Slate summarizes an article from the American Journal of Cardiology (emphasis added):
Transcendental meditation may prevent death from hypertension. In a study, hypertensive elderly people who used TM were 23 percent to 30 percent less likely to die than those who relied on other relaxation methods or drugs.
What is the difference between transcendental meditation and regular meditation? It must be pretty good if it makes people “less likely to die.”
My son is looking over my résumé, including the part where it says I’ve worked with lots of different languages.
“You don’t know a lot of languages,” he says.
I remember being told less than two years ago that if you kill Osama bin Laden, thousands more bin Ladens will rise in his place. I didn’t think so myself; he looks like a one-of-a-kind guy to me, as does Saddam Hussein. But if people rise up to take his place they’ll be killed as well. There are more of us than there are of them, and we are smarter, cleverer and more tolerant; and we, too, believe that our culture and civilization mustn’t be offended, defamed, raped and defiled.
Hi Mom!
Happy Mothers Day!
I know you were sad when I left, but I live with a loving family now, so you don’t have to worry about me.
Say hi to Dad.
Love, Lightning
P.S. Here is a picture of me with my owner.
— Lightning 
Much of present-day software acquisition procedure rests upon the assumption that one can specify a satisfactory system in advance, get bids for its construction, have it built, and install it. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong, and that many software acquisition problems spring from that fallacy.
We were doing incremental development as early as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM’s Service Bureau Corporation]. He was a colleague of John von Neumann, so perhaps he learned it there, or assumed it as totally natural . . .
All of us, as far as I can remember, thought waterfalling of a huge project was rather stupid, or at least ignorant of the realities. I think what the waterfall description did for us was make us realize that we were doing something else, something unnamed except for “software development.”
In his book, Agile and Iterative Development, [Craig] Larman has well documented the history of the many disasters introduced by accident when the Department of Defense standardized on a non-iterative method that was unproven on large projects. It was essentially a blunder by a consultant who had little experience with real software development.
The DOD has long since abandoned the waterfall method, and the consultant has recanted, but the waterfall approach persists as an urban myth in many software development organizations.
I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre.
. . . that I’d already noticed:
You know, nobody really cares what you have to say about anything.
My wife wants a massage . . .
“Moderate pressure or deep?” I ask.
“Deep . . . AAAAHHH! Moderate!”
To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty — much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority . . . This is called moral influence . . .
One of the moms from my son’s hockey team tells me that there’s too much “silliness” on the team, that the kids need to prepare for games with a little more seriousness.
I read today where someone called the new pope, Benedict XVI, “a tremendous intellect” because he speaks 10 languages and has written 40 books.
I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s say it is. What are the 40 books about? His unquestioned acceptance of everything he’s ever been told?
Explanations of daily changes in aggregate stock market indices are among the most ridiculous, speculative, and uncertain causal inferences made by journalists . . .
Today I saw a woman driving a car with a license plate frame that read:
IS A HAPPY LIFE
How ominous is that? It’s a threat, really. Get ready to have “I’m not happy” brandished as a weapon against you for the rest of your life.
You see, the wife can’t figure out how to be happy, therefore the husband must devote all of his energy and attention to figuring out how to keep her happy, solve her problems, and somehow get her through the day.
And what if, as a result of this, he is not happy? Who cares!?
Be very careful, young man, is what I’m saying here . . .
Here’s a short excerpt from an article called “Ninety-Nine Rules for Managing ‘Better, Faster, Cheaper’ Projects” by Alexander Laufer and Edward J. Hoffman:
In a dynamic environment, project management is not about performing according to plan, with minimal changes. It is about meeting customer needs, while coping successfully with unavoidable changes. Therefore, the planning system should be capable of coping with changes.
Jesus Christ, if I could articulate even one rule that perfectly, I’d publish it and call it a day . . . but there are 98 more of these!
Here’s another one:
More paperwork does not ensure greater information reliability or accuracy — it only adds to the non-value-added cost. It only seems that adding more measurement and reporting means better control. The illusion of control may partially explain an obsession with control.
A must read!
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Please welcome . . . Anton Chekov!
6 Programmer Analysts with Java, J2EE, Weblogic, Websphere (before Java you should have programmed in C++ not VB or Visual Basic)
I don’t entirely share the author’s view that programmers can be ordered up like pizzas — Java, C++, hold the VB — and I would point out, sadly, that the hiring path for developers is now littered with jackasses who don’t know that VB and Visual Basic are the same thing . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Women represent nearly half the workers in the U.S. — 46.6 percent. However, they always have been underrepresented in I.T. Even more discouraging is the fact that the percentage of women working in I.T. jobs is not growing but dropping.
Why is that discouraging? Who exactly is discouraged by it?
Here’s a simple explanation: Maybe women don’t want to work in IT. Is there nothing more rewarding that a woman can do with her life than work in IT?
IT in the post-dot-com era is a stagnant industry. A lot of people in it would like to get out of it, but they need the money.
I don’t encourage my son to get into it, nor would I encourage my daughter to get into it, if I had one . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
When I used to drop my son off for a half day of pre-school, he’d try every trick in the book — Dad, I need someone to push me on the swings! — to get me to stay just a few more minutes . . .
Misspellings are in the original document:
I am not the most organised person in the world. I have a poor short-term memory, so I write things down. But because I have a poor short-term memory, I loose the paper. I tried to become more organised — I brought Getting Things Done. Then I lost it. I feel I might be more organised if I stop loosing my organisational aids.
This is such an inane activity — snorkeling, that is, not biting people in half — that if you find yourself engaged in it, it’s a pretty good indication that your life has already gone on way too long.
