“The great personal fortunes in this country weren’t built on a portfolio of fifty companies. They were built by someone who identified one wonderful business.”
~ Warren Buffett
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 136)
Helplessly hoping
Her harlequin hovers nearby
Awaiting a word
Gasping at glimpses of gentle true spirit
He runs, wishing he could fly
Only to trip at the sound of goodbye
From a favorite song of late,
Helplessly Hoping,
by Crosby, Stills, & Nash
“A lot of people with high IQs are terrible investors because they’ve got terrible temperaments. You need to keep raw irrational emotion under control.”
~ Charlie Munger
“He has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
~ Stephen Hawking (1/8/1942 to 3/14/2018), in regards to Albert Einstein (3/14/1879 to 4/18/1955)
I’m very proud of students who are taking the action that American politicians won’t. Image from this Twitter page.
Note (March 14, 2018): I’ve disabled comments on this website until I get through this current illness.
The mast cell disease has been kicking my butt the last few weeks, and I’ve come close to losing consciousness several times. Had this been eighteen months ago when I didn’t know what was going on I surely would have lost consciousness, but these days I at least know that I can try to rapidly load up on the meds and do some other things to stay conscious.
One thought I’ve had during these times is, “What joy is there in this moment?” I don’t mean that in a negative thing; in fact, I mean it as the exact opposite. For example, when the syncope started last Thursday at 2:15am and I ran outside to sit with my head between my legs in the icy cold weather on the porch, I asked myself this question. My first answer was that the cold felt good. After a little while I noticed the faint sounds of an owl making “Who ... who” calls somewhere in the distance, and combined with the cold dark silence, that was very pretty.
Frankly, my main thought was that if I was going to go unconscious again – something you never know if you’re going to come back from – I wanted my last thoughts to be of something joyful, and that’s when I started thinking to ask myself, “What joy is there in this moment?” If you’re having a bad day or a bad moment, I encourage you to ask yourself that question. For me it’s been a way of finding some gratitude in my most difficult moments.
“Nobody can bring you peace but yourself.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
A few quotes from Gary Kubiak about new Broncos QB Case Keenum, from this Houston Chronicle article:
The reason he’s where he is, first and foremost, is his work ethic. He wants to be great. His presence among his teammates is as good as I’ve ever seen. He never judges people or acts like he’s above them. He treats everybody the same, and guys want to make plays for him.
Case played well (in his rookie year), but we couldn’t win a close game. One thing I learned about Case is that he’s such a mentally strong person. He can handle any type of locker room and any kind of teammate. He’s very consistent on and off the field. His teammates respect that.
A lot of guys would just go in the tank with a start like that (0-8), but Case kept battling because that’s the kind of guy he is. He’s very comfortable in his own skin.
I don’t care who he plays for, you’re not going to put Case in an uncomfortable situation. He’s got a lot of confidence in who he is and how he carries himself. Guys respond to that.
If you’re interested in investing and would like to somehow invest in “artificial intelligence” and robotics but don’t know how to get started, take a look at the ROBO and BOTZ ETFs (exchange-traded funds). You can either invest in those ETFs, or do your research on them to see what underlying securities they invest in.
I came across this Android phone dialer tip yesterday. If you want to make a phone call from an Android application, all you have to do is create a new Intent, either an Intent.ACTION_DIAL (to start the call) or Intent.ACTION_CALL (to place the call).
Here are the three lines of source code you need to get started:
Intent dialIntent = new Intent();
dialIntent.setAction(Intent.ACTION_DIAL);
dialIntent.setData(Uri.parse("tel:8675309"));
I was recently working on some images of a mobile phone, where the mobile phone was surrounded by a solid color that I wanted to make transparent. Unfortunately the phone was black, and that color was dark gray, so when I made the dark gray a transparent color in Gimp using my usual approach — clicking Colors > Color to Alpha, then choosing dark gray — it had the effect of bleeding a lot of color out of the black phone. This was wrong.
Per this story on ycombinator, it appears that political issues can affect clocks:
The short version of the story is that grid electricity in Europe is produced by rotating the turbines 50 times a second and that's where the 50Hz AC electricity comes from. Apparently to match the demand at given instance electricity plants rotate their turbines a bit faster or a bit slower instead of switching a complete plant on and off, which results in slight deviations from the 50Hz standard but it is fine as long as it stays between the limits.
At the end of the day, as the demand increases and decreases, the average frequency would be 50Hz and engineers took advantage of that fact to create clocks that may not be accurate to the second but accurate on average. How do they do that? They count the change in the electricity and assume that 50 changes are exactly 1 second.
Unfortunately, due to political issues in the Balkans, the grid was under-supplied or over-supplied for a prolonged period and this created a deviation from the average of 50Hz and the clocks that depend on this average to be 50Hz also lost accuracy that currently amounts to 6 minutes.
Here’s a good story about how Intel missed out on the mobile CPU market, and what they’re trying to do about it now. It’s always interesting to me to read about how leaders of large corporations misread the possibilities of the future, thereby endangering the future existence of their business.
If you’re into technology, I highly recommend Benedict Evans’ weekly newsletter. In this weeks email you’ll find stories like, The Inside Story Behind Pebble’s Demise, Google’s blog post titled Assessing Cardiovascular Risk Factors with Computer Vision, a story about how Intel Fights for its Future by Jean-Louis Gassée, and Pete Warden’s story of Why Low-Power NN Accelerators Matter. All good reads.
MedicalNewsToday.com has an interesting article for people with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases titled, Could targeting gut bacteria prevent autoimmunity? Except for their desire to use drugs to solve the problem, the concept is consist with autoimmune diets like The Wahls Protocol.
As @olafurpg notes, this image shows a good “elevator pitch” description of the Scala programming language. See this Github link for the rest of the description.
A new study shows that Android users have a higher “loyalty” to their OS than iOS users have, 91% to 86%. techcrunch.com has the story.