I spent the day yesterday in the Kitsap County Superior CourtHouse in Port Orchard waiting for jury duty. Much of the time was spent sitting on the floor because that was the easiest way to get to a power outlet for the laptop. We finally made it into the courtroom at 3:15pm, and when I walked out at 5pm, I was a juror on a case. I've been challenged off juries before, but never served on one. If it weren't inconvenient in the extreme right now, I'd be fine with it. But as I drove home, I reflected that the only way for us to keep what we have in this country is for us to participate in it. I won't be blogging the trial until after its over, but if you see a reduction in posting, there's your explanation.

Patrick Logan heard Maurice Herlihy give a talk, and elevated him into the pantheon, which he richly deserves. I know him mostly from his work on wait-free data structures, which predated his arrival at Brown. If memory serves me, we overlapped just a little bit there, but I don't remember having any significant interactions with him.

Patrick then went on to extend our VM discussion by pointing out that

... this level of concurrency control should at least show up at the virtual machine level. Why emulate a 1970's instruction set?

Now there's a thought. Definitely worth a master's degree project. Might be worth more if things turn out hairy. And be worth a lot more if it actually turned up in Parrot or Mono. Truly told, there are a ton of old (and good) research results sitting on shelves in university libraries. Why aren't we picking this low hanging fruit in the open source world?