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.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 137)
When I started meditating I was filled with anxieties, I was filled with fears ... kind of a depression and anger. And I took this anger out on my first wife, and after two weeks of meditation she asked, “What’s going on?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
She said, “This anger, where did it go?”
And I didn’t even realize it had lifted.
~ David Lynch, in this video
David Lynch (the director, not the realtor I knew in Kentucky) is a big proponent of transcendental meditation (TM). He writes about how he started with it, and about the transcendental meditation technique (with clips from Jerry Seinfeld, Ellen DeGeneres, and others). Here’s a YouTube video titled, David Lynch on Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain, and here’s a related Jerry Seinfeld video on TM.
I don’t get too much news from inquisitr.com, but this story that shows that 7% of astronaut Scott Kelly’s DNA changed permanently is interesting.
Just read that JavaFX is going to be removed from the Java JDK. From the article: “Making JavaFX its own module will make it easier to adopt and clear the way for new contributors, Oracle said. The company added that with the faster release schedule being implemented for standard Java and the JDK, JavaFX needs to be on its own pace driven by contributions from Oracle and others in the OpenJFX community.”
Doctor: You have more bacteria DNA in your body than your own DNA.
Me: My body??? (spoken in high-pitched voice)
Doctor: Yes. No. I mean not just you, everyone.
Me: Oh, good. I thought you were trying to tell me something.
“Man is drawn between two paths: One drags him downwards towards fulfillment of desires and sense gratifications, leading to bondage and destruction; the other guides him upwards towards purity and realization of his inner Self. Desires fog his mind and veil his true Self. It is the mind alone which leads to bondage or to liberation. It is his reason which either controls his mind or allows itself to be dominated.”
~ from the book, Light on Pranayama
I woke up Thursday morning at 2:15 am and quickly knew something was wrong; if I didn’t act fast I was going to go unconscious for the eighth time. I threw down some Zyrtec and Benadryl, put some ice in a towel, went outside, and sat down with my head between my knees. (When I get close to passing out I feel extremely warm, like some form of hyperthermia, so I try to cool down as fast as possible.) I don’t even know what I did wrong this time, but that’s how life with MCAS rolls.
If you ever wondered how many people use the internet and/or what countries have the most internet users, here you go. (The image is from internetlivestats.com.)
Problem: You want to eliminate repetitively passing variables into a Scala function by (a) passing common variables into the function to (b) create a new function that’s pre-loaded with those values, and then (c) use the new function, passing it only the unique variables it needs.
Solution: The classic example of a partially applied function begins with a simple sum function:
Problem: You want to define a Scala method that takes a function as a parameter, and that function may have one or more input parameters, and may also return a value.
Solution: Following the approach described in the previous recipe, define a method that takes a function as a parameter. Specify the function signature you expect to receive, and then execute that function inside the body of the method.
“But the cloud came along. And one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen in business is when an unrelated type company — a retailer, you can call Amazon of that type, goes into another big industry and sees the future in it, gets into it, and then they gave — and Jeff Bezos would say this, he said it on the Charlie Rose show, some time ago — he got this amazing runway. I mean, the other players — here are all these 200 IQ people, you know, in that business, and they gave him year, after year, after year. It wasn't a secret of what he was doing. And he was, in an important way, revolutionizing the industry, and the other people sat on their hands, basically.”
~ Warren Buffett talking about Amazon and “the cloud” in this Morningstar article
Way back when I lived in this low-income apartment complex in Wasilla, Alaska — technically I had no income at the time, and it’s ridiculously hard to find a place to live in Alaska in the summer — and spent as much time as I could meditating in the mountains, I created a vi/vim editor video tutorial and put it on YouTube. I just noticed that video has now exceeded 200,000 views. It feels a little weird to think that over 200K people have started to learn vi/vim from that video.
A funny thing about making that video is that the walls in that apartment complex were paper-thin. I could hear everything my neighbors did in their apartments (use your imagination and you won’t be wrong), and they could hear me, so I intentionally tried not to talk too loud in the video. I had to edit the video at several points to crop out some of my neighbors yelling at each other.
There is a mistake technical and scientific people make. We think that if we have made a clever and thoughtful argument, based on data and smart analysis, then people will change their minds. This isn’t true. If you want to change people’s behavior you need to touch their hearts, not just win the argument. We call this the Oprah Winfrey Rule. (It’s also the way good politicians operate, but Oprah does it better than anyone.)
~ Google’s Oprah Winfrey Rule, from the book, How Google Works
For Lent this year I'm giving up.
If you feel like digging through this Seeking Alpha article, you’ll find that EV auto sales in China were up to 3.3% in December. That’s well above the 1.2% in the U.S. and 1.9% in Europe. Another quote from that article: “China is likely to announce its internal combustion engine [ICE] ban plan date sometime in 2018. Then, by January 2019, the new China zero emission vehicle [ZEV] system will begin, boosting sales of longer range pure EVs.”
Here are a couple of good quotes from this article about the Golden State Warriors “truth teller” Ron Adams. First, about treating your work as your craft, and being a craftsman:
“I try to be an artisan,” he adds. “There is a purity to teaching as an assistant — a virtue in being a craftsman and having a craft. It’s the nuts-and-bolts stuff that appeals to me, and the relationships.
Then these quotes about telling the truth:
He learned something else. “On the farm, your rapport with your neighbor is critical,” Adams says. “There is a premium on honesty. You don’t fool people in that world.”
On the farm he learned to speak the truth — and to send the wine back. “My father, I remember him getting bales of hay,” he says, “and if it didn’t meet his standard, the response would be polite but firm: ‘This is good but not what I wanted.’”
“So the main takeaway of this discussion (on functional programming) is to appreciate the idea of algebra-based design. An algebra is a combination of a set of types, a set of functions defined with them, and a set of laws that interrelate the functions.”
~ from the book, Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling
PayPal Engineering has an article titled, Learning from Using a Reactive Platform — Akka/Squbs.
I went through this several times when writing the Scala Cookbook and Functional Programming, Simplified. In the end I just tried to think of myself, and write a book that would have been helpful to me five years earlier. (Image from this Twitter page.)
