Popular Science put together their list of the 100 greatest innovations of 2018.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 117)
From their website: “The 2018 Engineering Gift Guide from Purdue University is filled with fun toys, games, books, and applications to engage girls and boys ages 3-18 in engineering thinking and design. Researchers looked for toys that would promote engineering practices ranging from coding and spatial reasoning to problem solving and critical thinking.”
Back in my day, aerospace engineering undergrad students had very little time to work in the wind tunnels at Texas A&M, but in the limited time I had I tried to look at what makes a knuckleball move erratically. Barton Smith at Utah State University did the same thing (presumably with much more wind tunnel time) looking at a baseball’s spin rate, spin axis, and orientation of the ball.
I just released a large-font version of the Functional Programming, Simplified PDF. My hope is that it will help those people who want to read it in a Kindle reader. If you’ve bought the PDF, you can find the new file in your Gumroad.com account.
Places I’m sending money to on Giving Tuesday: The Scala Center, Drupal.org, The Mastocytosis Society, my niece’s non-profit application, and Providence Zen Center.
If I manage to send any cards out for Christmas this year, they’ll be these “Starry Night over the Rocky Mountains” cards, which I found in a store on the Pearl Street Mall in Boulder, Colorado yesterday.
For Cyber Monday I reduced the price of the PDF version of “Functional Programming, Simplified” to $22.50. (Price good on November 25 and 26, 2018 only.) Click here to buy the book!
I need a new tablet, and I just might bite the bullet on the Amazon Fire 10 HD today (Black Friday, 2018). For my Android development I don’t like that it’s based on Android 5, but $100 (33% off its regular price) for a tablet with decent performance is hard to pass up for my current needs.
Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread,
air, light, spring,
but never your laughter,
for I would die.
~ Pablo Neruda
CBS is reportedly working on a reboot of the Northern Exposure television series. The series had more of an impact on my life than any other tv series — I ended up living in Alaska — so more power to them.
Some people come into your life and even if they don’t stay in it for long, they make an impact that changes you forever. Happy birthday to two people this month, one who made my life miserable, and another who made it wonderful.
The New York Times has a good article about a “55 and better” living community called Latitude Margaritaville.
“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”
~ Ernest Hemingway
I haven’t tried it yet, but from all of the images I’ve seen, Elementary OS looks like the prettiest desktop Linux distribution I’ve ever seen. I hope to install it this weekend and take it for a spin.
Yesterday I just churned the numbers from the surveys, but last night I started thinking how cool it is that there are one million Scala developers in the world.
I remember when I was wandering around Alaska in 2011 and first stumbled upon Programming in Scala, I found that very few people knew about Scala, maybe numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands at most. I hope Martin Odersky & Company are having a little celebration this year for their success. (And on to two million!)
“Since I had started to break down all my writing and get rid of all facility and try to make instead of describe, writing had been wonderful to do. But it was very difficult, and I did not know how I would ever write anything as long as a novel. It often took me a full morning of work to write a paragraph.”
~ Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast
I was curious how many Scala developers there are in the world, so I did a little research. There aren’t a huge number of data sources, but here’s what I found.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a thousand words about what the Republican and Democratic parties look like in the United States.
~ image from this tweet
This is probably the coolest and creepiest thing you’ll see all week: Baby owls in the loft.
Per Dr. Tania Dempsey, one of the leading researchers in the mast cell field, “MCAS/MCAD causes chronic inflammation in multiple organs/tissue/systems, with or without allergic-type problems and sometimes even abnormal growth and development in various tissues, and there can be acute flares of symptoms.”
Anyone who has seen the inside of my body through MRIs, CT scans, and ultrasounds will agree with that statement. (I write that with Surgery #8 coming up in about three weeks. As usual, a very experienced doctor used words like, “I’ve never seen that before,” “abnormal,” yada yada yada.)
