash script to solve my problem:

I then proceeded to write Conway’s game of life in pascal - which is the seen running in the second gif above ( I have the source code here if you would like to read over it). The game of life is a simple simulation game that populates and repopulates a grid of cells based on simple rules. If a cell is filled it is considered “alive”, if it is not it is considered “dead”. Here is an example of an interesting configuration - known as a Glider Gun - in the game of life:

Making Life

I created two arrays, one to store the current state of the grid and another to store the temporary grid that helps calculate the next “generation” of cells.

For each “generation” - or step as I have called it here - I fill the grid with cells based on the following rules:

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by under-population.

Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.

Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by over-population.

Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

While looking at the gif above, you may have noticed that there are some cells that seem to pop into existence randomly. This is because I randomly turn 4% of cells in the grid ‘alive’ during each step. I do this to insure that the grid does not empty, because I like to have this programming running in the background as I do other things.

I am currently trying to install old DOS games onto the system. My goal is to get the old elder scrolls arena - the first elder scrolls game - onto the system. Because the file is big (9MB, well… big for 1980′s computing) I will have to break apart and transfer over multiple floppies. I currently have a script to split the executable and I am working on a pascal program to reconstruct the partial files on the IBM.

The Source Code:

To view the source code for this project, or to fork it, check out the github repo:

https://github.com/piepieninja/IBM-DOS-GAMES/