An article titled The Best Way to Learn Anything: The Feynman Technique shares these steps about how to learn a topic really well. (Where Feynman refers to Richard Feynman.)
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 177)
When I saw this quote posted on Twitter by Jonas Bonér (originally from Isaac Asimov), it made me wonder if Meritocracy wouldn’t be a better form of government than Democracy. What I mean is that if you are actively involved in government or your local community you are allowed to vote, but if you aren’t you don’t get to vote. Something like that.
IMHO, what we have in the U.S. right now is a popularity contest. I have no doubt that if Arnold Schwarzenegger could run for President in the U.S., he would have easily beaten Trump or Clinton this year. (I mention him specifically because of his interest in politics.)
Personal note, star date December 5, 2016: Apparently I strayed too far off the diet yesterday and broke out in a couple of hives last night.
If you live in Colorado, you’re doing laundry at someone's house in Kentucky, and you lose a sock in the dryer, where does it go?
About five years ago, when my thyroid was first failing, I went through something known as Hashimoto’s disease. What happened was that at some times I would become hyperthyroid (and therefore hyperactive), but most of the time I was hypothyroid, meaning that my brain and body were slow and sluggish.
Nine times out of ten I was sluggish, so one day when I had a job interview I decided to drink some Red Bull. I had one drink an hour before the interview, and drank the second one just before the interview.
Sadly, on this occasion my body decided to have that “1 out of 10” day and be hyperactive. Combined with the two Red Bull drinks I couldn’t sit still or think. I’m sure the people conducting the interview thought I was on speed, and more than once they told me I could relax. I wanted to tell them, “No, I can’t. I really can’t.” By the end of that miserable interview I was just glad my heart didn’t explode.
At the time this seemed like a really bad event in my life. I didn’t know what to do about my thyroid, and I felt miserable. I was at a real low point, especially in my professional life.
Fortunately one of the next things I did was to send an email to the O’Reilly folks asking if they needed someone to write the Scala Cookbook. They said yes, and the rest is history.
Looking back on that interview, I now think that if I had done well that day I might have been forced to work with Java for the next few years. Instead, I’ve been able to work with Scala ever since that day. I got to write the Scala Cookbook, and now I’m working on a book about Scala and functional programming. With the mast cell disease stuff I just went through I would have never been able to work at a “normal” job, so all of this turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Moral: One some days things in your life can look bad, really bad. But if you keep your chin up and keep working hard, good things can still happen, and in the end that bad day can be the best thing that ever happened to you.
In case you need a gift for the mom that has everything, here you go. :)
Here’s a link to the latest holiday “gifts for geeks” from ThinkGeek:
They also have these geek gift ideas for under $20:
“Years ago I knew little, but was comfortable using things I didn’t understand. Now I’m experienced, I fear things unless I understand them.”
This is the front of one of the postcards I designed for my Zen Foundation business back in 2012. I liked it, but not enough other people liked it, so I closed that business for the time being.
Had an unexpected reorganization at the company today.
Moved the desk around, re-positioned some lamps. (I work from home.)
Fortune has a good article on the Google Brain research team, their products, and technology.
So the woman who told me to “suck it up” when I complained about doing the laundry in the winter moved out of the apartment complex. Facta non verba, baby.
(I posted this on December 1, 2010, when I lived in an apartment in Wasilla, Alaska, and had a 75-yard outdoor commute to the laundry facility.)
The history of the Earth in a 24-hour clock, from flowingdata.com.
“During Zazen the ego-subject can look at the ego-object, and vice-versa. We can realize that we are not so wonderful, sometimes we’re even worse than other people, because in deep zazen our true desires are revealed and we can see them fully.”
~ Taisen Deshimaru, in the book, Questions to a Zen Master
A strange thing about the illness I’ve gone through is that I don’t have any memory of certain events.
For example — from what I can gather — during my worst time(s) I wrote this Collection of ScalaTest BDD examples using FunSpec tutorial, but I have no memory of writing it. I know that I wrote it because (a) it’s my writing style and (b) it’s on my website, but other than that, I have no recall of it. None. Zilch.
For a little while that bothered me, but now I look at it as something that’s interesting. I think it’s weird/amazing that I could write a tutorial and have no memory of writing it (or the process of researching it), but I guess that’s how the brain can work when things are screwed up. During the same time I also wrote this note to “buy some december at the grocery store,” so I know my brain was definitely going out to lunch at times.
I can see how this can be frustrating for people with chronic memory problems, but at the moment I look at it more as a mystery, like, “Huh, well, I wonder what else I did during that time?”
Besides having a bad memory, I haven’t been able to work with Scala much recently, so I’ve been putting together this list of for loop examples.
This page is a work in progress, and as of tonight I haven’t tested some of the examples, but ... if you’re looking for some Scala for loop examples — technically called a for-comprehension or for-expression — I hope these examples are helpful.
“I’m just a guy ... a guy who saw a crack in a chair that no one else could see. I’m that dog who saw a rainbow. Only none of the other dogs believed me.”
(A quote from the movie Kate & Leopold.)
I don’t know about you, but the only thing I’m interested in getting for Cyber Monday is a Raspberry Pi 3 starter kit:
