Notebooks Fetish and Purpose:

The notebook, to me, is an idea, an all-encompassing repository for my quirky consciousness as it winds its way forever upriver. It’s a continuously evolving incubator, inherently messy, fragmented, idiosyncratic, loquacious, forgetful, quixotic, and occasionally (okay, often) full of half-witted and badly expressed notions.

Elegance:

the most elegant answer to the problem is the simplest one that meets all of the necessary constraints, and is implemented in a readable manner.

Despite nearly 400 years of scientific revolution, Biology has been unable to deliver on crucial problems like effective cures for viral infections or cancer. Some of our best progress, like antibiotics, has been due to chance and random experimentation. You start a clinical trial for a hypertension drug and suddenly - whoah - all your subjects have hard-ons! Viagra is born. To be sure, chance plays a role in all endeavours, but Physics and Chemistry have a comprehensive theoretical basis powering systematic improvements, whereas Biology has been largely confined to kludges. Wanna treat cancer? Here, blast the patient with radiation and poison and hopefully the cancer will die first. They’re brilliant kludges, and I’m happy to have them, but it’s a far cry from the precision we’ve had elsewhere.

That’s from an excellent essay by Gustavo Duarte.

A short, not-so-sweet explanation of the root cause of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac collapse (via MR, Econlog, and others):

What went wrong? The illusion that the companies were doing virtuous work made it impossible to build a political case for serious regulation. When there were social failures the companies always blamed their need to perform for the shareholders. When there were business failures it was always the result of their social obligations. Government budget discipline was not appropriate because it was always emphasized that they were “private companies.” But market discipline was nearly nonexistent given the general perception — now validated — that their debt was government backed. Little wonder with gains privatized and losses socialized that the enterprises have gambled their way into financial catastrophe.

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous of my freedom. I feel that my connections with and obligations to society are at present very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which I am serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful, and only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, neglecting my peculiar calling, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

H. Thoreau
10 January, 1851

Yes, stealing from Wikipedia is still plagiarism. Apparently Stacy Conradt of mental_floss finds it too difficult to include a link to her source material. In this post she posted a sampling of events from this Wikipedia page, and she didn’t even bother to paraphrase them all.

The mental_floss blog is worthless entertainment, but that doesn’t excuse this sort of thing.

I wonder if she’ll cop to it or change the post or ignore this (I posted a comment pointing out the issue).

Nice concise definitions of closures, map, fold, unfold and filter sneaked their way into the middle of a Dr. Dobbs article (via Raganwald):

Closures, are anonymous functions created at run-time which can refer to variables that are visible where the function is declared.

Closures are especially useful when performing operations over elements in a collection. The most common collection operations (aggregate operations) in functional programming are map, filter, fold, and unfold operations.

A map operation transforms a list into a new same-sized list by applying a transformation function (such as a closure) to each element in the original list. A common example of a map operation is when performing a vector scaling operation.

A filter operation creates a list from another list using only those items for which a predicate function returns true.

The fold operation combines values in a list using a binary function and an initial value. A summation function is a simple example of a fold operation.

The unfold operation creates a list from an initial value and by successively applying a generator function, until a terimination predicate returns true.

These are usually defined in much more obfuscated terms. It’s good to see them so clearly defined.

In a geeky programmer post Jeff Atwood made, he included this gem:

His [Daniel Gilbert's] research found that people are bad at predicting their own future happiness. They tend to radically overestimate the positive or negative impact of large events in their lives — losing your job, getting rich, getting divorced, having children. That’s generally good; it means we have defense mechanisms in place to adapt and survive in our changing circumstances as human beings.

What’s the lesson? Don’t avoid doing things because you fear the impact they might have on your life. Don’t do things that you’re only interested in the impact they’ll have on your life. Don’t suffer a meaningless toil, no matter how great the potential reward.

Live so that you can enjoy as many things as possible each day. That doesn’t mean banishing all of life’s annoyances. Perhaps some small joy can be found in them. Appreciate the rusty hinge or fix it; don’t let it bug you.

Enjoy the journey, choose the paths you pursue with that in mind, and don’t overlook the little things.

If only I were this geeky.

I am in serious pain today.

I went to the gym this morning, as always. I was just about done with my workout when, feeling a bit of tightness in my lowerback, I began to bend over to stretch. That’s when I hurt myself. I got about 5-10º from vertical, at which point I was hit by a bolt of pain in my lower back, starting just above my tail and extending to about 1/3 of the way up my spine.

The pain nearly knocked me down. Fortunately, gyms are filled with heavy things to lean on.

Eventually, I made my way to the stairs and out of the building without attracting too much attention. It took me about half an hour to get back to Leazes Terrace. During my old-man slow walk home three people stopped me, asking if I was okay. I found it quite comforting that so many strangers showed concern about some random guy stumbling through the park. This also made me wonder just how badly I was moving.

It’s been a few hours since I hurt myself, and there’s been a bit of minor improvement but I still can’t sit, stand, walk or lie down comfortably.

Several times in my life I’ve gone through periods of intense pain, and this ranks with the worst I’ve experienced. Whenever I’m dealing with pain I’m thankful my dad is who he is.

My dad has dealt with, sometimes debilitating, chronic pain for as long as I can remember. Growing up I’ve picked up a lot of pain management techniques from him. The two most important ones for me at the moment are:

1. Take care but don’t stop moving.
2. The pain could always be worse.

It’s also a great help to know that I’ve got an amazing girlfriend that I can count on.

Today is all about popping ibuprofen and trying to get some work done.

This is fascinating. It provides a sort of C.V. for the Oracle at Delphi.