You call me a Christian, to make me angry and to make yourself feel happy. Others call themselves Christians, to make themselves feel other emotions. Very well, if we are dealing in exciting words, I will call you a devil-worshipper. That should give you an agitation which will please you for some time.
The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. — Nietzsche
How Did the Rose Ever Open Its Heart?
How
Did the rose
Ever open its heartAnd give this world
All its
Beauty?It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,Otherwise,
We all remainToo
Frightened
This is My Year!
My dad is 82 . . . he says he always thought that someday he would get everything organized and under control but it never happened.
That being said, I feel like this is the year I get everything organized and under control . . .
When Death Is Not Death
A certain man was believed to have died, and was being prepared for burial, when he revived.
He sat up, but he was so shocked by the scene surrounding him that he fainted.
He was put in a coffin, and the funeral party set off for the cemetery.
Just as they arrived at the grave, he regained consciousness, lifted the coffin lid, and cried out for help.
“It is not possible that he has revived,” said the mourners, “because he has been certified dead by competent experts.”
“But I am alive!” shouted the man.
He appealed to a well-known impartial scientist and jurisprudent who was present.
“Just a moment,” said the expert.
He then turned to the mourners, counting them. “Now we have heard what the alleged deceased has had to say. You fifty witnesses tell me what you regard as the truth.”
“He is dead,” said the witnesses.
“Bury him!” said the expert.
And so he was buried.
Two Reasons For the Low Number of Women in Computer Jobs
I saw this chart on LinkedIn with the heading “Chart: Women in tech continue to face uphill battle” and the hashtag #STEMSexism.
The first reason for the low number of women in computer jobs is that we rarely hear about women in computing except in the context of pay gaps, harassment, discrimination, “uphill battles” and #STEMSexism.
It’s self-perpetuating. “Computing is a terrible profession for women in so many ways.” Followed by “Why aren’t there more women in computing?”
You’ve answered your own question. If you think computing is a hostile profession (I do not, btw), why do you want more women to go into it?
The second reason for the low number of women in computer jobs — sometimes the simplest explanations are the best — is that women prefer to do other things.
Men and women are different and make different choices about their lives, as a result of which, women are underrepresented in some professions and overrepresented in others.
Women, for example, are overrepresented in nursing, family counseling, speech pathology, social work, education, to name a few.
Do we hear about a diversity crisis in speech pathology or social work? We don’t, right?
I worked with a nursing organization for five years. About 90 percent of nurses are women, but in five years I can’t remember a single instance where gender bias was cited as a crisis, a dilemma, a problem, or even something as mild as a cause for concern.
Women being overrepresented in certain professions is not widely considered to be a problem. But if women being underrepresented in computer jobs is a problem, then their overrepresentation in other professions is also a problem.
In fact, it’s the same problem. Because where are the women in computing going to come from?
On the safe assumption that the number of women is constant — that a large number of new women are not going to just appear out of nowhere — the women will have to come from other professions that they seem to prefer, the professions in which they are overrepresented.
Sorry girls, we can’t have so many of you working in healthcare, education and other helping professions because we need to boost the computing numbers.
Or — we could calm down about the computing numbers and leave young women to make their own choices about their own lives.
TL;DR -> Women are capable of making decisions for themselves. For the most part, they choose to do things other than work in computer jobs, which is okay. It’s possible that none of us really knows what is the “right” percentage of women in computing and it’s possible that none of us really knows what other people should be doing with their lives.
Thus spoke The Programmer
Another Reason I Prefer to Just Stay Home
A passenger jet skidded off a runway and got stuck in the mud on the edge of a cliff in northern Turkey. — MSN
When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men. — Epitaph of Jalaludin Rumi
What Shall I Be?
I have again and again grown like grass;
I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels:
After that soaring higher than angels —
What you cannot imagine. I shall be that.
Integrity and Self-Respect
Forgive yourself for your mistakes and embrace yourself with all your character traits just as they are, believing that you’ve done the best you could with your available resources in the course of your life . . .
Why Not Enjoy a Snickers?
Our being is a being-towards-death, ending, not on the summit of actualization, but over the cliff in the abyss of annihilation . . .
More People I’m Sick Unto Death Of
Colleagues whose most conspicuous contribution to the workplace is to laugh irrepressibly at the boss’s jokes . . .
More Words and Phrases I’m Sick Unto Death Of
One. Word. Sentences.
Soda Sticker Shock in Seattle
Seattle is trying to discourage its citizens from drinking sugary beverages by imposing a 1.75-cent per ounce tax on all sugary drinks sold in the Emerald City.
A $15.99 case of Gatorade at the Seattle Costco now has an added tax of more than $10. A case of Coke is now $7.35 more expensive than the Diet Coke or Coke Zero.
Sticker shock!
What will people drink instead of sugary beverages?
- Coffee. Seattle drinks a lot of coffee. Is coffee good for you? What if you put sugar in it?
- Beer. At these prices, it’s cheaper than soda.
- Diet soda. Are artificial sweeteners better for you than sugar?
- Fruit juice. Not taxed but contains a lot of sugar.
Should there be a tax on all-you-can-eat buffets? How about a tax credit for eating a vegetable?
Or maybe — just maybe — the tax code was not designed for and shouldn’t be used to impose nutritional penalties on the citizenry.
Economic question: How high does the sin tax on soda have to be before it becomes profitable to smuggle black market sodas into Seattle?
That’s not a frivolous question. Remember Eric Garner?
He died while being arrested for selling illegal “loosie” cigarettes as part of a black market created by stratospheric New York sin taxes on cigarettes.
Here’s another great health-conscious idea: I’ve heard a lot about the ill effects of sleep deprivation . . . Seattle should have a mandatory bedtime for all residents, with a fine of 1.75 cents per minute for violators.
Teaching Computer Science: Asking for Help
I’m volunteering a couple mornings a week at a local high school, helping out with computer science classes.
This morning, in AP Computer Science Principles, the teacher went through an explanation of the hexadecimal number system, then gave an in-class assignment for students to convert their cell phone number to hexadecimal. Not in two parts, 3 digits and 4 digits, but as a 7-digit number.
It seemed pretty obvious from the interaction and the body language and the looks on their faces that a lot of students didn’t get it, but in a class of 25 students, only one student asked for help. Until the teacher finished with that student and asked “Does anyone else need help?” and eight more students immediately raised their hand.
I asked the teacher, “Can I address the class for a minute?”
“First off, doing a 7-digit hex conversion is not easy. I know professional programmers who can’t do it. So I’d expect someone trying to do it for the first time to need some help.
“In fact, if you know any professional programmers, ask them to do a hex conversion on their phone number. Let me know what happens. I guarantee you won’t have to ask too many people before you stump someone.
“None of the material in this class is easy. Snap programming? You might look at it and think ‘There’s a cat and a fish and a duck . . . I’m not understanding it but it looks like a program for 5-year-olds. It’s embarrassing as a high school student to have to ask for help with it. Maybe I’m not very smart.’
“No, Snap is a university-level curriculum from Berkeley. Academically rigorous. I worked through the assignments myself and I found them pretty challenging. I’d expect many of you to find them challenging as well. So you should be asking for help.
“If you need help, waiting for someone to ask if you need help is not going to be a winning strategy. In school, in life or in anything. Because if no one asks, then you need help and you don’t get it.
“There’s probably a natural reluctance to ask questions because what if I’m the only person who doesn’t know the answer? Then I ask a question and look foolish.
“It’s going to be unusual in any class that you’re the only person who doesn’t understand something. If you find that happens to you a lot, you may have a problem. But normally it’s going to be pretty unusual.
“I can tell you in this class, there’s definitely more than one person who finds the material pretty challenging. As I said, I find it pretty challenging myself. It’s not so challenging that I need help with it, but it’s definitely challenging enough that I’d expect most people who are not programmers to need help with it.
“I’m also hearing some people today saying to themselves or to the person next to them, ‘Why do we need to know this?'” That’s actually a very good question. Binary of course is the fundamental language of computers, but why would you need to know hexadecimal? Anyone?”
No hands go up.
“OK, we’ll talk about that in a minute. If it’s not clear to you, in this class or any class, why you’re being asked to learn something, put your hand up and insist on understanding the relevance.
“One final anecdote:
“I worked with an AP class a couple of years ago at another school. About this same timeframe, late first semester, I was in class on a Monday and before the class started, one of the students asked me, ‘How was your weekend?’
“I said, ‘It was okay. How was yours?’
“‘It was great! I played like 47 straight hours of [some video game I can’t remember the name of].’
“And he was one of the worst students in the class, maybe the worst.
“I know he and his parents had met with the principal and the teacher to figure out why he was doing so poorly in computer science. It had to be the school’s fault, right?
“So I’m trying to wrap my mind around this. You played 47 hours of video games, you have no idea what’s going on in this class, and it’s the teacher’s fault?!
“No, it’s your fault. You put nothing into it so you get nothing out of it, you don’t ask for help, and that’s why you’re failing.
“Moral of the story: Don’t be that guy.”
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Grounds for Dissolution
Divorce has traditionally been a fault-based proceeding, but California and most other states are now no-fault jurisdictions, and a divorce in legal terms is now called a Dissolution of Marriage.
And yet we never hear anyone say “I’m going to dissolve you.”
The primary ground for dissolution in California is “irreconcilable differences.” In a Regular Dissolution you are also allowed to use “incurable insanity.” Your spouse may seem crazy to you, but the insanity case is too complicated for you to present without an attorney, so if you want to keep things simple, go ahead and use “irreconcilable differences.”
EppsNet Book Reviews: Death on the Installment Plan by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Death on the Installment Plan is a fictionalized coming-of-age story based on Céline’s youth in pre-World War I France.
Absent are heroism, transcendence, love and the possibility of love. Instead, there is a lot of human action that comes to nothing. Death is not ennobling.
That said, hopelessness has never been described with more wit, energy and imagination or more droll, breathtaking language.
Here’s a sample of the black comedy, as the narrator remembers a local physician (all ellipses in the original):
“The most exquisite deaths, remember that, Ferdinand, are those that attack us in our most sensitive tissues . . .” He had a precious, elaborate, subtle way of talking, like the men of Charcot’s day. His prospecting of the Rolandic, the third ventricle, and the gray nucleus didn’t do him much good . . . in the end he died of a heart attack, under circumstances that were anything but cozy. An attack of angina pectoris that lasted twenty minutes. He held out for a hundred and twenty seconds with his classical memories, his resolutions, the example of Caesar . . . But for eighteen minutes he screamed like a stuck pig . . . his diaphragm was being ripped out, his living guts . . . a thousand open razors had been plunged into his aorta . . . He tried to vomit them out at us . . . I’m not exaggerating. He crawled out into the living room . . . He damn near hammered his chest in . . . He bellowed into the carpet . . . in spite of the morphine . . . You could hear him all over the house and out in the street . . . He ended up under the piano. When the cardiac arterioles burst one by one, it’s quite a harp . . . it’s too bad nobody ever comes back from angina pectoris. There’d be wisdom and genius to spare.
Rating: 
Is A.I. a Threat to Humankind?
Not with a bang but a whimper, as T.S. Eliot used to say. In some countries, the people are kept in a state of submission by violence and/or threats of violence, but here in America, the same effect is achieved via mindless entertainments and gadgetry.
Fake News Awards
I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018
I’m looking forward to this! I find news media on both the left and right too smug and simplistic and agenda-driven.
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them. — George Eliot, Middlemarch