Mayer Goldberg's Homepage

Table of Contents

1 Contact Information

  • Email: gmayer@little-lisper.org. All email, from all other accounts, gets forwarded to this account.
  • Office: Building 37 (Alon, אלון), room 106, mailbox 44
  • Office hours (for the Fall Semester 2012-2013): Wednesday, 13:00-16:00
  • Telephones: Voice (+972)(0)8-647-7873, FAX (+972)(0)8-647-7650
  • Professional mailing address: Mayer Goldberg, Department of Computer Science, Ben Gurion University, PO Box 653, Beer Sheva 84105, Israel.
  • Personal mailing address: Mayer & Sharon Goldberg, PO Box 15161, Beer Sheva, 84121, Israel

2 Research

  • Research Interests
    • Proof Assistants (Coq, nuprl, et cetera)
    • The Lambda Calculus
    • Programming Languages
    • Functional Programming
    • Object-Oriented Programming
    • Computational Reflection
    • Continuations & Control
    • Interpretation & Compilation
    • Automated theorem proving (Coq, NuPRL, etc)
  • Research Students
    • Present research students
    • Past research students
      • Valery Frolov (MSc, expected 2012)
      • Guy Wiener (PhD, 2012)
      • Sonia Margulis (MSc, 2011)
      • Avi Shefi (MSc, 2009)
      • Yelena Lev (MSc, 2008)
      • Yigal Greenshpun (MSc, 2007)
      • Guy Wiener (MSc, 2007)
      • Assaf Shemesh (MSc, 2006)

3 Teaching

4 Departmental duties

5 Personal Interests

6 Hey, where's the old website??

For several years now, I have been "growing" (for want of a better word) a huge website (over 3,500 pages), containing massive amounts of information. The website was convenient to create, somewhat convenient to manage, and the students hated it. The website was created semi-automatically by a program called The Brain. The program is very useful knowledge management system, and I suppose that deployment to the web was never a priority for the guys who wrote the Brain. Despite many requests, they were not quick to fix bugs in the website generation parts of their system, and were even slower to add features. Websites created using the Brain were very demanding in terms resources of the web browsers, could not be annotated with keywords, did not lend themselves to a simple creation of a sitemap, and Google did its best to ignore them.

I struggled for a while to maintain my Brain-based website despite many serious objections, not the least of which were the objections of my students, most of whom hated the way it looked. A graphical, Javascript-intensive, resource hungry website that didn't look or feel good on the limited browsers of the phones and ebook readers that are now as much a part of my life as they are of the lives of my students.

So there you have it. The Brain-based website had to go. This site is still very very rudimentary. I have great plans for it though. If you miss anything that appeared on the old website, just drop me an email, and I'll up its priority in the migration plan for the new site.

So what am I using now? Why, Emacs of course! One important lesson I learned from my experience with the Brain is that I must control my own toolchain, and I must keep things very simple. No commercial vendor is going to listen to my suggestions and needs as… myself! Emacs, make, rsync. I'll obviously be adding tons of Scheme scripts later on. Stay tuned! ☺

7 Random thoughts

  • 2012-07-12 Thu This year, the governemnt [of Israel] raised the cost of electricity 3 times, raised property taxes, raised the cost of petrol, raised the cost of public transportation, raised the cost of cigarettes, raised their own salaries, and bought brand new BMW cars for all the ministers. When & where does this country begin to serve its own citizens? Partial answer: Our minister of the treasury, Philosophy professor Yuval Steinitz, is now trying to raise the age of retirement, as if the elderly can even find work in Israel!?
  • 2012-05-07 Mon ‏כשאלוהים אמר בפעם הראשונה ”יהי אור“, הוא התכוון שלא יהיה לו חשוך. הוא לא חשב באותו רגע על השמיים, אבל העצים כבר החלו מתמלאים במים, וציפורים קיבלו אוויר וגוף…‎
  • 2012-02-24 Fri Here is a fine example of Racism in Israel: When speaking of Ashkenazim, Jews of European ancestry, apprarently all norms of civilized, public discourse are off. Gila Adrei (‏גילה אדרעי‎), the chairperson of the railworkers' union comments: “‏הם מנהלים איתי מלחמה של אשכנזים. אלה בדיוק השיטות של האשכנזים. מחבקים אותך ובינתיים מאחורה דוקרים אותך‎” (“they are conducting against me a war of Ashkenazim. These are exactly the tactics/methods of the Ashkenazim. They hug you, and in the meantime, from behind, stab you”). The quote is from this article in the Ma'ariv (מעריב) daily.
  • 2012-02-12 Sun A shlif (שליף) most likely used in a final exam in economics (side A, side B): Here are both sides of a note found by exam monitors, in the bathroom, during my final exam in the compiler construction course – a shlif is a "cheat sheet" smuggled in one's pocket, and consulted during a trip to the bathroom… It carries no identifying marks, and I am not accusing or blaming anyone, nor do I have any proof, other than circumstantial evidence, that it was actually used to cheat on a final exam, etc. I'm just hysterically amused by the amount of information crammed onto it. And what a lovely handwriting too! ☺
  • 2011-10-27 Thu Today a demonstration is scheduled in Tel Aviv, in support of Holocaust survivors who are [still] living in Israel. The State of Israel, having received substantial monies from the Federal Republic of Germany, both in compensation for the Holocaust and in direct support for Holocaust survivors, has abandoned these survivors to a life of dire poverty on ridiculously-small stipends. The demonstration is being held under the slogan The Final Solution. The slogan, intentionally provocative, has aroused [self-]righteous indignation both in the public and in the government. The State of Israel, apparently, demands the right to relegate Holocaust survivors to a life of dire poverty & medical neglect, and to do so without being shamed, named, and goaded into providing these survivors the means to die in peace and dignity, with their basic existential needs met. Again, this is not about the free market, this is not about Capitalism vs the welfare state: Rather, the State of Israel has already received, and is still receiving monies on behalf of these survivors. Those survivors that have not signed up to receive their stipends directly from the Federal Republic of Germany have had to settle for a fraction of what the Federal Republic of Germany has provided them. In other words, Israel took over these monies and their disbursement, in the hope that it could keep some of it for itself. While many programs do not operate well in Israel, the program for robbing Holocaust survivors of their rightful stipend has been a resounding success… ולתפארת מדינת ישראל, etc.
  • 2011-10-27 Thu In case you wondered about the raucous that was heard in Beer Sheva at 3:30am, a day before Yom Kippur, a raucous that neither the police nor the city were willing to stop, you can see our mayor Rubik Danilovich participating in that very event. It is amazing that slichot, the inyan of which is beyn adam la'makom would be held at the expense of so many averot she'beyn adam la'chavero and against an entire tsibur — averot that cannot be attoned for.
  • 2011-05-03 Tue The revolting sights of Americans cheering the death of Osama Bin-Laden, bring thoughts to my mind that in this day and age ארצות הברית היא אי שפיות בים של ברבריות. Proverbs 24:17-18 comes to mind here.
  • 2011-02-28 Mon On Sunday, February 27, the International Society for Conspiracy Theories was established at one of several unnamed locations. Invitations were not sent out, so as to prevent the CIA from finding out. Nobody showed up because people had realised this was an Orwellian plot to lure them out of their hiding. The worldwide, Jewish-controlled media has silenced this story.

8 Tales of corruption of Israeli police

Date: 2013-04-04T00:30+0300

Author: Mayer Goldberg

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