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To Galita

Galita's life cycle is over, a cute little dog that my daughter Lissi picked up from the street and who gave us a lot of love and happiness.Galita was very naughty. Being at home made Dolly, another bigger dog, dump the garbage can so that she would then be the one digging for food. And that we gave her a lot of food and other things that she liked. But it seems that her nomadic life led her to try to store as much food as she could find.Galita got along with everyone. She was very sociable. I d...

Real and Fiction Story Telling

You can write, we know. And so do we... You can write, we know. Do you think the influencers knew that by recording videos they were going to have millions of followers? Well, no, they did not know, but each and every one of the audiovisual influencers have been and are sincere in doing what they do, for different variants that exist. Well, writing is easier than making videos, even if it doesn't seem like it, just because it's visually anonymous, which I believe is very importa...

A doctor and a monkey overboard!

It was the year 1977-78 and by then Dr. Mitchell Valdés had already made much progress in psychophysiological experimentation using MEDICID-1 and MEDICID-2 as reported in other articles, even using cats as experimental subjects.Then he is visited by Dr. Erwin, who had managed to create a vervet monkey business on the island of Saint Kitts. It is important to clarify that the vervet monkeys, brought to Saint Kitts by the conquerors from Africa, are compatible with man in many respec...

How we finish the ANFACT.

Well, I didn't know whether to put this article in "Stories" or if here, in "ProgramSolving", but in the end, due to the randomness of the Programming, I decided to put it here.It was between 1973-1974 and a Programmer from the Center's Department of Mathematics, Raisa Cepero Bonilla, was in charge of carrying out a project to carry out a "Factorial Analysis by Correspondence", which is a fairly sophisticated statistical analysis and not very broad utilization even today.It was pro...

What Homer Didn't Tell Us...

Troy, a great epic of ancient times. Do you remember? Paris, the Trojan prince, abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, the Greek king. Menelaus, his pride wounded, but with the true intention of seizing Troy and thus controlling its trade and strategic location, launched a great invasion that resulted in a total siege of Troy for ten years. So, to put it in modern terms, which are also favored by high-ranking officials of the most powerful country on Earth, what do you think was happening in the "re...

Reporting 0002

Back in *Reporting 0001* (look it up), I proposed the method of spreading good news rather than the bad news that constantly surrounds us. We need only set our minds to it. Let us look at medical practice as an example. It is well known that there are doctors —and even entire countries— that do not provide sufficient information to patients regarding their ailments and potential solutions, effectively positioning themselves as high priests of those individuals' health. Yet, there are also doct...

Cats on MEDICID-1

One of the most fantastic things about having a computer in our department in the 70's is that we could do with it what we wanted, literally, without having to go through all the bureaucracy created around the so-called "Calculation Centers", where weeks and even months passed between having an idea and getting a real program to implement it. In other words, we lived through the personal computer revolution years before it even existed.In those years a young researcher, the current...

Technology plus Ideas.

Technology plus Ideas. In this section we intend to comment on technology applied or applicable in the future, as well as presenting ideas on various technological topics. You can add content by yourself if you register and request it to us at info@havanatrends.com Any technological comment is welcome. Any technological idea is welcome. This section contains technological topics from the past as well as ideas for the future. We look forward to your collaboration. Octavio Bae...

Pedro Valdés from Neuro found me... and I was looking for the same thing!

I will tell how I started working in the Department of Neurophysiology of the National Center for Scientific Research. It was the year 1971 and I was studying Pure Mathematics at the University and it turns out that a doctor, Dr. Pedro Valdés Sosa, better known as "Peter", also began to study Mathematics as a second career. Peter and I were together for almost two years, we became good friends, we even studied together. Peter was already a worker with many obligations, he skippe...

Human Facebook.

Yesterday walking and walking I went to repair a fan where a technician who has been repairing electrical appliances for more than 20 years, has a lot of experience, is fast and accurate.Upon arrival there was a "return at 2:30" sign and waiting for it a Mrs. arrived with a rice cooker. Well, we started talking and talking, and I said to myself, why wait until everyone has internet to use Facebook? Facebook we have it within reach...Well, without meeting each other, exchanging pho...

How I became Section Chief of the Computing Center.

It was the early 70's and as I have commented in other articles, our Neuroscience Department had a 12-bit 32 Kilo Words computer, a punched tape reader and an extended typewriter to punch tapes.In those days, computers were scarce, very scarce, and that meant that their use as such was in the hands of large ministries or large companies, but it was very rare for a small department to have one. The self-sacrificing work of the Department staff that prior to my entry into it and usin...

The novel of Time.

I am Time. And I am more than the Time you know. I have always been and am in Everything, even before Him. I am not linear, as you think; I permeate everything from top to bottom and from front to back. I see everything to the same Me, because I am Time. I am always passing and always compacting. They measure me but they do not see me. Nor do they hear me. They cannot move me and yet I define the destiny of everything. In due time I become aware and I see. I see Everything, even Him. But I am no...

With Variables everything, without Variables nothing.

I have said on many occasions and in various audiences that what we call variables in Programming is what frontally separates Mathematics and its language from Programming and the problems it solves.It is that it is well known that a mathematical variable is like a being without a name, which can be called X, Y, or Z interchangeably and the meaning of the mathematical formulas where it appears does not change. Also the mathematical variable is like a being without its own personali...

FOCAL. Salcedo the Great.

It was the early 70s of the last century, and in our PDP-8 compatible minicomputer from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) there was almost no way to program except by hand-coding machine language. Later, the Central Institute for Digital Research (ICID) developed the assembler and later the LEAL language (LEnguaje ALgoritmico) that I have referred to in other articles and in which it was quite difficult and tedious to program as it was postfix notation, especially when evaluating...

FORTRAN. The best for calculus.

It was the 70's and I continued working as a programmer for the Neuroscience Department using the laboratory computer, which in other articles I have explained that it only had 32 Kilo Words of 12 bits each, a typewriter that could punch 8-bit paper tapes. channels (bits), and an 8-channel paper tape reader.I have also commented that I programmed coding "by hand", and as soon as it was available in the machine language assembler, and also in the LEAL language, which was "postfix".T...

Microsoft Access as a database is limited by design and what to do.

As the title indicates, the microsoft office database product, Microsoft Access, is limited by the company itself so that it does not compete with other products such as SQL Server and C# program development, for example.I explain:The first limitation is the commercial one. Access is not sold alone, but as part of Microsoft Office and therefore an application made in Access cannot be distributed without first verifying that the customer has a valid license of the same Office as suc...

The Goto. The great forgotten. Not to think structured.

I still remember when I was programming with GoTo. Programming without using it was not conceivable. Until the revolution started by Dijkstra with his note "Goto considered harmful" came to "structure" our minds for program development.The progress made with "Structured Programming" is incalculable, which allowed not only to increase the speed of having correct programs, but also to increase the number of people capable of programming.At that time, "Top to Bottom Programming" and "...

Vulnerabilities in Windows? They are dictated to the programmers.

Do you really think that programmers do our job "so badly" and make "so many mistakes" that we cause the thousands of vulnerabilities that the Windows operating system has had, has, and will have?As a fact, I affirm that all "legal" antiviruses ask Microsoft for various "entry and interception points" where to put their "legally added" programming to the operating system. For example, how do you think an antivirus "checks" every file before being "opened" by Windows Explorer? Becau...

Single link Cluster Analysis and Peter Valdes.

At the beginning of the 70s we had a computer with 32 Kilowords and 12 bits in length each word and to program it encoded the machine language by hand and could also use a posfix notation language called LEAL although it was difficult for us anyway to translate algorithms especially if what prevailed was the calculation, so frequent in the Neuroscience applications that we developed supported by statistics, including multivariate ones.In those years and also in the 60's, it was com...

Tapes, Punched Cards, and Machine Time.

It was the 70's and then we only had a 12-bit 32 Kilo Words computer, as I have commented, but the problems that we had to solve, especially statistical ones, needed many more resources.So I took on the task of "circumventing the bureaucracy" of the Computing Centers with their way of working: "submit the program and data on paper" and after days or weeks: "come and collect your results" or "the program did not compile" or "the program failed", which made us fix the problems on pap...

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