Grocery shopping lately reminds me of the Seinfeld “Can you spare a square?” episode.
Scala, Java, Unix, MacOS tutorials (page 72)
I still get a chuckle out of things that are designed poorly. In the example shown in the image, when you turn the top handle to lock this door, nothing visible happens. You hear a little sound, but when you look at the crack in the door there is no bolt; nothing moves. The feeling is disconcerting, because you have no idea if this door — a bathroom door in a hospital — is locked. The situation is so bad that the people at the hospital made this little sign to assure you that the door is locked.
This is a case where technology helps to create a problem. Some engineer or designer figured out how to make a lock without any visible moving parts, but they didn’t take the human factor into account with their design.
As a brief note, late on the afternoon of March 11, 2020, the number of COVID-19 cases in Colorado have increased from 11 to 33 in two days.
Update: We increased to 77 cases by the evening of March 13, and 101 cases by noon on March 14. So coronavirus cases in Colorado are just about tripling every two days in Colorado.
Late on March 11, 2020, I just took a look at the stock market. After today’s drop, the S&P has arguably gone back in time to June 1, 2018, as shown in the top image. As shown in the bottom image, you can argue that the Dow Jones (Trump’s “Dow Joans”) has gone back even further, to October, 2017.
This is happening as the Coronavirus (COVID-19) has been hitting the United States over the last 1-2 weeks. Here in Colorado we had 11 cases reported two days ago, and two days later we’re up to 33.
On the evening of March 9, 2020, Colorado now has 11 people with the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). As shown in this image, the two most recent people have no known contact with an infected person, which is pretty scary. You can get up to date statistics at this colorado.gov URL.
On the personal front, I went to the hospital this morning, and I’d guess it was about 1/3 to 1/2 as populated as normal. When I went to have some imaging work done, the technician who was going to do the work was waiting for me when I walked to the Imaging Department, and I was in and out in a few minutes. Later at the grocery store, it was the same, maybe half as full as normal.
I’m not sure why this is called the Scala 2019 developer survey, since the results were released in February or March, 2020, but just follow that link to see more charts like the one shown in this image.
This image is part of a new Heart Sutra translation by Thich Nhat Hanh. “New” is a relative term, because it looks like this translation happened in 2014, but it was just released in 2020 by Plum Village. Here’s a link to the complete translation, and here’s a letter that describes why this translation was made. The first paragraph of the letter begins:
“Thay needs to make this new translation of the Heart Sutra because the patriarch who originally compiled the Heart Sutra was not sufficiently skilful enough with his use of language. This has resulted in much misunderstanding for almost 2,000 years.”
I don’t know many sutras, but the Heart Sutra is my favorite, so it’s interesting to see this new translation.
Wow, how embarrassing. It has taken me *years* to realize that when I run on all fours in a dream that I’m actually a dog (or maybe some other four-legged animal).
I finally realized it this morning when I was running like that and came up to a group of human friends, and one said something like, “Hey, look over there, it’s your new friend.”
When I looked in the direction he was pointing I saw a group of people who didn’t look familiar, and a black dog. Just then the dog came running at me. When it got to me it started licking and biting me and I thought, “This dog is crazy, why doesn’t someone get it off of me,” when everything suddenly made sense.
(A Facebook post from November 14, 2014)
While almost all of the other sled dogs are sleeping, this one doesn’t seem to want to sleep. Photo from this Twitter page.
The “Nome National Forest.” The Iditarod race ends in Nome, Alaska, somewhere near here.
If you didn’t realize it, this is actually a joke. What you’re seeing is a bunch of Christmas trees shoved into the snow on top of some sea ice.
The image comes from this Twitter page.
This photo of two black dogs comes from the Iditarod Trail Committee Facebook page.
Ah, the adorable puppy head tilt. :) (Based on an image search, this appears to be created by Mark Parisi.)
Had a dream about having a job interview with Apple this morning. I was talking to some guy, and he asked me to write some Scala code for a particular problem, so I did. I wrote the solution by hand, and as usual, writing in a dream is hard, and the handwriting didn’t look like my own.
Then he didn’t seem to interested in the solution. He told me to follow him and we went into a room filled with a few couches, folding chairs, and Apple employees. They were getting set to watch a video or teleconference.
“Pursue something so important that even if you fail, the world is better off with you having tried.”
~ Tim O’Reilly
Weird thought of the weekend: I was just listening to Make It With You by Bread, and I thought, “I can love someone else, but I can’t imagine why they would love me.” I wonder how many people think that.
Life can be short or long
Love can be right or wrong
And if I chose the one I’d like to help me through
I’d like to make it with you
I just found this tweet from Grzegorz Kossakowski, and agree with it all the way. For Scala, the fusion of OOP+FP is a founding principle — and it’s well-explained in the book Programming in Scala — so lets see where it takes us.
xkcd has a really interesting article on orbital speed, i.e., how fast something needs to move (sideways) to stay in orbit over the Earth.
I’m sure there must be other ways to mathematically see these differences, but I agree with the general concept that it can be easy to be misled by data. (Image from this Twitter page.)
When I started watching Season 3 of In Treatment, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Irrfan Khan plays one of the patients. I enjoy listening to his voice, he's a good storyteller.
Over the 2019-2020 holidays, the Mars Curiosity Rover took a series of high-res photos on Mars. The panorama shown in the video in this tweet contains 1.8 billion pixels, and lets you zoom in on features many miles away.
