Amazing treehouses from around the world
Failure Porn. Is there now too much celebration of failure?
Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging? (from 2011) Also: the message of the medium: why the Left loves twitter
Leftists don’t like being reminded of the socialist roots of Naziism. Also: Hitler and the socialist dream.
Best programming languages for beginners to learn.
Some signs of recovery in the rustbelt
Love the Recovery in the Rustbelt piece. I hope it keeps happening. Being a native Midwesterner, I love seeing the home team do well from time to time.
Ha! Does Failure Porn include the failure to provide the correct link to Failure Porn?
Arcs…good catch, now fixed…thanks.
The kinematic folding on that 3-D dress was interesting. So was the model.
The failure porn essay is good. There’s a lot of glib advice on the Internet about this topic that I think is mostly garbage. Most of the people writing are probably doing so to get attention for something they’re selling. It’s not much different from the inspirational platitudes and other feel-good fluff that’s ubiquitous online. Some of the advice givers are very successful people who are arrogantly generalizing from their own experiences, which in most cases probably have little value for anyone else. Most of the people with real experience with business failure aren’t writing about it for public consumption, and if they did it’s conceivable that few people would read it since, after all, they failed.
“Cheap and abundant natural gas is luring investment from manufacturers from Europe and Asia, ”
How the left must hate this sentence.
If the cities can deal with the black underclass and its pathologies, those cities might yet do well. Detroit, for example, is surrounded by nice close-in suburbs.
Chicago is strangled by taxes. Illinois could make it if only the Democrats could be overthrown. California is Chicago with good weather.
“Best programming languages for beginners to learn.”
The one everyone else is using so beginners can get the most help.
To my astonishment, that language, in wearables (cosplay) and drones, is C.
Shouts of race/class/gender incarnate three different varieties of hate, er Socialism, but are same thing judging by words, deeds, and results. All Socialism is anti-Enlightenment and cares nothing for truth which in its theory is bound to race/class/gender and is not independent.
Racial socialism is National Socialism,
Class socialism is Communism,
Gender socialism is Feminism,
and the consistency among these totalitarianisms is obvious, continuous, and frightening.
The recent example of feminists shrieking about the Jewish Question (I mean that 1/5 women are raped) and how the Show Trials can’t be questioned (I mean, how women never lie about rape) is conclusive.
The best I ever learnt was one of the ALGOL family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_IMP
Having to use Fortran or Basic after having used IMP was a horrible experience.
When I was programming for a living, Fortran had just come out. That was 1959 and what we could do was incredibly limited by today’s standards. The IBM 650 used a ten digit system in which the action to be performed was two digits, the address of the data was a four digit number and the address of the next instruction was the last four digits. It was before hexadecimal. Because the memory was 2000 ten digit spaces, the program took up most memory and the data was on punched cards. I once spent nearly a month trying to get the machine to print headers on each page of a multipage printout of calculations so you could see what column was what item. The machine could not do it, or at least I couldn’t figure out how to do it.
A couple of years later, IBM contacted me to see if I was interested in medical applications (I was now a medical student) but I wasn’t interested as I was sure it would be decades before computers would be useful for anything but billing. And it was.
After I spent a year at Dartmouth, including using SAS language for doing statistical analysis I got interested again and took some classes, beginning with Pascal, then C and then Visual Basic. I was going to go on to Visual C++ but lost interest about then.
A few years ago, I saw a young surgeon at the American College of Surgeons’ convention who had done a very good surgery office EMR with Visual Basic. Too bad the jerks who did Obamacare didn’t try it. I was very enthusiastic about electronic medical records 25 years ago but they are so user unfriendly as implemented by Obamacare that I have lost all enthusiasm. I think this will be my last year teaching, at least in part because of my annoyance at the EMR used by both teaching hospitals at USC.