One thing I really appreciate about good authors is their ability to clearly articulate ideas or impressions that I share, but am unable to express on my own. Or in other words, I love seeing these semi-conscious ideas floating through my mind assembled eloquently in language. I think this takes an enormous amount of skill.
I agree with French author Marcel Proust, who claimed "there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one sees oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt." We can learn what we feel by reading material written by others. We can develop our thoughts through the thoughts of others.
Of course, one shortcoming with this idea, and in my opinion, of literature in general, is that ultimately the author is not ourselves. Despite an authors ability to help us understand our feelings and enhance our sense of perception, there inevitably is a divergence in the particulars of our personal situations and those found in writing. Trying to mold our experiences into those of a book, in hopes of finding answers or guidance, is misguided.
Proust explains better than I can myself:
'It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role, at once essential yet limited, that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called 'Conclusions' but for the reader 'Incitements'. We feel very strongly that our wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to provide us with is desires... That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.'
``I have a physical checklist for when I’m doing a deployment. It’s, off the top of my head maybe six commands long; one, two, three, four, five, six. I check them off; dink, dink, dink, dink, dink. And then after I do that, I have the other checklist to verify that it actually took, you know the things that I did that had the expected effect. I missed doing that once because I was exhausted at the day job and, sure enough, that was my biggest down time in four years. So I’m trying to be better at it in the future.''
Sometime some type of technology does not not lend itself to 100% automation. So there will be certain steps that would require a bit of human intervention.
Of course, we all wish that all software is written according to the UNIX philosophy.
Here's a commented version of my .vimrc, which is modeled after Steve's, albeit nowhere near as comprehensive. (Looks like I lost it's fixed width in the paste? Sorry!)
For me it's a lot quicker to reference comments than the :help entry for each option. Thought it might help others who are creating/modifying their .vimrc.
And of course, thanks Steve for continuing to share your stuff. I'm in love with Vim, and a lot of that's thanks to you.
I think that word 'learn' may mean 2 entirely different thing, and that's why the op may be confusing for some people. We can think of learning as improving your skills in one area, or we can think of it as exploring possibilities. For example you could learn some programming language (as your first) like C++ and then stop doing stupid shit and become expert at it, or you could do stupid shit like ingesting news about every new shine technology that comes out and settle for something else later, like ror. Succesful learning is for me a bit about balancing between 'breadth search' and 'depth search'.
However this is not exactly what the OP is about - I think author's point is to cut off things that doesn't work, and stick to those who do; it's about optimizing your learning methodology.
Also you can do really stupid shit, like browsing reddit all day long (which was my first thought when I looked at the title), but that's different thing, and it's quite obvious that it won't lead you to success.
First, don't be afraid to fail and make stupid mistakes. Then, after you've made those mistakes, examine them and eliminate them. I think the author is talking about the latter part, and that often this process of removing mistakes is all it takes to be good at something. This idea could be reassuring to you if you tend to think that you need a certain genius that you do not have in order to excel. All you need is the ability to recognize your mistakes and the will to get past them.
> but isn't there a flaw in the explanation that running usually happened on dirt, grass, and not on the paved streets of New York?
This seems intuitive when considering the difference in impulse between a sidewalk and a grassy lawn, but I'm not sure it actually makes any difference if you have good form - the idea there being that your calves take all the impact (remember impulse, again), versus your knees. Muscles can develop - whereas joints and bones can deteriorate. There's a good illustration of this in the following link from Harvard, which elaborates on the mechanics of foot strike with pretty charts showing the force generated in different scenarios: http://www.barefootrunning.fas.harvard.edu/4BiomechanicsofFo...
I started running in VFFs in September, 2009, but didn't seriously commit to running in them until January of this year. I've since logged 1,200 miles in them and haven't looked back. I've done numerous 20+ mile runs in my Vibrams, including a marathon within the past month. There were 2,700 entrants at that race, but only two runners (including myself) wore VFFs. I haven't had any stress fractures or other injuries since I've started wearing them, even when logging around 60 miles per week. (This is not to say that I disagree with the other comments in this thread.)
I'm pretty passionate about barefoot running. I love to see others joining the movement, so I try to encourage best practices to those making the transition. If any of you have questions about how to take the plunge, feel free to follow up here or contact me via email.
Regardless of your favored method of distribution, make sure you consider the consequences of sharing classified documents.
Those consequences are probably negligible for the overwhelming majority here, but for anybody anticipating getting a US security clearance within the next seven years, you're likely shooting yourself in the foot. You'll either have to reveal the fact that you've disclosed classified material, or else lie under oath. Neither of those being ideal if you're trying to get that job.
It also conflicts with your clearance if you're already holding one.
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't support Wikileaks. Just make sure you give it adequate thought before jumping on a torrent.
Interesting point. I currently do some work for a different federal government which involves some security clearance. I may need US security clearance in the future, and the conflict is something I hadn't considered until now. However (and I usually try to avoid ideological soapboxes, but), I believe that government should exist for the people, and not the other way around. I'll take my chances.
Sincerely though, thanks for pointing that out. It may have more immediate/drastic consequences for others and should certainly be taken into consideration.
It's absurd. It's public knowledge now. They're trying to threaten the bourgeois intellectuals. DOn't give into this baseless (Baseless in precedent I don't know how much they get to discriminate based on politics) threat. Also if State et al. don't hire anyone interested by the cables I think we might be slightly screwed later.
Rather than get into the ethics of it, I was simply hoping that people would pause, even if just for a second, to make sure they were comfortable being involved. I'm not trying to sway people either way.
I agree with you - you can't put Pandora back in the box. I don't, however, think that changes the classification of the leaked documents. When judging an individual's fitness for a security clearance, I imagine that they're looking more at character traits than specific instances of undesirable behavior. Sharing these documents that are already "public knowledge" is only noteworthy because it may indicate that you're not uncomfortable with the idea of releasing classified documents if it's for a cause you believe in. (Just speculating here)
>>Also if State et al. don't hire anyone interested by the cables I think we might be slightly screwed later
I disagree with this. I can think of a handful of reasons somebody lacking interest in these cables would still want to work for the government. Example: To do engineering work for a defense contractor, you'll undoubtedly need a secret+ clearance. You might seek such positions for the job security they provide. Or maybe you're interested in working with cutting edge technology that isn't necessarily available at more budget constrained (IE commercial) companies. Many of the engineers working at a high technical level are drawn to the technology, not the politics.
To reveal any bias, I should note that I do contract work for the US government.
It's not a baseless threat. Security clearances do not just disappear because classified information has been made public. Security classification is a government process/label, and applies until it is removed.
The key issue is that a person with a security clearance cannot knowingly distribute information that he knows carries a security classification. It's not a matter of "being interested."
You can rant all you want, but that does not change the fact that if you have/want a security clearance and you redistribute the Wikileaks content (the American stuff; the foreign stuff is okay), you will lose or be denied a security clearance.
Newsroom does... kind of. It places an icon of a designated feed on your home screen and shows how many unread items you have. It's similar to what the iPhone does for a lot of things.
Edit: Just noticed that the Wolfram links break because of their syntax. HN then worsens the problem, by shortening the displayed links with '...', meaning copy/paste breaks! So I'm just removing the http prefix and you'll have to copy/paste to view any of the graphs.
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This seems to disagree with the gist of the comic, but I think the answer to the final part (largest dating pool) is 23 years old.
I arrived at that by doing the following, please correct me if you spot an error along the way!
The dating range for any age, t, would be defined as:
lower limit = .5t + 7
upper limit = 2t - 14
This agrees with the example in the XKCD strip. The dating range for an 18 year old is from .5(18)+7 = 16 to 2(18)-14 = 22. Because this is linear, the range will always be increasing with age.
Despite the range growing with age, we know that the proportion of singles is decreasing with age. Sigh. That's where the other model comes in. The author of this problem gives:
S(t) = e^(-0.05*t)
That looks like this: www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot[E^(-0.05+x),+{x,+85,18}]
I believe the largest dating pool would correspond with the greatest area yielded by taking the definite integral of this function from .5t+7 (the lower age limit) to 2t+14 (the upper age limit). To see this in pretty print, you can visit this link: www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=integrate+(E^(-.05x))+dx+from+(.5x%2B7)+to+(2*x-14)
Evaluating that for any age would give the area under the curve corresponding to that age.
The next step, then, would be to find the maximum area for any age. To do this, we should be able to take the derivative of that previous equation, and set it equal to 0 in order to maximize it. Again, correct me if I'm wrong, but for the result of that, I get:
-2000(e^(-0.1t+0.7) - e^(-0.025t+0.35)) = 0
I plotted that to find that the max was located at age t = 23.
This graph illustrates the size of the dating pool corresponding to age along the x axis: www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Plot[-2000(e^(-0.1x%2B0.7)-e^(-0.025x%2B0.35)),+{x,+0,+100}]
Comments? Did I approach this totally wrong? Did I miss something along the way? Does that seem reasonable?
I agree with French author Marcel Proust, who claimed "there is no better way of coming to be aware of what one sees oneself than by trying to recreate in oneself what a master has felt." We can learn what we feel by reading material written by others. We can develop our thoughts through the thoughts of others.
Of course, one shortcoming with this idea, and in my opinion, of literature in general, is that ultimately the author is not ourselves. Despite an authors ability to help us understand our feelings and enhance our sense of perception, there inevitably is a divergence in the particulars of our personal situations and those found in writing. Trying to mold our experiences into those of a book, in hopes of finding answers or guidance, is misguided.
Proust explains better than I can myself:
'It is one of the great and wonderful characteristics of good books (which allows us to see the role, at once essential yet limited, that reading may play in our spiritual lives) that for the author they may be called 'Conclusions' but for the reader 'Incitements'. We feel very strongly that our wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off, and we would like him to provide us with answers when all he is able to provide us with is desires... That is the value of reading, and also its inadequacy. To make into a discipline is to give too large a role to what is only an incitement. Reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life; it can introduce us to it: it does not constitute it.'