Deep thought: An instruction I have never followed. And will never follow.

"Rinse rice thoroughly before cooking."

If being submerged for thirty-five minutes in boiling water ain't gonna do it, ten seconds of cold water beforehand sure ain't, either.

Geezer Alert! (Memories on a Tuesday afternoon)

I don't remember my first experience of programming computers. Close to the beginning, though, for sure, was a course I took in my junior year of high school (c. 1976), where we learned how to write BASIC programs that ran on a DEC PDP-8, I think it was. There was one terminal, which displayed both what you were typing and your program's output on yellow paper, a giant roll of which lived in a cardboard box, below the terminal.

I do vividly remember the first time I made money programming. It was right around that time, probably a school break six months later, when I was asked by my friend's father to put together something that would display bar charts and stuff like that. In this case, I was using his Apple computer (model number long since vanished from memory), which hooked into the TV and used a cassette tape recorder to store programs. He paid me $10 for four hours' work, which was a considerable bump from what I had ever made before that; e.g., about a $1/hr for a paper route, babysitting, and lawn-mowing, maybe $1.50/hr for caddying.

The money was nice, but it wasn't the most important thing. Computers were just ... pretty cool, and the thought that it was not inconceivable that I could someday get paid for playing with them? Well, as I said, still a vivid memory.

Fast forward to the time that they became magical.

After having been excused from further attendance after my sophomore year in college ("Mr. Blutarsky: 0.0"), I still hung around with my erstwhile classmates over the next few years. Mostly in bars, admittedly. But for some reason, one night, I went with one of them to a class, which was an introduction to Lotus 1-2-3. Looking at the Wikipedia article, I now realize that this must have been very near the initial release, well before it became the proverbial killer app. Anyway ...

omg

To be able to put a number in one cell, and then a formula in another cell that referred to the contents of the first cell, and displayed the result in place, and then instantaneously updated when you changed the first cell? That was when I got hooked.

I said magical, but it was something else, too. It felt like I was privy to a sorcerer's secrets. I could make something happen that looked magical, but it was, behind the curtain, absolutely, 100%, purely logical.

What brought about these memories?

A fascinating article by Amy Peniston, posted just a week ago, in which she describes her observation of ...

... a radical shift in data analysis methodologies. Excel-based models, which had seemed top-of-the-line suddenly were too slow and too rigid; Integration with 3rd party data sources, which was once a luxury, became the norm; And analysts began to utilize scripts to accomplish many labor-intensive tasks typically performed by hand or in spreadsheets.

Enabling this change is a suite of accessible Python-powered tools.

I apologize if that punchline didn't knock you off your couch, or home barstool, or ergonomically correct desk chair, or what have you. So let me tell you that there's more! She observed these changes while working in ... wait for it ... the reinsurance industry.

Wait, what? Still not sold?

Ah, well. Such is the lot of the nerd. But thanks for reading all the way through.

(h/t: PyCoder's Weekly)

Deep Thought

It has long fascinated me that our mouths are simulataneously one of the most horrible sources of infection and about the most rapidly healing part of the body I can name.

Pro tip: just because you blow once or twice on a hunk of potato you just boiled and repeat that for a ladelful of a reheating stew [1] that seemed to need a little extra starch doesn't mean you aren't going to burn the roof of your mouth.

You'd almost think I'd've figured that out by now.

Anyway, let the healing begin! (Dousing with rioja [2] seems to be helping.)

---

[1] Spiced Chickpea Stew With Coconut and Turmeric

[2] Spanish wine with a South Asian-ish dish? Yeah. I'm a savage. Or a multiculturalist. One of those.

Inspirational! But ... it's complicated.

My first thought upon reading this was: Wow! Gotta pass that along!

De la Pava himself can seem like an avenging angel, at least for those with a certain view of what ails contemporary American literature. He exists off the literary grid, which is to say that he lives in the real world and has a real job—as a public defender in the criminal courts of Manhattan. He has no M.F.A., no teaching post. The academy hasn’t laid a finger on him. He self-published his first novel, “A Naked Singularity,” in 2008, after eighty-eight agents turned it down. Against all odds, it found a literary audience, and when the University of Chicago Press republished it, in 2012, it received the PEN/Bingham Prize as the best début fiction of the year.

My second thoughts, however ... How many other aspiring novelists have been rejected time and time again, simply because their novels weren't any good? Is passing the above along akin to rejoicing because someone won the lottery, while neglecting to reflect upon the millions of people who, week after week, blow tens or hundreds or thousands of dollars, seeking that lucky ticket?

I don't mean to disparage Sergio De la Pava at all -- the review in which the above appeared certainly makes me want to read all three of his books. Just ... it's complicated.

Um ... yeah. Well, I certainly aspire ...

Sometimes, throwaway lines make you (me) think. Here's one, from the start (about 4:50) of a Google Talks interview thing with an erstwhile Tibetan monk who seems now to be in the business of ... talking to small crowds of people like the Googlers, which is not a bad thing, something he says one of his teachers told him:

... unless you can improve on silence, it's better not to say anything at all.

I can hear everyone I work with nodding with cocked eyebrows, of course, but that's not the important part.

So, a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, and an atheist walk into a bar ...

Ah, sorry. There's no punchline.

But it was a great way to spend Christmas Eve. Thanks y'all.

And praise god for diversity.

I might even say.

Because vernacular, of course.

Deep thought

I'm not much of a spiritual guy anymore, but there are some times when I feel guilty about not giving a reverential enough look at the just past full moon, with Jupiter right next door.

Deep thought

Cheap is nice, but how long until a 3D printer can make a copy of itself?

My mind is a terrible thing

I glanced at this three times before I realized it did not say "Dana Fetish Cubes."

Changing times

I have no opinion on Jennifer Carroll's recent tribulations (the range of my expertise on this matter being encompassed by the three latest Wonkette posts on her), least of all whether she was having an affair with another woman, but this sentence did kinda jump out at me:

Ms. Carroll, who has been married for 30 years, offended lesbians by saying, “Black women who look like me don’t have relationships like that.” She later apologized, but critics said it was a major stumble.

Never mind everything else there (particularly "critics said," about which I could go off on one of my usual rants); it struck me that the New York Times's saying offended lesbians in such a straightforward yet low-key way is different, in ways I have no precise words for, from what I might have read in those same pages, a decade, or two, or three, ago.

Sometimes signs of progress in ongoing struggles aren't brilliantly lit, but I think I like the subtle ones the best. Somehow, they seem the most real.

Anyway ...

You are now free to make fun of the Republican griftin' half-lieutenant-governor. Super Big Gulp jokes are go.

Deep thought

Is the opposite of anemic ironic?

Deep thought

Whence came the expression hailing from (as in "originally hailing from Australia and now living in Los Angeles")?

Because we never say snowing from or sleeting from or raining from.

Well, reigning from, maybe.

---

The example above had nothing to do with the previous post. Rather, I was Googling in response to the next post.

Deep thought

Yesterday, I watched an SUV pull into a handicapped parking spot. It had a Ron Paul bumper sticker. I wonder if the driver enjoyed the irony as much as I did.

"Pyongyang ... deals with fewer electricity shortages than other parts of the country."

So says the caption.

My first reaction: the other parts of North Korea have electricity?

__________

[Added] Probably you remember seeing a picture like this:

[ + ]

(pic. source)

Deep thought

Shouldn't denuded mean clothes put back on?

Deep Thought

What came first, JavaScript's truthy or Colbert's truthiness?

Deep thought

How much longer will it be before some kid comes up to you and says, "What's that Save icon supposed to be?"

Shadow thought

Don't you love when an idle conjecture flashes through your mind, and it turns out to be correct?

Maybe the idea was spurred by having fruit on the brain? Or am I completely off tropic?

Diaeresis (geezer moment?)

I think I am just young enough that the word cooperate spelled with an umlaut above the second O -- coöperate -- looks archaic. (I was re-reading an old favorite last night, which was published in the early 1960s.)

On the other hand, acting on a suggestion by Pierre Igot, I can confirm that the New Yorker still spells it that way,^[1] and I have never noticed.  [Added: Thanks to MB in Comments, see this, especially. And then you will be able to chortle at my blunder in the first sentence of this post.]

..  ..  ..

[1] Except, it appears, on blogs, for obvious reasons.^[2]

[2] ALT-0246, if you're interested. If you're writing markup text, ö also wörks.

..  ..  ..

P.S. I was going to spell the post title diæresis, but I thought that would be going a little far.

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Deep thought

I wonder how long it will be before someone he listens to will tell that Papa John© guy, "Seriously, you do not come across as likeable on camera. Not. Even. Close."