John Wooden, 1910-2010

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John Wooden

I thought John Wooden was going to live forever.

I grew up here in Southern California watching his UCLA Bruin teams dominate college basketball. The main thing I learned from that is that success is a result of preparation. Coach Wooden was a teacher. After he retired, he used to say that he didn’t miss the games and he didn’t miss the tournaments, but he did miss the practices.

College basketball today is unwatchable, in my opinion. The coaches are all bug-eyed lunatics, screaming, waving their arms, tearing their hair out. I’m sickened by these college basketball coaches and their look-at-me theatrics.

Does that help the team win? I watched UCLA win 10 championships and I don’t think Coach Wooden even got out of his chair the whole time. Draw your own conclusions.

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Divorce is Bad for the Planet

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Moon Rise behind the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm

Al, Tipper Gore Shock Friends With Divorce Announcement

— ABC News

As if the burden of divorce weren’t bad enough, people with failed marriages can be blamed for global warming, according to a study by Michigan State University.

Divorced couples use up more space in their respective homes, which amounts to to 38 million more rooms worldwide to light, heat and cool, noted the report.

And people who divorced used 73 billion kilowatt-hours more of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water than they would otherwise in 2005.

Dissolving a marriage also means doubling possessions, from the lowly can opener to the SUV. The report, however, did not estimate how many more natural resources the children of shared-custody parents consume by getting birthday and holiday gifts twice.

Nor did it count the greenhouse gases spent to shuttle kids between their pair of energy-hogging households.

— CNET News

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Henderson the Rain King

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Sunset in Kenya - Masai Mara

“There is that poem about the nightingale singing that humankind cannot stand too much reality. But how much unreality can it stand? Do you follow? You understand me?”

“Me unnastand, sah.”

“I fired that question right back at the nightingale. So what if reality may be terrible? It’s better than what we’ve got.”

“Kay, sah. Okay.”

“All right, I let you out of it. It’s better than what I’ve got. But every man feels from his soul that he has got to carry his life to a certain depth. Well, I have got to go on because I haven’t reached that depth yet. You get it?”

“Yes, sah.”

— Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

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EppsNet Love Song of the Day: Bargain

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I’d gladly lose me to find you
I’d gladly give up all I had
To find you I’d suffer anything and be glad

I’d pay any price just to get you
I’d work all my life and I will
To win you I’d stand naked, stoned and stabbed

I’d call that a bargain
The best I ever had

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How to Be a Denialist

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self-applied blindfold
  • Allege that there’s a conspiracy. Claim that scientific consensus has arisen through collusion rather than the accumulation of evidence.
  • Use fake experts to support your story. “Denial always starts with a cadre of pseudo-experts with some credentials that create a facade of credibility,” says Seth Kalichman of the University of Connecticut.
  • Cherry-pick the evidence: trumpet whatever appears to support your case and ignore or rubbish the rest. Carry on trotting out supportive evidence even after it has been discredited.
  • Create impossible standards for your opponents. Claim that the existing evidence is not good enough and demand more. If your opponent comes up with evidence you have demanded, move the goalposts.
  • Use logical fallacies. Hitler opposed smoking, so anti-smoking measures are Nazi. Deliberately misrepresent the scientific consensus and then knock down your straw man.
  • Manufacture doubt. Falsely portray scientists as so divided that basing policy on their advice would be premature. Insist “both sides” must be heard and cry censorship when “dissenting” arguments or experts are rejected.
— Martin McKee

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Payback Time

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PARIS — Across Western Europe, the “lifestyle superpower,” the assumptions and gains of a lifetime are suddenly in doubt. The deficit crisis that threatens the euro has also undermined the sustainability of the European standard of social welfare, built by left-leaning governments since the end of World War II.

— Payback Time – Deficit Crisis Threatens Ample Benefits of European Life – NYTimes.com

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Nothing But the Night

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Times Square at night

Now hollow fires burn out to black,
  And lights are guttering low:
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
  And leave your friends and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,
  Look not to left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
  There’s nothing but the night.

— A. E. Housman, “A Shropshire Lad”

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New Programming Jargon

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Excerpts from Global Nerdy:

Bugfoot

A bug that isn’t reproducible and has been sighted by only one person.

Shrug Report

A bug report with no error message or “how to reproduce” steps and only a vague description of the problem. Usually contains the phrase “doesn’t work.”

Smug Report

A bug report submitted by a user who thinks he knows a lot more about the system’s design than he really does. Filled with irrelevant technical details and one or more suggestions (always wrong) about what he thinks is causing the problem and how we should fix it.

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A Rare Event

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I’m out walking the dog and one of the neighborhood moms asks me, “What grade is your son in now?”

“He’s a junior in high school this year,” I reply.

“I saw him out walking the dog the other day.”

“You did? Oh you’re lucky to see that,” I said. “It’s a rare event, like an eclipse. Everyone gets very excited when it happens.”

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