Dear Friends and acquaintances ,

I trust all had a merry winter solstice season and happy western , now global , holidays which approximate it .

Shortcuts : #GoodByeNY , #Liberty , #4thCoSy , , #MidWinter19

#GoodByeNY
The major event for me in 2005 has been leaving my 20 year view at 42 Peck Slip , Manhattan 10038 , of Roebling's enduring bridge over the East River for a view of the natural beauty of Pike's Peak from here at 28124 N Hwy 67 , Woodland Pk , CO 80863 . I have been meaning to get out a general newsletter since even before the move in August but only succeeded in publishing specific portions on CoSy.com which I'll include by reference . I apologize to some of you for whom this is the first time you will have heard of my move . Many of my reasons for moving are given in my Blog at 20050810 .
Here's a slice of an interesting graph from MillerSamuel.com/ recently posted on the NYC Junto Discussion list . Stevan Apter compared my leaving NYC to a canary in a coal mine . Certainly it seems my deciding , around the end of Q1 , to leave presages the bursting of a housing market bubble . It will be interesting to see how the curve progresses .

Recently another APLer mentioned in an email that the what's new link is his favorite feature of CoSy.com . It's perhaps not a bad way to scan the various fronts I've touched during the year tho I'm afraid the Sep 2 updates were due to a wrong click .

#Liberty
It's incredibly frustrating to be living in one of the world's most expressive computing environments and find it pointless to make any new words because only you will use them and you are doing your damnedest to get the time to birth its replacement . What brings this to mind is working , concurrently with writing this , on cleaning a 14700 record NYS Libertarian Party data base and merging it with our Manhattan LP list and eliminating all bad e-addrs .

Ok , I couldn't avoid making one new word . For any remaining K geeks : whereachIdxs : { ,/ ( ! # x ) ,/:' x } whereachIdxs..h : " for a matrix like &:' returns , returns all address pairs "

( I may have left NYC in body , but I continue to be the Manhattan Libertarian Party's manhattanlp.org webmaster in addition to my own Liberty page . ) Largely because of its computational notebook aspect , I don't think there is a system anywhere better able to poke around with this info than K.CoSy . While messaging the DB , I inevitably saw there are a couple of words like "csv2dic" which would be better named "csv2DT" ( for DictionaryTable or DatabaseTable ) . But it's not worth tapping a finger improving anymore .

In addition to the web mastering , I wrote an article on The Logic of Liberty for the upcoming issue of the MLP's Serf City and am also running an ad for in it . ( The advertising rates are a very good deal . )

#4thCoSy ( most teky )
On the 4th.CoSy front , I've gotten less done than I had hoped by now . See for one reason . tax computations , Liberty related work , an extended and enlightening quantitative discussion on the NYC Junto discussion list on the physics of mean global temperature , and a frozen spigot by the corral among others . )
But I expect to have bigger time blocks available the last half of winter .

The major piece of progress is really a change to a path even less traveled than before , in fact , a path only just being broken . Even within the minimalist FORTH world , I have moved from a commercial version , to a mature web community based one , Win32Forth , and now to a very small implementation Reva being created by an individual , Ron Aaron , in Bellevue WA . There appear to be a handful of similarly minded minimalists clustered around RetroForth each making their own variations on a theme . Ron is simultaneously producing Windows an Linux versions . Ron's Reva.exe has grown to 20KB creating a vocabulary approaching 300 words . When I convert and flesh out my "dynamic list" vocabulary from Win32Forth I expect to have a very powerful Array Programming Language in about 50 or 60KB . The small size is not a goal in itself , rather the terseness manifests the simplicity and generality of the structures and words making up the system . It is possible for an individual to get his head around the whole thing .

Unlike traditional FORTHs , Reva is built in an external ( free ) assembler , FASM . It's the first time I've used an assembler in years , but it was surprisingly easy to gain a sufficient understanding of Ron's well organized code to make some simple words of my own . I think the result of this simplicity of modifying the source code itself will be to lead me to ramify this language bush yet another limb .

It's apparently a RetroForth tradition to just have the conditionals ( 0if =if <>if <if >if ) which are , in fact , the atomic instructions at the assembly level .

In particular , while apparently convincing Ron to add logical functions ( > < = ) in addition to just the logical conditionals , I was figuring out how to make those same words in assembly . I have decided I really want those basic logic functions to follow Iverson logic ( TRUE ~ 1 ) rather than the Moore logic ( TRUE ~ -1 ) returned by Ron's words . In both cases ( FALSE ~ 0 ) . ( In actual fact Moore's logic is ( TRUE ~ { not 0 } ) so Iverson logic would seem a restriction . ) But , the thing is , you can do arithmetic with Iverson logic . And , when you start wanting to speed up really big logical problems , you can bit pack the logic values and get machine word size parallelism with algorithms which were worked out in the APL world decades ago .
But the arithmetic is the important thing . You must be able to add up how many TRUEs you've got .

#GlassTables

Something I have wanted to market since 1985  Glass Table Kits

#MidWinter19

Last but most assuredly not least , as I write this on New Year's eve , MidWinter is just 5 Saturdays away . This will be my 20th MidWinter Gathering , the first couple of which were held in Rochester NY before moving down to Manhattan in 1984 . To mark the first party back out in the natural world , we'll do something that's a little difficult on the 13 mile island , particularly on your own family property .
We'll light up this year's Christmas Tree one last time at MidNight in a bonfire celebrating as the sun reaches the zenith in Bangalore .

So , let me invite you out a midwinter weekend in the mountains . Our neighbors to the north are a small Bed & Breakfast and there are many other accommodations in the area . The major ski resortsstart about an hour away , Cripple Creek's casinos are about 40 minutes ( 25 miles ) down Highway 67 . Here at our miniRanch , depending on the weather , and your ability , you might take a horse into the national forest , or we could do some target shooting or plinking . In mid-winter , everything depends on the weather . The average temperature here on Feb 4 ranges from a day time high of 40f dropping 36f to a nightime average low of 4f . Only .3 inches of percipitation are expected in the month .

Be great if some of you all can join us !