We are Rotten Flesh™

According to their own self-description on Reddit, openSUSE is for open minds. A good way to demonstrate that open-mindedness, dear fellow boiling frog, is to call political opponents bigots, hateful and rotten flesh. Faced with this, I can only pray "Lord, have mercy on them, they are just clueless". Also, a good time to re-read …

I will not lie to please your masters

Political correctness is a cancer of the mind. It is based on lies, and worse yet, it demands that you bow to the lies. In a very Grenouille Bouillie way, this propaganda technique has slowly invaded not just politics, but even the corporate world, and we are now at risk of losing major human rights, …

Orwell’s 1984 was not an instruction manual

Some seem to mistakenly believe that George Orwell's 1984 was an instruction manual. It was a warning against dictatorship and specifically the socialist / communist / nazi / fascist / marxist flavor of dictatorship that sprouted all along the XXth century. It looks like the younger generation does not know enough history, and they are being played again, using the exact same playbook.

Paul Graham recommends doing things that don’t scale

As usual, Paul Graham writes an interesting piece about startups. He recommends doing things that don't scale. Thinking like a big company is a sure way to fail. It's a reassuring piece for the startup creator that I am, because at Taodyne, we are indeed in this phase where you do everything yourself and you'd …

Curly braces in Go: 101 posts and counting…

Someone asked on the Go language mailing list about the placement of curly braces. The thread currently has 101 posts. And my guess is that this is just the beginning. Programmers are familiar with holy wars. This thread reinforces my belief that Go should put a little more emphasis on flexibility or extensibility, and a …

About peculiar and unusual points of views

If every individual student follows the same current fashion in expressing and thinking about electrodynamics or field theory, then the variety of hypotheses being generated to understand strong interactions, say, is limited. Perhaps rightly so, for possibly the chance is high that the truth lies in the fashionable direction. But, on the off-chance that it …

Compliment or insult?

Two of my interests collide in this post: cultural differences and physics. Tommaso Dorigo begins his long report about a talk by Lisa Randall with: If you allow a slip to inappropriate comments, Lisa Randall is notoriously not only an esteemed and well-known theorist, but also a quite attractive woman - a powerful mix, capable …

The "being unreasonable" tactic…

Until yesterday, my approach to get some help with publication of my pet theory had been to ask for advice, as politely as possible, sending only one, rarely two e-mails, and giving a lot of time for response. Basically, the approach that usually gets you results pretty quickly in the software community. Naturally, my questions …

Smiling or not?

Americans and Japanese read faces differently. This is one of the many problems members of international teams face. A related issue I find particularly challenging is humor. For example, sarcasm is perceived very differently by different cultures, as Douglas Adams alluded to by making Ford Escort sarcasm-impaired in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy...

Slashdot on the election of Nicolas Sarkozy

There is an article on Slashdot about the election of Nicolas Sarkozy. The header of the story included Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure for his demand that immigrants learn Western values (and the French language), a phrase that number of readers commented, noting if I'm going to move to France I'm at least …