Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs - Episode 99: Moby Dick & Our Favorite Movies

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

In this episode, Bryce and Conor finish their interview with Sean Baxter and talk about Moby Dick and our favorite movies.Link to Episode 99 on WebsiteTwitterADSP: The PodcastConor HoekstraBryce Adelstein LelbachAbout the Guest:Sean Baxter is an independent programmer and the author of Circle, the next-gen C++ compiler. He formerly worked at DE Shaw Research, NVIDIA and JPL.Show NotesDate Recorded: 2022-09-25Date Released: 2022-10-07Sean Baxter on TwitterSean Baxter cpp.chat EpisodeSean Baxter CppCast EpisodeCircle CompilerMoby Dick by Herman Melville (1851)In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Phillbrick (2000)Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)Sean’s Favorite MoviesAMC Stubs A-ListHarakiriSpider-Man: Into the Spider-VerseThe Lego MovieLittle WomenThe Green KnightThe NorthmanConor’s Favorite MoviesJurassic ParkLa La LandZootopiaFight ClubGood Will HuntingBryce’s Favorite MoviesStar WarsDoctor ZhivagoDragonheartThe Princess BrideSeven SamuraiLegally BlondeGattacaMementoThe Pentagon WarsTo Have and Have NotLost in TranslationBreakfast at Tiffany’sIntro Song InfoMiss You by Sarah Jansen https://soundcloud.com/sarahjansenmusicCreative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/l-miss-youMusic promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/iYYxnasvfx8

Business, business, business. Numbers. Is this working? Yes. Welcome to ADSP The Podcast, Episode 99, recorded on September 25th, 2022. My name is Connor, and today with my co-host Bryce, we finish part three of our three-part interview with Sean Baxter and changed topics to Moby Dick and our favorite movies. All right, so I think we got to talk about the last thing that we promised the users we would talk about. Connor, have you read Moby Dick? I actually haven't. I've read In the Heart of the Sea, which is the book that Moby Dick was based on. Sean, is that correct? Oh, no, I think you're talking about The Sinking of the Essex. There is a Nathaniel Philbrick book, I think, called The Heart of the Sea.

Right. That's a recent book, but it's talking about an actual ship that was hit by a whale and sunk in the uh 1830s and that kind of was like part of the legend um oh so it was a recent book that actually tells the story that the story that moby dick was sort of based on, correct? Well. Here we go. I don't know how much time we have. We have.

Look, Sean, we did an episode where I talked about my criterion for restaurant bathrooms and how much I love. No, no, that did not air. You what? Connor, you got to put that. You have to air that. All right. So, okay. All right.

Moby Dick. Okay. So to get this out of the way, Moby Dick is a really funny book. It's fun to read. The metaphors are thick and they're outrageous. Ishmael is your guide and he is, he's like a very modern mind. He's the kind of guy who now would go to wikipedia all the time and tell you of all those like crazy discoveries going down the rabbit hole

so it's like it's a really gregarious book but for me it has continuing resonance because it is our national myth and do you know about like national myths? You know, like there was the... Like the Loch Ness Monster? No, like the Bronze Age collapse. So between 1200 BC and 800 BC, Bronze Age civilization around the Greek islands collapsed. The population fell. They lost technology.

There's like no writing. There's no history from that period. And so in 800 BC, when Homer and Herodototus are walking around they have this sophisticated greek language they have the alphabet for the first time they record their thoughts and they look around and we have all these like legends but we don't like know where we came from so they you know he writes like the iliad which is the story of the greek war against Trojans, which is where Constantinople is now, and how the Greek modern people came to be. After this Bronze Age collapse, that became the national myth.

Everyone would plug in to that, and they'd write drama, and they'd write songs, and they'd do sculptures and paintings and whatnot from these national myths and in virgil who was the roman uh poet during the time of like augustus caesar in the first century bc he did the aeneid which is how uh descendants from troy fleeing the sack of troy found their way through egypt and came up to uh rome and settled rome and this was kind of glory for the country. It showed like we're like not just the powerhouse of the world, but we have this amazing national inheritance from the Greeks. And after the thousand-year dark age in England,

you have the Arthurian legends in the Middle Ages that were kind of discovered and formed into coherent prose by Mallory and like a bunch of itinerant traveling poets. They created the Arthurian legends. And this is basically Christianized versions of the Greek stories. And in 1667, you have the publication of Paradise Lost, John Milton. He was a religious extremist during the wars of religion, like the Thirty Years' War destroyed Europe, and then the English Civil War in 1648 that killed the king, and then Cromwell was beheaded, and bloodshed everywhere. and kind of the fundamentalist Puritans. And Milton tries to create a national myth for Protestantism. He creates Paradise Lost, which is telling the story in the Bible, but in the language and poetry of Homer. And the idea is to give your own culture or religious movement more intellectual credibility

by linking it with this tradition of the national myth. And I think what's incredible about Moby Dick is that it was published in 1851 by a 31-year-old Melville, I think he was, super young, to create this amazing work. But he nails the idea of the national myth because he sees America as the sole superpower of the world in 1850. And he sees it because the American whaler is all over the entire globe. And we're the only whaling power that butchers the sperm whale, which is the tooth whale, like the man-eater, and breaks it down entirely in the boat to create a single, self-sufficient oil industry at sea.

And he sees this as the Navy for the United States. And for him, the idea of jousting the sperm whale, not just like staying off the coast of greenland and hunting right whales which are docile idiots but going after the the the sperm whale in the pacific and chasing it and jousting it lance to jaw is like the most ambitious arrogant thing you can do because it's the biggest animal that's ever been on the planet, and we are fighting it. And I think if, you know, this is 1850 before the Civil War when America was still, like, not really on the world stage.

But if he was writing in the, like, 1900, he would be writing about skyscrapers. Or in the 40s, he'd be writing about the bomb. Or in the 60s, he'd be writing about the moonshot. What happened to the moonshot? In 1969, like, it's the greatest human achievement of all time to walk on the moon and then we go back and we're hitting golf balls like it's such contemptuous it's it's a an act that's so contemptuous of the challenge that we we trivialize it by by hitting golf balls on the moon on the next couple go-arounds and i think that's like the true arrogance and ambition of America.

And that is captured by Melville in Ahab representing America, which is America is just ambition on a national level, right? We are not about tradition. We are about doing the impossible. Even if it's foolish, it doesn't matter. He just loves the impossible. So yeah, Moby Dick is basically about Ahab, even if it's foolish it doesn't matter it's it just he just loves the impossible so um yeah Moby Dick is basically about Ahab who goes on an adventure with this Parsi the Parsi is a Zoroastrian

um which is a kind of a pre-Christian religion in Persia and they were run out of Iran during the Islamic um expansion like the 7th and 8th century, and they went to India. They're kind of like fire worshipers in these fire temples. And the idea of the sun is like really pertinent. And I think the Romantic movement started kind of like during the French Revolution and kind of went to the end of the 19th century, of which Melville is like a high Romantic artist. They're really interested in comparative religion and he sees Zoroastrianism as an alternate alternative to Christianity create religious conflict um so that Ahab who is a Quaker and he speaks with this King James Version Bible language and all his friends are Quakers and the three mates on the ship

are Quakers and the Bildad and Peleg, the owners of the ship who outfitted are Quakers. Like Ahab was a Quaker but now he's got these other ideas about the Godhead and the Infinite and he's led to believe that Moby Dick, the whale, is Job's Leviathan, is the sea beast that God sent to Earth to torment mankind and kind of like show us our place. So Ahab is given this idea by Fadala, the Zoroastrian, that by striking through the whale, he can go to the other side and strike at God himself. So I think this is about the ambition of America, where Melville's own career started about, well, we're going to only fight the sperm whale because to fight any other kind of whale is beneath us. It's not macho. But how do you get more macho than fighting the largest animal that ever lived?

Make that largest animal that ever lived make that largest animal that ever lived um the the agent of god and so by striking through that you strike at god himself and this this goes into this romantic recontextualization of paradise lost and how it connects with national myths that kind of connected all of like western civilization together it's just it's a whole bunch of metaphysics that is that is advanced by ahab's ambition and at the same time you have this kind of encyclopedic curiosity in the in the in the voice of ishmael which is like melville's alter ego that's understandable to us so we have this running commentary by Ishmael, and then we have these kind of dark, elusive motivations of Ahab and his quest to hunt and destroy this, not quite animal, but really the supernatural being.

And I think the ability to have a really daring metaphysical novel that's also like descriptive of America's ambition to come, which is, you know, dominance on the sea, dominance in the air, dominance in space. And to get all this in 1850 is like just an amazing thing. There's a lot going on. But I don't know. I love hearing you talk about Moby Dick.

Connor's going to have to go read Moby Dick now. I will. You've inspired me. That was masterful. Early on, there's a whole chapter on chowder. Like fish chowder or clam chowder. He spends pages and pages

on silly stuff but at the same time you've got this this magma that's like animating some of the characters and it's the high and low just like shakespeare it's like high and low everywhere and he works on so many uh registers of communication just uh and he's a new york And he's a New Yorker. He's like, you can walk up Broadway and you can see all the places he lives. He's buried in the Bronx. You can go visit his grave. He's buried in the Bronx? Yeah, take the 6 train all the way up to the Vaughan Cemetery.

And you can go see his headstone there, right? You see, I'm at the confluence of New York. I can go anywhere. I can get to anything. I'm right off the 6. Yeah, there you go. Bryce is going to go there tomorrow. He's going to visit Melville.

Wow. Yeah, no, no. Tomorrow I've got to do high holidays, do stuff with my grandparents. All right, all right. When did you first read Moby Dick? Probably when I was like 22. I think I was just out of college.

I had read a lot of, um, here's the thing. I was, like, a physics major, typical, like, sci-fi kind of nerd in high school. And then I thought, well, all I'm doing is, like, C++ programming and, like, physics homework. How do I communicate in the humanities? So I had this idea I could get, like, a general education. So I just started reading, like, really deeply kind of the canon. So I read, you know, I read, like, Iliad and the Odyssey. at like a general education so i just started reading like really deeply kind of the canon so i read you know i've read like iliad and the odyssey and i read like all every dickens novel

um i read a whole bunch of i read like the three tolstoy novels and i read a bunch of cuba novels i just wanted to get like generally educated so at that point you know i was like 22 and i read moby dick i cried through it in a couple days and said, wow, this is truly next level stuff because not only is he working like the top of his game with respect to the other novelists of that mid-19th century, of which there's like, that modern novel was kind of created at that point by Flaubert and other social novelists, Balzac. He's not only doing that, but somehow he's able to tap in to Milton and Shakespeare

and Aristotle and Aeschylus and unite the ideas of people over 2,000, 3,000 years of history in a way that makes it more or less intelligible today. What, like, his ambition in writing that novel

is like the ambition of ahab hunting for god and why does ahab do it just because like it's something that he's doing it for the sake of ambition and doing something for the sake of ambition is at the heart of melville it's at the heart of ahab and it's a part of america and that i think is like amazing observation in 1850 this is a master class on, yeah, this, this, here, here's a very odd follow-up question. Cause I'm getting the sense that like, you're like,

you're like a savant at like certain, you know, you're, Oh, I got to go get cultured. So I'm going to read every single, you know, X book. What's like a top five interesting facts about Sean, you know, already we know that you've so you can't include i've written you know single-handedly a c++ compiler and uh i could read a i could write a dissertation on uh moby dick uh what's what's your top five uh interesting facts about sean that uh are probably uh you know i i won't be surprised to hear based on now these last two things but just it's going to be like interesting,

interesting facts. I probably shouldn't make a big deal about it, but I'm like very friendly with bartenders, I feel. Oh my God. Watching Sean romance a bartender, it's like, it's like X-rated, which. No, it's not. I'm very respectful of everyone.

But just like. I just want to know about the liqueurs and Amari. We were at this nice restaurant in Aspen, and it was like a group of eight of us. And Sean's like, I'm going to make friends with the bartender. I'm like, by the end of the night, they're going to be sending me free drinks. No, no, no. Anyways, it's nice when you can nerd out. How extensive is your home bar? I haven't been replenishing it.

So, you know, I just, I'm just more curious about, like, I mean, it's interesting that there's, like, a drinking culture for every culture. And, like, it's such a specialized, localized thing that somehow made it through. Like you can go to places in New York where they have like two, 300 of Marlowe's on the, on the shelf. Things you've never seen that are produced in like really small numbers, even things like craft beer that, that I think Americans like really do well.

It's just a cool thing to nerd out on. And it's like a fun, pretty inexpensive consumable I think stuff like that is really fun I'm not terribly pretentious about other than Moby Dick I don't think I have any terrible pretensions I'm

expecting that you're like a casual 2400 ranked I don't have time for any of that stuff I wish I just gotta write my compiler all day it's terrible existence really yeah i i i watch a lot of movies i probably see like three movies a week at the theaters yeah that's an interesting john thing sean watches a lot of movies yeah oh wow you can get a pass from amc for like 24 a month and since there's so many theaters in new york so i go

to like times square like three times a week and i see whatever they have um and i what's so many theaters in New York so I go to Times Square like three times a week and I see whatever they have and I Do you have like a favorite or top three movie similar to Moby Dick that's you know Oh wow, boy, there's so many great movies 1961 Kobayashi Harakiri

it's like a character in a collection thing about samurais I think that might be my favorite I've actually seen that. That is a great movie. That's a great, great movie. Really severe cinematography. A lot of, like, right angles everywhere. There's courtyard, black and white.

Incredible. Chic. My mom really likes that movie, but it's a jerk. Yeah. I love Spider-Verse. Like, I saw Spider-Verse a verse a million times because yeah it's just like it's a great movie the lego movie is a great movie another one it's like you're gonna do a toy movie and you're gonna put like these incredible themes in it

business business business that's like yeah is this working lord business is president business um are you excited for spider verse uh number two whatever it's called two and three there's two more coming out oh didn't know i hope they're good um little women i thought was really good um little women i saw that a bunch of times they had uh tim chalamet sersha ronan i did not see that i'm thinking of like i heard that i haven't seen that thinking about little fires which is like a TV show or something. Little Women is, it's like a,

I could compare it to like Two English Girls, a Truffaut movie. It has like a real French New Wave feeling, even though it doesn't look like a French New Wave movie. But it's excellently, like just so many good decisions when the director made it.

I thought The Green Knight that came out last year was fantastic. I love that. Really that came out last year was fantastic. Really? I got like 10 minutes into that on an airplane ride. That is not the time to see it. It's not an airplane movie.

It's a very slow movie. On an airplane, unless you're a pro, you watch a round-the-clock or something. Me, I have much more limited time to watch stuff these days. So now I am watching my quality shows on an airplane. I can't bring myself to watch my top two shows on an airplane. I just don't watch. It's terrible on the back of the seat, whatever.

But yeah, check out Green Knight. I think the montage at the end of the movie. It's like 10 minutes long. It's breathtaking. It's incredible. Did you see the Spencer movie about Lady Di? I thought that was like a masterpiece. Yeah, Kristen Stewart was, you know, it was like so many great ideas in it.

Anyways, a lot of good movies. Now, I thought the Northman that came out this year was really good. Really? I haven't seen that, but it's not... I don't know. It was awesome. Your taste in movies

is just so varied. What are you talking about? I like good movies. They're all good movies. They're really good. They're tour movies. I'm just saying, like,

I'm willing to believe that. I'm just saying, like, for me, like, I have a more selective taste in things. What's your favorite movie?

Connor, what's your favorite movie? I really like Casablanca. I know it's like... I know that's such a trope answer, but I'm like, one, I think it's a great movie, but two, I really... I'm like a World War II history's just anything set in that time period like really sort of works for me um i yeah i really

like casablanca um i saw it uh once in the stanford theater where they use the historical projection techniques. I saw it with my mom. That was a great experience. I'm trying to think about more modern stuff that I really liked. I'll give you a top five. It's hard. I feel like... Connor has a top five.

I'll give you a top five and you can give me your thoughts on each one. For the longest time jurassic park was um one of my favorites and specifically because of the soundtrack um music is like a big thing for me it was a james horner right uh i thought it was john williams yeah um and then i guess i'm interesting yeah this is I'm interested to hear your reaction of this one I for a long

for a while I think La La Land was my number one movie have you seen that I love I love his other movies

but I thought Whiplash and First Man were amazing I didn't like La La Land oh yeah Whiplash was phenomenal I think the I think the director is super talented but like Whiplash and First Man were amazing. I didn't like Lola that much. Oh, yeah. Whiplash was phenomenal.

I think the director is super talented, but I just don't like musicals very much. I found my list of things. I respect your choice of director. I think Damien Chazelle is a really talented guy. Wait, let me finish my top five. All right, all right, go for it. Or I'm not even sure this is top five. It's just a list of five movies that I really like.

Potentially, if I had to say one movie, my number one would be Zootopia. Have you seen that? Yeah, the Disney one with the rabbit and the fox. Yeah, and the fox. Okay. Why Zootopia? There's a number of reasons, but I absolutely love the fox character. I cried. I don't think i've told

this story in the podcast i went and saw zootopia twice in one day so i went and saw like a matinee performance um with my ex at the time and uh cried a little bit but like because i i guess i wasn't comfortable crying as hard as I wanted to cry. So then I went back in the evening and saw it again and just like, it was just brutal. Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, that's like me and Spider-Verse, same way. It hits me in that way. Yeah.

So yeah. And then the last two are probably not number one, but just amazing movies, Fight Club and Good Will Hunting. I like Good Will Hunting. probably not number one but just amazing movies uh fight club and goodwill hunting i like goodwill yeah i i found my list of uh uh movies that i like i'm much more a tv person so i'll give you some tv things after that but um i think i think for top things i would have to say star wars that's probably been which one um the original three episodes. And I say that, like, it's not that... Casablanca is probably, like, the movie that I think is, like, of highest quality. But Star Wars are the movies that have had, like, the biggest impact on my life. Because, like, as a kid, it was just very influential. I played a lot of text-based games, MUDs, as a kid, and that's actually what got me into programming.

Star Wars MUDs? Yeah, and so I played a lot of Star Wars MUDs. And so the thing that got me into programming was wanting to write my own Star Wars MUD. So I have to say Star Wars, but here's some other things on my list. Dr. Zhivago. Have you seen that? Julie Christie, yeah. Yeah.

Long movie, but it's one of my mom's favorites too um dragonheart oh my god i really love the dragonheart movies is that the one it's it's got the dragons talk oh god that's terrible with sean with sean connery fights in the dragon it's amazing hi own so there's the first one, which is pretty good. I was just saying I was so unpretentious. And now I'm thinking maybe I'm really pretentious. And then there's like the two others, which are absolute trash. Princess Bride, Indiana Jones, Seven Samurai.

Have you seen that? Yeah, I like Seven Samurai. Although, I mean, I think we can do... I mean, okay. High and Blue, I think it's like better than Seven Samurai for those, I mean, I mean, okay. I think it's better than Seven Samurai. You know what I mean? I really like Seven Samurai. Have you seen The Pig?

Yeah, the Nicolas Cage one. Yeah, what did you think of that? It was a good movie. I mean, it was not in my top ten or anything. I think the idea of a fight club for cooks um is kind of cool but it's good to see nicholas cage um i don't know what do you what do you i thought it was good but it wasn't like it didn't super it didn't blow me away in the way that like

spencer blew me away or like titan which i think came at the same time blew me away yeah i mean i i loved uh pig and it was all it's like it's like john wick but like different but well he never which I think came at the same time blew me away yeah I mean I loved Pig and it was it's like it's like John Wick but like different but well

he never he never has he never goes into cage rage that's the thing you're expecting him to lose it yeah and he just cooks a meal

and then they cry and that's that's the cage rage at the end I will I will in this episode you're now listening to me or I'll put a little

disclaimer if you don't want pig spoiled uh not that that spoiled it but it's a little bit of a spoiler everyone should go watch pig though because it's a that's a it's a it's a very fine movie nick cage he has a pig it's like john wick except replace uh with Nick Cage and replace his dog with a pig. Someone takes a pig and then he goes and fixes it. There's a kind of. A kind of. There's a fair amount of misdirection. Yeah.

I mean, if you watch the trailer, it just shows a truffle pig. You definitely expect more. Someone took my pig. And then he goes and uh yeah anyway there won't say anything more but it's um i was i was not expecting much when i watched it and uh and then was man you gotta you gotta see that 824 neon stuff just like whenever they come out with an 824 neon movie go see it because that's that's what they do you know 824 neon i don't even know what that this is the the two like they buy movies

after festivals and they promote them so they're like the distributor and they have just have good taste you know or at least like they make they buy interesting movies so they bought they've got pig and they got titan and green knight spencer pretty much everything that's good interesting it's definitely like you know you're you've got to be a movie buff. Go see the neon stuff. I'm going to read the rest of my movie list, and we're going to see whether we're still friends. All right.

Legally Blonde. What? Isn't that the one with, like, Reeve? What's her name? Yep, yep. Reeves? Gattaca? You've seen Gattaca. I haven't seen Gattaca.

I really like Gattaca. It's like the sort of dystopian that I like. Memento? Memento's good. Yeah. And let's see, what else do we have on here? I did have Jurassic Park on here. And I usually don't like horror horror type stuff um the pentagon wars it's just a

really funny movie i like the pentagon wars you've never seen this movie um let's see what else do we have on here uh to haven and uh to have and have not which is very similar to Casablanca. Have you seen that? No, I don't think so. It's a Nora kind of thing? Yeah, it's the same Humphrey Bogart, I forget the woman's name, the same two leads I think.

Oh really? Okay. Yeah, and it's sort of a similar setting. Lost in Translation, that's a really good one with the what's this place Bill Murray yeah and scarlet Johansson yeah yeah and breakfast at Tiffany's yeah you are you are more of a place yeah I would have to concur with Lee now for TV and it's probably just because i've done my most recent re-watching probably one of my favorite tv shows stargate um i i have i have

watched the entire stargate like um tv saga at least five times and that is like a big commitment because there's a lot there you could write a c++ compiler i've never i've never gotten through i've tried to do it with star trek i've never gotten through the i got stuck in like midway through ds9 and i just couldn't i couldn't go any further um and uh what my my favorite like current tv is westworld um i was i was just watching that before you came in uh because the girlfriend's gone now so i can catch up on my fucking shows on the big tv with the volume set to a level that i like yep um yeah all right we gotta wrap things up yeah We got to. We are. But, well, we'll say this has been a fantastic show.

I got to say, I might do something special with this in that usually we dice these up into, like, 30-minute segments. But maybe, I don't know. We'll have to see because it will take more work for me. I'll only cut this in half. I think like titling the first episode C++ or like the first half of this C++ versus Carbon versus Circle versus CPP Front or CPP 2.0, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I think there's going to be a lot, for folks that are interested in Circle, like you're currently adding the equivalent of C++ OX concepts

and that might be interested in checking that out or even checking it out right now. I tweet about it every day. So I follow you on Twitter. Sean Bax. And it's Circle-Lang? Yeah, Circle--lang.org but I don't really

update the website I just I just try to yeah we gotta get you I just try to work right now you know yeah just working

that's all yeah alright well thanks thanks for hanging out for two and a half hours and I can't wait to see the feedback

we get from folks on the internets from this because it's gonna be exciting yeah and hey i want that bathroom episode to air connor thanks for listening we hope you enjoyed and have a great day