How's the quarter going so far?  What classes are you taking this quarter, anyway?  I've officially had two classes with Babith already, and you are exactly right -- Grandpa Simpson.  Because it's Tuesday/Thursday, it's an hour and eighteen minute class, and it is truly astonishing how sidetracked this man gets. On Tuesday, whilst telling us about the course and other semi-relevant topics, he managed to tell us the entire plot to the Disney movie Aladdin. Seriously, Aladdin.

So yesterday in class I thought it'd be fun to write down a list of everything he talked about, in order. He started off by saying he was going to tell us about ALGOL, the algorithmic programming language developed in the mid 1950's. Here, then, I present you with...

...The Story of ALGOL

(note: things joined with a "-->" imply that somehow one thing directly lead to the other)

-Russian Missile Scare of 1950's
-Distance Early Warning (DEW) missile tracking
-The complete plot of the film War Games staring Matthew Broderick --> Matthew Broderick's relationship with Sarah Jessica Parker and the confusion around it --> Sex and the City and subsequent movie sequel
-The complete history of RadioShack & original parent, Tandy Corporation
-Buying a LCD TV over Christmas --> CRT monitors
-How light bulbs work
-How vacuum tubes work
-Direction of current flow --> Benjamin Franklin
-How electrical relays work --> how electromagnets work --> telephone switching networks
-How transistors work
-IBM 709 vacuum-tube based computer --> IBM 7090 transistor-based computer
-FORTRAN programming language --> people buying IBM 7090 just to use Fortran --> fear of IBM taking over the world
-The complete history of IBM from 1880 onward --> punchcards
-The US Census --> how the House of Representatives are determined
-Drinking ages --> history and effects of drinking age laws --> global comparison of drinking ages
-IBM office dress code and on-the-job drinking policy
-Mac exclusivity of OS --> Hackintosh
-Invention of ALGOL
-Backus-Naur Form grammars
-The complete life story of Mike Woodger (guy he worked with)
-Five Degrees of Kevin Bacon --> Alan Turing
-The complete life story of Pocahontas --> the complete plot of the Disney film of the same name --> historical inaccuracies in childrens' films
-The complete life story of Jestine Nussbaum's grandfather --> original settlers of US
-Pyramids --> complete history of airplanes --> space travel
-ALGOL 60 committee --> ALGOL vs C --> block statements
-ALGOL 68 --> heterogeneous data structures --> Pascal
-Fire-related death in Morrill Tower (OSU dorm) when first built --> campus fatalities in general
-The complete history of railroad switching yards
-The topography of Norfolk, Virginia
-"Railroad diagrams" for programming syntax
-Hospital protocols
-Electrocardiography --> heart problem diagnosis
-Indigestion --> broken legs --> heart attacks --> angiograms
-Columbus hospitals --> comparison of national average
-The complete history of keyboard layouts --> transition from {...} to (*...*) to /*...*/ in programming languages to represent comments
-"reserve words" vs "keywords" in programming languages
-Republican Party --> Democratic Party --> comaprison
-The Daily Show --> news cycles of reporting on reporting
-BASIC compilers
-The history of Computer Science education in US
-"Masking Functions" --> masks in general --> the movie Mask --> the movie The Mask --> zebras


Yes, he really did finish the lecture on the topic of zebras.