As I wrote a few weeks ago, I’m tired of politicians saying after yet another shooting that they’ll pray for the victims and their families. Those words are hollow, and the United States needs gun reform. This tweet by Neil deGrasse Tyson echoes my feelings about politicians hollow words.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 139)
I’m told that this is a famous poster for designers that I just applied a lot of whiteout to. (The missing words seem to have been inspired by Samuel L. Jackson.) I like “Believe in yourself” and “Trust your gut.”
Every March I feel like moving back to Talkeetna, Alaska, and this year the feeling has started early. This is a photo of Denali from the rivers in Talkeetna. If I remember correctly, Denali is 90 miles away in this photo. (Denali is kind of a big deal.)
“The same cosmic forces that mold galaxies, stars, and atoms also mold each moment of self and world. The inner self and outer self are born in the cleft between expansion and contraction. By giving yourself to those forces, you become those forces, and through that you experience a kind of immortality — you live in the breath and pulse of every animal, in the polarization of electrons and protons, in the interplay of the thermal expansion and self-gravity that molds stars, in the interplay of dark matter that holds galaxies together and dark energy that stretches space apart.”
~ Part of a quote from The Science of Enlightenment, How Meditation Works, by Shinzen Young
A strange thing about being me is that many people I’ve never met think they know me. It happened with almost everyone at the Buddhist Geeks conferences — “Do I know you?” Last week it happened at Whole Foods, where a cashier talked to me like we were old friends, asking if I ever got to do so and so. I had to tell him that wasn’t me.
Due to my most recent illness I haven’t eaten at a restaurant since before October 10, 2017, but yesterday I went to a burger place to try a small burger and see if I could eat it. Right away the cashier said, “Hi! How have you been? Hey, did you cut your hair?” I guess I just have one of those faces.
“Nothing has been done. It doesn't seem to matter to our government that children are being shot to death day after day in schools. It doesn't matter that people are being shot at a concert, at a movie theater. It's not enough, apparently, to move our leadership, our government, the people who are running this country to actually do anything. That's demoralizing.”
“But we can do something about it. We can vote people in who actually have the courage to protect people's lives, not just bow down to the NRA because they've financed their campaign for them. Hopefully we'll find enough people, first of all to vote, get people in, but hopefully we'll find enough people to actually help our citizens remain safe and focus on the real safety issues, not building some stupid wall for millions of dollars that has nothing to do with our safety, but actually protecting us from what truly is dangerous, which is maniacs with semi-automatic weapons just slaughtering our children. It's disgusting.”
~ Steve Kerr
“Vigorous writing is concise.” ~ William Strunk
“Succinctness is power.” ~ Paul Graham
Those quotes remind me of writing in general, and writing expressive code in Scala specifically.
In this video from one of the childrens’ phones inside the school in Florida you can hear the rifle being fired, and hear the young children scream. This insanity has to stop, the United States needs gun reform in a major way. It used to be a shock when there was one shooting in America; there have now been 18 shootings in the U.S. in the first 45 days of 2018. At this pace there will be 146 school shootings this year. Dear NRA and Republican-led congress and White House, how many children have to die before you’ll do something?
Everyone tells me that the cardiologist I see is the best heart doctor in Boulder, Colorado, so on Thursday we were talking and I was telling him that it looks like I was born with a rare blood disease named mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), and said, “So maybe that fake heart attack I had last May may have been allergic angina, you know, Kounis Syndrome. If we had known about MCAS at that time I might not have needed that angiogram, yada yada yada.” Then he said, “Wait, what was the name of that disease?”
At first I was upset that he didn’t know what this was, but then I realized how rare mast cell disease is. Statistically there are only 26 other people in Colorado with this disease, and if I was still in Alaska there would only be three or four of us. (FWIW, this is the same doctor who knew what a Pheochromocytoma is, and told me to get to the Mayo Clinic asap when my bloodwork made doctors think that I had a Pheo.)
The good news is that I was able to give him all of the information I have on mast cell disease and Kounis Syndrome, so hopefully in the future he can try giving patients who present unusually some Benadryl and see if that helps. (I started to write, “Give them Benadryl instead of an angiogram,” but the stress test showed a possible dead spot in my heart, so I was getting that angiogram one way or another.)
(This image comes from the book, Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease.)
A woman in California is starting a “mobile meditation bus” business.
Alex Nedelcu has a good article titled, In Defense of OOFP, in which he writes about Scala, OOP, FP, and the Scala collections classes.
A note from this long article about Google’s Rick Osterloh:
Former CEO Eric Schmidt calls this system “Ship and Iterate,” and in his book How Google Works he makes a consistent case for not even trying to get things right the first time. “Create a product, ship it, see how it does, design and implement improvements, and push it back out,” Schmidt writes. “Ship and iterate. The companies that are the fastest at this process will win.”
Steven Sinofsky has this series of 30+ tweets about Apple software quality.
Google is making “Cloud TPUs” available in beta. From their announcement: “Starting today, Cloud TPUs are available in beta on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to help machine learning (ML) experts train and run their ML models more quickly. Cloud TPUs are a family of Google-designed hardware accelerators that are optimized to speed up and scale up specific ML workloads programmed with TensorFlow. Built with four custom ASICs, each Cloud TPU packs up to 180 teraflops of floating-point performance and 64 GB of high-bandwidth memory onto a single board.”
The Andreessen Horowitz website has a blog post titled The Crypto Canon which has links to good resources on what a blockchain is, how bitcoin and others work, Ethereum, and much more.
“There’s a philosopher who says, ‘As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation, and then … then this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like ... what in the world is going on? And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don’t.’ And a lot of The Eagles story is like that.”
~ Joe Walsh, in the History of The Eagles
“I’m going to be the best Zach LaVine you guys can get,” he said. “That’s who I am. I’m not here to replace anybody. I’m here to become the next young guy coming in for the Chicago Bulls, work my butt off and take this back to where it should be. You can’t replace a guy when you’re not that person. I’m Zach LaVine. I’m going to play like me. I’m going to act like me and that’s just how I carry myself. I’m me.”
~ from this article
In celebration of 2/11 tomorrow: 2 + 11 = 1 + 12 and “two plus eleven” is an anagram of “one plus twelve.”