departure to unknown lands
Of the gladest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the Slavery of Home, man feels once more happy. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood….afresh dawns the morn of life…
Richard Francis Burton, Journal Entry (2 December 1856)
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think that this to be the normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Douglas Adams in The Scientific Indian Science Fiction Anthology
Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.
Niels Bohr
- Reverse-engineering the 8085’s decimal adjust circuitry (righto.com)
In this post I reverse-engineer and describe the simple decimal adjust circuit in the 8085 microprocessor. Binary-coded decimal arithmetic was an important performance feature on early microprocessors. The idea behind BCD is to store two 4-bit decimal numbers in a byte. For instance, the number 42 is represented in BCD as 0100 0010 (0x42) instead of binary 00101010 (0x2a). This continues my reverse engineering series on the 8085’s ALU, flag logic, undocumented flags, register file, and instruction set.
How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”
Matthew 12:12 NIV
To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.
Mark Twain
