Jack Rusher
NYC-based technology entrepreneur, musician and combat sportsman.
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Tweets
- Scientific Community to Elsevier: Drop Dead http://t.co/8FEMAerGJan 28, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Jan 25, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @johnhawks Do they call that part of the building Broca's Region?
- @johnhawks It has always made me think of space age habitrails for humans.
- Programming language LOLs: https://t.co/cQC2VvLZJan 23, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @kevinlahey will you re-glue?
- @leppert foxes!
- @JudStephenson @leppert @guille__lopez @jacecooke @evanlh Everyone up for CS4NM next Tuesday evening?
- Solo Piano by @chillygonzales remains an enduring favorite, full of timeless, soulful beauty, like Satie's Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies.Jan 18, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Preparing for upcoming Bjork concert at the Roseland Ballroom by listening to my favorite concert recording from there: http://t.co/vImhciQEJan 16, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Years worth of cool projects waiting here RT @dancow Amazon public datasets: http://t.co/ERyOsufV #data
- @jacecooke @leppert It looks like it's you two for comp-sci classes. Is there free space on a whiteboard at Svpply?
- Scratched up my scalp doing headsprings at the gym last night. #shaolinproblemsJan 16, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Anyone interested in attending a Computer Science for Non-Majors class at Skillshare?Jan 13, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Horace's Odes ("Rubente dextera") → Milton's Paradise Lost ("His red right hand") → Nick Cave http://t.co/HHRkRTWkJan 09, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- A nice writeup on one of my favorite tools, tmux: http://t.co/vasOrnIwJan 08, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @piercegleeson Once they're no good for re-use, we cut them up and use the pieces for rags.
- "Doing easily what others find difficult is talent; doing what is impossible for talent is genius." — Henri Frederic AmielJan 04, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
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Posts
Pale old Finucane pulled his horses, who pulled his plow, all so slowly going over a stoney field under grey skies.
Every time he would pass the window of Widow Jones — the newly widowed Widow Jones, it must be noted — he’d pause a moment to listen to her sobbing within, think for a moment and start again.
It was on the morning of the third day of her mourning that he abandoned his work, bit the inside of his cheek hard and worked himself up into a weeping fit before knocking on her door.
Peeping around the door, she saw the state of him and asked:
— Ah, Finucane, what’s the matter?
— I’ve lost my wife who was so dear to me, and seeing you here lamenting your lost husband, I came to thinking: shouldn’t we live together as husband and wife, each doing for the other now that we’re both alone?
She thought it over, posing a few objections that he handily dismissed, until they had agreed that it was to be. Their tears dry and with their smiles newly shining, he gave her a chaste peck on the cheek and returned to field to find his horses and plow gone and stolen!
He set to wailing and shouting and bemoaning his loss, which brought the widow out of her cottage.
— You’re still grieving?
— I am, and this time I mean it!
The Diary of Sebastian Van Der Sloot
We were the first civilized men to reach the island. The natives greeted us at the beach, carrying garlands of flowers and fresh fruit. The men, who had been at sea for two months, thought it a kind of paradise. I suppose they were right in a way.
These simple people were living in naive cooperation. They helped us build a group of huts at the edge of their village, and we explored and charted the region while our linguists studied their barbaric tongue. Once it was possible, we explained, via translation, that our faith demands competition, winners, losers. They seemed, at first, to understand, showing us the games they play at festivals — wrestling, putting stones, something like the caber toss.
At the next festival, we gave the winner of each competition a reward of tobacco, the natives’ most esteemed trade good. The losers expected us to share with them as well, but we made it clear that smokes are for winners. The next festival featured more fearsome competition, including eye gouges during the wrestling. We increased the prize.
Within a year they were charging each other tobacco for food, shelter and assistance. We had brought the faith and discipline of the market to these savages, demonstrating once more that it is eternal, immutable — God’s law.
At the beginning of the summer of our second year on the island, the chief and his sons came to our huts dressed as if for hunting, bare-loined with spears in hand. He told us they had learnt a great deal from us, and that they were thankful for our visit, and then asked:
“Your ship, is it whole?”
“Of course.”
“Can it carry you back to your homeland?”
“Yes, with luck and God’s will.”
“Will you leave now and never return?”
Their faces and spears told us that though he phrased it as a question, they weren’t asking. Ungrateful savages.
PHOTO: Men of Bathurst Island, C L A Abbott, 1939.
Jared Marechal took his eye from the telescope and wrote in his log book, marking “no change.” He had been watching the Earth daily since before the second Indo-Paki War set off American automatic defense measures that had triggered Armageddon, before a series of electromagnetic pulses had destroyed most technology on the surface, and left it — still, thirty years later — a sparsely populated feudal wasteland.
“Sir, the citizens await you at the Biodome assembly field.”
“Yes, Anderson. Let’s not keep them waiting.”
Jared walked to the center of the once grassy area reserved for civic assembly, his brown robe trailing him slightly, his head hung down as if by the weight of his grey beard. Climbing onto the podium, he looked out over four generations of Colony families and winced at the hope he saw on the faces of those old enough to know what was happening.
As the crowd grew quiet he began: ”Our botanists have had no success combatting the mutant fungi.” Murmurs rolled through the crowd like leaves do in the wind depicted by Earth films.
“Most of our root stock has been destroyed. Air crops, food crops — both have fallen below sustainable levels.” The murmurs intensified.
Jared held up his hands until they quieted themselves.
“Do not lose hope. We have been in radio contact with Earth, and they have made considerable progress on the rescue ship. We just need to hold out until they get here.”
1.
Friday night, after working a double shift at the diner, Audrey walked in the trailer door, tossed her keys on the table and sank into the sofa, not even stopping to turn on the lights.
After a few minutes, she reached over and lifted from the coffee table a cheap souvenir snow globe that a lover had given her many years before. Moonlight shined in through the open window, illuminating the tiny metropolis within. She shook it gently and watched the falling snow and twinkling lights inside, shimmering almost as if they were real.
2.
Other than a freak blizzard at Halloween and a few brisk days, the city’s autumn had lasted all the way into January, but that night a layer of fine snow drifted down, coating four hundred years of grime with a temporary whitewash.
Snow muted the city’s sounds and made it seem like anything was possible, like magic was real just for that one night.
In Chinatown, an ancient ex-ballerina pushed a shopping trolley full of bottles and cans down the street, its wheels drawing ledger lines in the show, her dancing feet dotting those lines with the notes of a symphony long forgotten.
On the city’s most famous bridge a suicide jumper reconsidered his decision after an owl flew down and regarded him with curiosity from the railing. In another borough, an estranged son called his mother to tell her that he loved her.
3.
Audrey set down the snow globe and drifted off to sleep, feeling at peace without knowing why or how.
The most disturbing paragraph of non-fiction I’ve read this month:
But Freckles is a long way from normal. She is an extraordinary creation, an animal that could not have existed at any point in history before the 21st century. She is all goat, but she has something extra in every one of her cells: Freckles is also part spider.
The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation.
Elias CanettiWhen asked if he works out ideas by writing songs:
“I think you work out something. I wouldn’t call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don’t really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans. They tend to be on the right side of things: ecology or vegetarianism or antiwar. All these are wonderful ideas but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It’s just my experience. All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience.”
Charlotte was tucked into her bed, blankets up to her elbows, her favorite stuffed animal in her hands, her father seated by the bed.
“Have you cleaned your teeth?”
“Yes, daddy.”
“Do you have Mr Fuzzy?”
“Daddy! He’s right here! Just start the story.”
“Okay. Long ago and far away…”
There was a merchant sailor named Aban who was descended of both men and water djinn. He went from port to port trading goods — the finest silks, exotic spices, pearls and gemstones, dried fruit and nuts, precious metals, Turkish delight — in short, he would carry any and every thing of value. He saw the world one city at a time and made quite a fortune for himself in the process.
One day in the port of Al Baṣrah, while examining the bill of lading for his cargo, he saw a pair almond eyes looking toward him from the crowd, caught the scent of jasmine in the air, and fell in love all at once, as sometimes happens in storybooks and fairy tales.
The girl whose eyes and perfume had captured him so completely was called Dara. She was the only daughter of the sweetmaker who baked the best, the most perfect, the absolutely nuttiest pistachio and walnut baklava in all of Al Baṣrah. Because she was his only daughter, he had spoiled her with every beautiful robe she had ever wanted, and Aban was sure based on her attire that she was a princess far beyond his reach.
Dara, for her part, had immediately fallen for the dashing sailor, with his tanned skin, purple turban and well groomed goatee, but she guessed that he was too rich to want anything to do with a humble sweetmaker’s daughter.
And so, they went their separate ways, she to her father’s shop, he to the sea.
One year later they saw each other again, for just as brief a moment, at the harbor. It was no accident, either, because Dara had asked after his name and made sure to be walking by the next time he was in port. If anything, they liked each other even more than the first time, but each had the same reservations as before.
Dara went home, later receiving an anonymous gift of Song Orchids, a delicate pink and violet flower that smells of jasmine and sings softly every night at dusk. She placed it in the open window of her room and sighed, wishing that they had come from Aban, which — of course — they had.
It went on like this for some years, Dara rejecting every suitor her father could find and Aban dreaming only of Dara.
One evening, Dara confessed her feelings to the songbirds who came every night to sing with her flowers. The birds flitted about the flowers, listening carefully with their tiny bird heads cocked to one side, the way they do, then flew off into the golden gloaming. The next morning they flew down to the harbor and told all the gulls and pelicans what Dara had told them, after which a pelican who was collecting a big bill full of the little fishes who live near the rocks at the sea’s edge told the fishes in his mouth what the songbirds had told him and offered to let them go if they’d promise to give the news to bigger fishes, which they did.
Word reached a passing school of tuna, who carried it on to a pod of whales, some of whom had seen Aban recently. The whales waited outside the harbor in Dilmun where he was moored, then surfaced beneath his ship from each side and carried it at top whale speed to Al Baṣrah. Aban shouted down to them in the language of the sea that he had learnt from his djinn great-grandfather, asking them what they were doing and why, but the whales kept quiet.
Meanwhile, in Al Baṣrah, one of the youngest songbirds fell out of a tree in front of Dara while she was out for a walk, then started hopping around as if it had broken a wing. She gently lifted the bird from the cobbled street and carried it in a fold of her robe down to the harbor to see Doctor Ahmed, who was known for being able to treat any man or beast of the mortal world and maybe some magical creatures and immortals too.
She arrived at the port at the exact moment that Aban’s ship was delivered by the whales, who spun the vessel in circles so quickly that Aban staggered off the deck dizzy and unable to see because his turban had come partially unwrapped and covered his eyes. Dara, at that very moment, was blindfolded by a flock of sparrows and lifted in the air by a pair of enormous pelicans. Before she could say a single word of protest, the birds carried her to Aban and pushed her into his arms, the two of them embracing blindly.
Dara, scandalized at being held so close by a stranger, lost her senses for a moment and shouted, “Unhand me, sir! I am in love with a sailor named Aban, and none other shall have me.”
Aban, though simultaneously flattered and confused by her statement, released her and replied, “Dear lady, you have nothing to fear from me, for I am in love with a princess called Dara.”
Now desperately confused, Dara took off the blindfold that the birds had fastened around her head just as Aban pulled the turban from over his eyes.
“And that, Charlotte, is how I met your mother.”
IMAGE: Istanbul Sweet Shop, Jack Rusher, 2008.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
Anton Chekhov- The Januariad 2012
The Januariad is a fiction project in which several somewhat foolhardy writers produce new stories every weekday in January. The pieces must be complete, readable and begun and finished during the 24-hour period of that day.
The project will, at the close of today, have just passed its halfway mark.
Tumblr is awash in fantastic writers. I’d like to introduce those of you out there to a few more.
My fellow Januariad participants:
http://distorte.tumblr.com/
http://goldenmesh.tumblr.com/
http://jackrusher.tumblr.com/
http://mollyculetheory.tumblr.com/
http://thejanuaryist.tumblr.com/Honorable mention, and unofficial participant: http://thedreamsofpirates.tumblr.com/
All are worth your time. Thank you all for reading.
-Justin
It was years ago, well before you were born, the great winter when the bay froze over.
A woodsman was walking along the edge of the ice, looking down through the translucent blue-grey of it, when he saw wisps of red moving beneath the water, like reeds or seaweed, but too light and too fine. He stopped to watch the tendrils and saw in their midst the face of a young woman. He thought at first that she was long drowned, but she blinked up at him and he realized that she must be trapped.
His axe fell on the ice again and again until he’d made a portal through which she could climb, but she refused to leave the frigid waters, happy just to lift her head and take the sun.
Once he understood that she could not leave the water, and she that he did not know how to swim, they met there at the bay’s edge each day. He would carve a hole in the ice and she would come spend a few hours with him. At the end of the first week he gave her a pendant with a small fish carved of wood, and she brought him a shell from the seafloor.
It went on like that, the two of them living together and apart at once, their love less uncertain than that of others because they already knew when the winter would end.
IMAGE: Detail from Goldfish (to my critics), Gustav Klimt, 1902. Swiss Institute for Art Research, Zurich, Switzerland.
This has been making the rounds, but I’m dropping it here because some of them really are fantastic.
Good morning, sunshine! No, relax, everything’s okay. Let me explain…
We used to joke about the apocalypse. You know, dress up like zombies on Halloween, that sort of thing. Well, let me tell you: none of it seemed funny anymore once there were actual zombies eating actual brains in New York (okay, a little funny when it was a banker’s brains).
You know how it went from there. Mass panic, death in the streets, governments unleashing nuclear weapons to “cleanse” other countries of zombies — the radiation only added hideously disfigured mutants to the situation — and so on like that.
A population crash, a technological crash, descent into barbarism — the works. Hardly anyone left alive. If we hadn’t found this old converted missile silo stocked with shelf-stable MREs and ammunition, we’d all be dead too.
You comfortable enough? Good, good.
I’m not going to say this is an easy life, but it does have a few advantages over what we left behind. There’s no shortage of time to spend with the family, for instance, and no television to soak up lazy evenings. What’s really surprising is what we don’t miss. Not the Internet, even though I’d have thought we would, nor cell phones, work done in comfortable chairs, nice clothes, and all that.
What I really miss — and I mean more than anything, more than ripe berries from the farmers market — is being able to meet a nice girl like you and not have to kill her for fear of infection.
BANG!
PHOTO: Berries, Dan McKay. Flickr.
Bob Argent was stretched out on the hospital bed that was likely his final address, a skeletal old man who had lost his chin to bone cancer. Nurse Brenda, the new girl, came striding down the oncology ward corridor to check on him.
Stopping outside his room, she took a deep breath and re-checked the name on the clipboard before opening the door and calling out:
“Good morning, Mr Argent!”
Bob smiled as much of a smile as a half-faced man can while Brenda took his vital signs, changed his bedpan, and shined upon him the warm beam of an enthusiastic bedside manner.
“Let’s get these curtains open!”
Sunlight illuminated every corner of the room, including the small pinboard on the bedside table. It was covered with old newspaper clippings and photographs, including several of a handsome young man holding an improbable weight over his head.
Humming and bustling around the room, she looked at the pinboard and asked, “O! Who’s that?” Bob looked away from her and was happy for the first time that he couldn’t speak, because it meant he didn’t have to say “that used to be me.”
PHOTO: Peter George, 5 time American national weightlifting champion, Olympic gold medalist, exceptional human being. (So far as I am aware, still alive and in excellent health at the age of 83.)
The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.
Vladimir NabakovYou can now be my online date to PROM.
Enjoy PROM NIGHT.
xx
Celia
Another great video from Celia.
Cold wind. Screech, pop, grind, slide, slam.
Words exchanged, clarifications given.
Swirling maelstrom and widening gyre, lights flicker-flashing, smeared colors, hot air. The speed, raw whipsaw speed, as necks are lashed back and forth by stop and start. Static, hum, a constant mumble in an undecipherable tongue.
Sweat, peeling layers of winter clothing. Staring. Blankness. Fear. Blankness. Roaring beasts shouting, bleating, racing past each the other.
Screech. Words exchanged, money given. Pop, grind, slide, slam. Cold wind.
Jingle, zip, swing, slam. Tromp-tromp. Jangle, zip, swing, slam. Home.
PHOTO: Drizzle on Fortieth Street, New York. Edward Steichen. 1925.
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Info
- Chief Scientist at Moto Research, Inc.Computer Software | Greater New York City Area, USSummaryI'm a polymath who has worked in computer science research at some of the most famous labs in the world, contributed to open source projects since 1985, and founded or served as the technical center of many successful startups.
Previous successful projects include low-level storage and cluster (cloud, avant la lettre) systems, an award winning real-time analytics platform, two from-scratch databases (one of which was a graph-structured semantic web store), a self-healing distributed cluster filesystem, and a best of breed local- and wide-area failover high-availability system.
My primary research interests for the last two years have revolving around applying my experience with big data to visualization and information aesthetics, with a sideline in UX.Specialties: Strong problem solving skills, deep understanding of applied mathematics and computer science, UNIX kernel internals, storage systems and database internals, networking, real-time analytics, complex event processing, semantic web technologies. Many programming languages. My favorites have historically been C (or a minimal subset of C++) and LISP, but I've lately found myself getting more and more work done with Python, Ruby and Javascript.Experience- 2010 - PresentChief Scientist / Moto Research, Inc.Created numerous document analysis and translation tools for formats like PDF, SVG and rasters (using an OCR workflow).
Designed and built Machine Learning systems to extract meaning from large document collections and a cluster computing environment to run those systems in parallel. - Aug 2004 - Jun 2008Lead Platform Architect / AleriDesigned and prototyped the primary product of the company, a streaming analytics system particularly well suited to handling high volumes of data with optional persistence. As part of that project I designed and built a custom log-structured database that presently outperforms all rival offerings.
Wrote and delivered a paper on the logstore at VLDB 2007; assisted in patent application process, received patents on technology.
Aleri has since been sold to Sybase. - Aug 2003 - Feb 2004Platform Architect / Radar NetworksBuilt a high performance triple store for the Radar Networks Semantic Web platform. Delivered a paper on same at the 2003 W3 SWAD-Europe Workshop on Semantic Web Storage and Retrieval.
Radar was purchased by Evri. - Jun 2002 - Jun 2003Researcher / AT&T Research (formerly Bell Labs)Member of the GigaScope research team, which created a streaming database designed to handle very large volumes of network data. GigaScope won Project of the Year honors at the Labs, and is currently used to monitor all iPhone data traffic on AT&T's wireless network.
- Oct 2001 - Feb 2002Software Architecture Consultant / AlternisAlternis, a Paris-based telco software firm, hired me to re-design a clustered Location-Based Services infrastructure for mobile telephones, which included re-working internal development practices at the company (revision control, test-driven development, and so on).
- Jan 1998 - Aug 2001Software Architect / IntegratusOne third of a team that designed and prototyped a high-performance cluster filesystem implemented as a network of commodity machines, each running a custom FreeBSD kernel with an in-house log-structured store. Consistent hashing (and a few other tricks) were used to allow a collection of nodes to operate as a self-healing, self-balancing storage fabric.
One half of a team that produced both the UHA High Availability Product — chosen by Network Appliance, Quest Communications, MCI Worldcom, and others as their standard HA solution, UHA had a number of firsts such as integration of local-area HA and wide-area disaster recovery in one product — and the Soltice Disk Suite to Veritas Volume manager converter, which converted from one volume management scheme to another with no data copying.
Integratus was purchased by Veritas. - Jan 1994 - Aug 1998CEO/CTO / RCI NetworksCEO/CTO of an ISP/ISV that used a cluster of commodity machines running an in-house BSD kernel that allowed very low operating costs. Built the company into a profitable enterprise from scratch.
Sold the company to another regional telco. - Jan 1995 - Jan 1998CEO / MicromendersTook over a failed computer repair firm and built it into the largest supplier of commodity hardware and tech services in the region.
Sold the company. - Jan 1990 - Jan 1992Computer Scientist / Florida Museum of Natural HistoryDeveloped a from-scratch distributed database system in which to store catalog information for a very large collection of zoological samples.
- Aug 1987 - Jan 1990UNIX Consultant / University of FloridaI worked as part of a team maintaining the computing infrastructure for the University of Florida's Computer Science Department. This started off as a Gould PowerNode 9000 with a collection of ADM 3A terminals, eventually growing to include Sun (BSD/SunOS) and HP (HPUX) workstations running X. This position involved a mix of system administration, software engineering, improving various UNIX kernels, and so on.
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Repositories
- Tornado is an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and tools that power FriendFeed.543 forks / 3289 watchers / Pushed Jan 23, 12
- Three20 is an Objective-C library for iPhone developers862 forks / 5697 watchers / Pushed Jan 23, 12
- The PDF::Reader library implements a PDF parser conforming as much as possible to the PDF specification from Adobe.35 forks / 267 watchers / Pushed Jan 15, 12
- NOTE: This repo (The Clojure programming language) has moved:16 forks / 991 watchers / Pushed May 18, 11
- Processing applet which creates the images seen in the Streamgraph paper9 forks / 147 watchers / Pushed Mar 30, 10
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Videos
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Posts
- Jan 15, 12
- Jan 10, 12
- Jan 06, 12
