The alternate name for Helvetica is "Neue Haas Grotesk".
-28 karma · joined September 25, 2017
Beyond the people with extraordinary natural ability, perhaps the rest of us just need to be taught what others can easily intuit?
That we live in a world full of cowards is the sad-ass truth.
After watching the excellent documentary "Eating You Alive", I have mostly switched to a whole-food plant-based diet and feel fantastic, although I do eat the occasional pair of eggs. The big difficulty with the diet is avoiding all the refined oils that permeate our packaged food culture. Luckily, my wife is a professional cook and still cooks at home.
That said, this document already has some of my favs and has added a ton of new ideas. This crazy diet is really difficult just from a "finding foods I can actually eat" sense. As such, I have lost a few pounds but one thing I notice for sure is that my skin is in much better shape now. The beautiful thing about the diet is that I find that my body can handle cheat foods much better and I feel happy to get back on the diet right after.
Of all the things I miss, I miss cheese the most, but coffee with oat milk is just fine. Ultimately, I think the beauty of this diet is that I am forced to eat things like beans, tubers, tofu and whole grains for lack of anything else to eat. And I'm usually so dang hungry that I love them, thanks to my wife's efforts.
Oh, and the diet is actually much less expensive, especially when you buy dry beans.
We got ours at Sam's Club.
And by inflation, I was referring to the brief period shortly after the BB where the clumps of galaxies quickly separated themselves. Is that what you are referring to here, or are you referring to the general expansion of the universe?
They were done in by "planned obsolescence"; I haven't watched this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdh7_PA8GZU) yet but it has a good ratio.
I can't stand the light from LED or fluorescent light bulbs, and GE can pour themselves a warm bath.
To say there is no "Prime Mover" is the height of hubris, for we live in a universe with laws that bely its own creation. For we creatures -- no matter how cognitively well-endowed we are -- to say that we are capable of understanding everything about the Source of this creation is not only absurd, but unscientific and logically unsound.
5/6ths of our universe's matter is missing.
The energy that keeps the universe expanding is missing.
We have no explanation for how the universe implements gravity and, thus, how it works with respect to the other three fundamental forces.
And yet "scientists" claim there is no Creator. The interrelation of all the dynamical systems at work in the various levels of the universe is so precise that even a small variance of one of them -- e.g. the Fine Structure Constant -- would not just break the entire structure; it would render it unmanifestible.
No, we can not understand how this universe was created, because, as the time-dependent creatures we are, the Creator of all that exists, including time itself, is literally beyond our comprehension. Knowing that "the Unknowable" exists should be common knowledge by now, especially for the physics community, as they work to transform subsets of Unknowns into Knowns.
All you who downvote such opinions think yourselves better than Einstein who himself understood that there was a Creator, even as a non-religious person who failed to crack all the mysteries of this wonderful creation. The problem of hubris is a purely personal problem that involves a completely different mathematics fought in a different realm.
Only by accepting the truth of reality can one successfully explore it, my dear friends. Plugging one's ears and yelling, "Blah! Blah! Blah!" is not the way of progress, even if it is the way of social media's self-selecting herds. This grand experiment has shown -- among other things -- that people who can not refute any points of an argument would simply rather make the argument go away. Everyone who knows the history of scientific advancement knows what became of that vast majority who ridiculed Boltzman and Einstein.
So, no, like life itself, we all make mistakes in our systems. The important thing is that we don't make the same ones over and over again. In software development, that means adjusting our development methology to make such bugs less likely in the future. That is why software development is both the most challenging and most rewarding of careers. Of course, I may be a bit biased ;-)
As far as encountering crappy managers, I'll just say that I can count the good managers I've had on one hand and still have a couple of fingers left over. As to your former manager's particular flavor of belligerence, I haven't had that one specifically, but there are very much uglier variants, my friend. My understanding is that one cannot be made a manager unless the person is willing to prioritize money over human beings and it doesn't take a biblical scholar to see how that is causing so many problems in the small and large across the world. In the small, that attitude manifests itself in many ugly personality traits, while being the foundation of the entire structure and intention of the for-profit corporation where the vast majority of us are forced to find our work.
Within corporate environments, the ultimate problem is that the people who allocate the resources are usually the least knowledgeable about the costs of "digging a hole" (i.e. technical debt).
Of course, there is a great deal of blame to be placed on our -- the developers' -- shoulders, but guesstimating software delivery is difficult enough without non-technical people setting ridiculous timelines. I'd say the solution to the problem is to have managers select competent, driven developers who care about quality, and then for those managers to trust the technical teams to get the job done right. For such a team to work, each piece must work well and work hard.
It depends on the spot missed: is it contaminated with fecal matter? There you get into the realm of risk management. The problem is that, with software, one bad mistake can leave the user with complete loss of data. Look at Microsoft's recent update debacle; some people lost a great deal of data.
>> Namely, is crappy software actually more efficient?
Never. As the Chinese expression goes: Pay a lot, cry once.
The problem is that the people who pay for the creation of software (i.e. corporate directors) are usually ignorant about all things except for money and the vague desires of their customers. The folks that can specify and implement the systems rarely have the clout to allocate the resources necessary to get the job done well.
>> Which one of these two things is software more like?
Information systems (software that must run over and over again against the same data, often concurrently) are actually engines in that they must withstand stopping and starting; of course, the information engines that run continuously are even more difficult to keep functioning as their uptime stretches on. Therefore, the answer to your question is that software is most certainly more like an engine because information systems are engines, just that their fuel is data (including user input) and their output is information (data made meaningful to human beings) and changes to its information base.
We can all see how the poorly designed information engines of the world accrue ugly cruft that eventually leads to their needing to be "re-built", which, for example for Windows, means re-installing from scratch.
(1) Specification (2) Implementation
Specification has always been the primary problem, the simple reason being that we are trying to quantify human desires regarding information flow. As we are finding out, it's non-trivial to say the least.
This goes back to an earlier talk I learned about here and watched just this morning by the outstanding MIT professor Nancy Leveson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBktiCyPLo4, who has analyzed various engineering problems (including the Challenger disaster) and even published an entirely new methodology for analyzing large-scale systems. Her book can be downloaded for free at http://sunnyday.mit.edu/safer-world.pdf.
Of course, economics factors into everything people endeavor to do these days, but strictly within the domain of creating correct information management systems -- from a purely technical level -- the problems are specification and implementation, in that order. Getting someone to pay for the time and team needed to do the job correctly is a completely different story, and not a pleasant one, it seems.
I know what you are saying and fully agree but would like to put a finer point on it: the problem is with unfettered capitalism, especially after 100 years or more of the lawyers writing the laws for the wealthy, who own the vast majority of the corps.
What we need is a balance between the entrepreneurial spirit of capitalism and governments that enforce corporate responsibility to its human workers and our communal environment. The corps have very effectively massaged the legal systems of the world into removing almost all notions of corporate responsibility. And here we are.
"Operator error is a symptom, not a cause."
Ms. Leveson's book "Engineering a Safer World" has a free PDF download at http://sunnyday.mit.edu/safer-world.pdf
Everyone who says that the perfection of the human being is impossible have never tried, thus they are acting just as the contemporaries of Boltzman and Einstein who derided their advanced understandings of the universe. The reality is that most people never try to better themselves, especially if the techniques suggested stray beyond their preconceived notions of the nature of the universe and themselves. As well, most people are caught up in their desires for pleasure and material wealth and generally have no concern for those outside of their social circle, be it based upon ethnicity, form of religion, class, sexual orientation or gender identity.
That the incremental perfection of each human being is possible is provable simply by noticing that every choice we make can be better chosen each day, by conscious thought and honest self-reflection on our past deeds combined with earnest study. We must consciously shift our societies' dynamics from destructive competitiveness to constructive cooperation, from selfishness to selflessness, from callous indifference to caring compassion. Love is the essence of humanity, without such agape (service-based love for all other human beings) we are left as the unenlightened animals we all begin as. Only we human beings have the ability to consciously rise above our foibles.
It is also our nature to require an inward connection with our Creator to effect our transformation from selfishness to selflessness. There is a science of spirituality that is beyond any form of religion but most modern scientists deny such science for lack of external evidence. The evidence must be perceived within oneself, just as Boltzman and Einstein's contemporaries needed to read the papers and understand the processes that they were describing. The difference is that denying the spiritual path indeed makes it not exist for that person, for each person must embark on that endeavor themself before being able to feel its reality. Those outside of that circle of understanding must have an open mind and heart to enter that circle or else they will never experience it and that is just another aspect of our human reality: we are free to choose to remain ignorant of it, but we all know what history says about Boltzman and Einstein's deniers.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
I don't remember where I heard it, but it was many years ago, that the "bad guys" can come in some many varieties, have so many different kinds of character defects and obsessions and whatnot, but that the true hero is always the same kind of boring because goodness itself is not flashy. That is why Hollywood always portrays their heroes with some kind of serious character defect, unless it just writes stories with only an anti-hero of some kind.
One must never forget that Tolkien lived through WWI whose horror and tragedy gave him a firm grasp of the complex realities of both good and evil. The resulting simplicity is why LoTR has stood the test of time as a truly epic story.
As far as shortcomings go, I feel that the movie's bastardization of Faramir was the worst travesty because his honor in the face of having the ring in his grasp is one of my favorite parts of the books. Making him drag the ring-bearer back to the city ensured that I will never watch the movies again.
As well, that crap with Aragorn getting lost and then fighting back by himself was an utter travesty, and the crap with his fiance was crap, too (except for where they subbed her in for Glorfindel in the race to Rivendell), as much as I understand that they wanted a woman to play a more prominent role. That said, Eowyn's story should have been enough and at least they didn't mangle her.
But, yeah, it would've been really cool to have a Patrick Stewart Tom Bombadil.
As an inveterate simplifier of code and its formatting for clarity, I have gone to only doing a single thing on a single line, even variable declarations [Note I only have personal projects now]. The primary purpose behind this is that such extreme simplification will make it easier to process algorithmically, for both meta-code (i.e. IDEish) work and to narrow the horizontal extent of its format on both paper and screen.
Now that I think about it, it seems that Whitney's perspective might flow from his not using a code-folding editor, where each chunk of code can be collapsed to its header comment that states what it does. Aren't we usually dealing with the higher-level flow of logical chunks instead of the itty-gritty details of each?
We programmers often seem to forget that we spend far, far more time reading code than writing it, therefore readability should be a (if not the) primary consideration when engineering it.
That said, I do understand where Whitney's terseness impetus comes from: I have always lamented how little of my code will fit on the screen, with the number of vertical lines being the limiting factor; that is precisely why my taskbar is on the left-hand-side. (And don't get me started on monitors designed for watching wide-screen movies -- 1600x1200 FTW!)
As such, I can't really fault his intention as much as his execution, and I feel that ultimately the solution to his (really, our) problem is that all our code (not just his) needs an IDE that can expand such terse definitions as per the current programmer's preferred style. This has been my perspective for many years, especially after wrangling various SQL dialects and the mostly awful formatting preferences of my peers.
As I see it, the ideal solution is to store all code files as its token stream and have a default format that can be customized by each programmer in the IDE. As a result, each program will be stored as its pure content (which would help with version control (so long as whitespace is ignored)) AND each programmer would get to work with their preferred perspective. Of course the problem with this methodology is that the tokenizer and formatter better be flawless or you're f*ed, not to mention the fact that there are various IDEs that people like to work with.
As such, nutrition science is literally less than four hours of medical school education (my wife's first son is finishing his residency at his first-choice program, one of the East Coast's premier programs). [To learn more about this, I highly suggest the fantastic documentary "Eating You Alive". I have switched to a whole food plant-based diet as a result and feel better every week (it's been about eight weeks now, with a few cheat days along the way).]
We are only now realizing the direct link between our gut biome and our mental health, and our gut biome is directly related to the foods and/or poisons we ingest. Once again, the for-profit corps provide foods that harm us but cannot be proven to do so, medicines that harm us but cannot be proven to do so, and an environment polluted by their machines and chemicals whose effects cannot be measured enough to hit them in the only place they care about: their purses via tort law. They have crafted the laws and staffed the regulatory agencies while lobbying the government to dismantle and detooth those agencies' abilities to provide scientific oversight. Every single one of these factors affects our mental health, and all the while there is very, very little research being done on nutrition and how to measure toxicity and remove it from the body.
And yet that only peripherally approaches the truth of our human baseline because our human nature goes deeper still, and yet that pervasive corporate mentality to put profit over human well-being is intrinsically related to what we are as moral beings. We each have a moral compass, however subtly different our societal tunings. It is an intrinsic part of our human nature, and our lack of moral teaching as societies is the source of all our problems including our inability to address psychological issues. We have sick societies the world over and it is foolish insanity to think that mental illness is not an absolutely natural result of such selfish, competitive societies.
The misunderstanding of the cocaine rat study illustrates this all-too-well. When the studies were re-run years later with non-overcrowded, healthy environments the rats wanted nothing to do with the cocaine.
The solution to all our problems is to selflessly choose, first individually and then collectively, to form cooperative, caring societies instead of the dog-eat-dog world of economic competitiveness we currently live under, competitiveness that oft leads to physical competitiveness. Beyond promoting mental and physical health, such compassion lets one see the true nature of the other person, which is essential when one is dealing with psychopathy or sociopathy. Psychiatry is built upon a lack of compassion and its systemic harms all result from their hubris, ignorance and profit motive.
Even our precious traditions that should be leading us towards that loving ideal have been conquered by the animalistic persons who live for mammalian alpha-dominance games within and among groups, be they defined by class, ethnicity, form of religion, political affiliation, gender identity or sexual preference. We must live in groups to survive and prosper and our moral nature's purpose is to nudge us towards peaceful cooperation so that we may ALL happily explore this world, whatever our predilection. This is why there is a Law of Karma that only works at the human level, where we reap the happiness or unhappiness we sow in others; it is the feedback mechanism that nudges us towards humane cooperation and away from animalistic competitiveness. Our Creator does not intervene because the gift of free will to choose either selflessness or selfishness, love or its antitheses, wisdom or ignorance, the good of the whole or the benefit of the few -- that gift of free will is freely given. Thus, a group of Nazis can go about their hateful, oppressive business just as freely as we Sufis can ours. It is up to each one of us to choose the better path, for ourselves first and then as societies.
As the great Poet of God, Rumi said, "The Way goes in.", but in this materialist world culture of self, there is a communal disdain for and utter denial of the internal spiritual pursuit that leads us to moral perfection, first individually and then collectively. As such we cannot comprehend the difference between physical mental illness (caused by disease or nutritional imbalance) and a person who's just a selfish, sociopathic bastard and a person who is just naturally having a difficult time dealing with our sick society and the sick world that is making us physically ill via its pollution and constant stress.
The fundamental truth is that no one's health, mental or physical ("Not two, not one"), can EVER be successfully treated without clear-minded, compassionate care, and that must involve first getting them away from negative environmental factors and into a nurturing environment. Creating such a compassionate society requires compassionate human beings, and that requires the humble work of self-reflection and self-evolution beyond the negative traits we all possess.
Peace be with you all. We love you.
Note: I am American, too.
The Creator of dimension, time, space, matter, energy and the subtle mathematical laws that govern their interactions will ALWAYS be beyond our comprehension, but we can understand a bit of It in very small, very abstract slices.
Mostly, however, we are here to enjoy this wonderful creation and for that reason we are created as moral creatures with an animalistic body. The most subtle law of the universe, that only we live under, is the Law of Karma. This law dictates that we must use our abilities to learn and choose, via our free will, to self-evolve out of our mammalian capacities of pack warfare and alpha-dominance games (most people naturally live above their reptile potential, that is why there are so few serial killers). This is why all the Great Teachings emphasize compassion towards all our neighbors as the destination for a spirituality that is born of an inward seeking for self-improvement via a connection with our Magnficent Creator.
There are many ways for a human being to enjoy this creation, which starts first with our body. There is the physical pleasure of eating and sex; the pleasures of having friends and family, perhaps having children of our own; the pleasures of athletic feats (Alex Honnold WOW!), mental feats (chess, mathematics), creative feats (art, writing, performance), as well as scientific feats that explore the nature of the universe in all its grandeur.
Our intrinsic sense of morality is built into us as a feedback mechanism to nudge us away from mammalian competitive strife and towards truly human cooperation, where those that have the means choose to help those that lack, where all oppression -- based upon ethnicity, form of religion (including none at all), sexual preference or identity -- is stamped out in favor of a free society of equals that each enjoy the respect and comfort that this planet provides when generosity and compassion are the rule.
Such compassion also requires us to fight oppression in all its forms, both personally and as societies and cultures. This is group compassion that stems from individual morality and the understanding that we are all in this together.
The Law of Karma's primary function is to feedback into ourselves the happiness or unhappiness resulting from our treatment of others. This is why so very few ultra-wealthy people are happy: they have built their empires upon the misery of the workers they have used and discarded for the lowest price possible. Note that there was a notable exception I saw crop up a few months ago where a very successful health care company founder gave very large bonuses to his employees in preparation for going full non-profit. He did this out of gratitude and generosity, knowing that his hundreds of millions of dollars was more than he needed and was built upon their backs. That is the essence of the spiritual path. It matters not which form of religion (if any at all) he adheres to. We are measured by our hearts and how we tune our minds to live the truth of selfless positivity over selfish negativity.
The misery upon the Earth in 2019 is the direct result of our free will's ability to choose the most horrific path due to Lennon's "Instant Karma" not existing. Karma is much more subtle than that. You can see its results on Trump's face and those of every person aligned with him. Yes, they can have the pleasure of domination of others or wealth and power, but pleasure is NOT happiness. Happiness comes from within.
This is a part of the Sufi Message of Love. All human beings must unite to selflessly create "On Earth as it is in Heaven" because each of our free wills are equal and the people who lie, oppress and keep secrets have an advantage over the truthful, meek, and kind people in that they not only have chosen to live unfettered from their consciences (the part of us that is the source of our morality) but take pleasure in the misery they inflict upon others. It is difficult for those not yet on the spiritual path to understand how evil a person can become for the simple fact that until we begin to fight against our own vices we do not know how deep human pathology can grow.
We are perfectible just as our software and machines can be made perfect, if we put in the effort and pay attention to the details; don't worry, the universe will test us ;-). Yes, we are all born imperfect, none greater than any other, but we also ALL have the ability to learn and self-evolve from vice into virtue. To reach that perfection, however, we must go within ourselves and beg our Creator for help. That humility and seeking then opens up our potential for only then are we truly living up to our potential to know the bits we can about our Creator and the magnificent tools we, ourselves, are to explore this universe in peace and harmony with each other and the Earth itself.
I suggest anyone interested in this Message to look into Coleman Barks' translated poems of Rumi. His UCTV presentation "Rumi and the Play of Poetry" is on Youtube and is excellent.
All our problems are caused by a lack of love, and no solution that does not emphasize love as its foundation is only a band-aid.
"The Way goes in." --Rumi
For those who ask for proof of what I speak, you must experience this truth for yourself by activating your own free will. If you believe that what I say does not exist, you will be correct from your perspective. That doesn't mean you aren't capable of exploring this sphere of creation or that you are not behoven to the Law of Karma; it just means you haven't opened your spiritual eyes, ears and mind to its reality and remain in the realm of scientists that shunned Boltzmann and Einstein for their expansion of our understanding of this universe. It is your free will's decision to accept this Message and try, or to deny it and remain as you are. There is no compulsion in religion and I am commanded to love everyone anyway. That is why I try to speak of the sublime joy I experience in my life as a result of trying.
Peace be with you all. We love you. The evil, selfish people are destroying our beloved Earth and inflicting misery on countless human beings.
My idea here is based upon physical/visual intuition, starting with why it works for n=2 (squares) and then why it cannot work for n=3 (cubes) and then that n>3 is necessarily more complex than n=3 thus cannot work either.
[Note that I will use lower case letters for the sides/roots and their uppercase letters to denote the areas or volumes. Thus, the full equation is Z=Y+X, with X = x^n, resulting in z^n = y^n + x^n. I also use (for n=2), dy = z - y, and Dy = 2(y(dy)) + dy^2, and dx = z - x, and Dx = 2(x(dx)) + dx^2. I'm sorry my dx and dy conflict with calculus notation but my notation means dx is "the difference between z and x" which is the same as "the length that must be added to x to equal z" and Dx is "total amount that must be added to X to get Z". Therefore (for n=2), Dx = Y = 2(x(dx)) + dx^2, and Dy = X = 2(y(dy)) + dy^2. ]
For n=2, Z=Y+X works because (what can be visualized as a square) X can be "smushed" over two sides and their joining corner of (the other square) Y evenly, such that Z = Y + Dy = Y + 2(y(dy)) + dy^2. The term "2(y(dy))" is the amount that must be added along each of the two sides, and the term "dy^2" is the amount that must be added at the corner to complete the perfect square Z.
So, for example, 5^2 = 4^2 + 3^2 because both 3^2 = 9 = 2(4(1)) + 1^2 = 2(4) + 1 = 8 + 1, and 4^2 = 16 = 2(3(2)) + 2^2 = 2(6) + 4 = 12 + 4.
Now, for n=3, we must visualize the situation where the cube X is smushed over the cube Y's three faces and its joining corner. (Now X=x^3 and Y=y^3.)
The equations for dx and dy are the same, but Dx and Dy have expanded by a dimension: Dx = Y = 3(x^2)(dx) + 3(x)(dx^2) + dx^3, and likewise Dy = X = 3(y^2)(dy) + 3(y)(dy^2) + dy^3.
The term "3(x^2)(dx)" is the amount that must be added to three faces of the cube Y, the term "3(x)(dx^2)" is the amount that must be added along the three edges joining those three faces of the cube Y, and the term "dx^3" is the amount that must be added at the corner.
Now, I haven't the maths to prove why Dx and Dy for n=3 won't have integer solutions but my intuition says it has something to do with the fact that it's three dimensions and, therefore, a couple of odd numbers multiplying around in there (the first two terms) and the fact that there are only two cubes being smushed together to try and reconstitute another perfect cube. I also imagine Fermat could actually mathematically prove why it's impossible. Perhaps it can be shown that Dx and Dy cannot both have diophantine solutions. These are just guesses.
As for n>3, the terms (and physical/visual representations) will only become more complex and there will be still only two terms with which to reconstitute the hypercube.
Anyway, that's my intuition about the entire problem and I have to imagine that a proof that Fermat can easily intuit yet is (a bit?) too large to fit in the margin must surely tread down a simple path, perhaps even one that relies on a physical/visual interpretation of what the equations can be likened to.
I look forward to this being eviscerated or flatly rejected, if appropriate, or at least corrected for inconsistencies. If it serves anyone in their exploration of this insidiously complex yet apparently simple-seeming problem, my joy would only grow. If my name would someday appear in a mathematical paper that a real mathematician produces as a result of this, well that would be out of this world for this poverty-striken math wannabe.
[Edited to fix my n=3 equations.]
Our unique talents also include abstract reasoning and communication as well as advanced tool making, yet most human beings are still acting within the mammalian level of behavior which mostly comprises pack warfare and alpha-dominance seeking, and we are all witness to the disastrous effects those sub-human tendencies are having upon each other as well as the Earth itself (via our short-term profit-seeking over the long-term well-being of the Earth for our descendants benefit).
Love -- via selfless service to others' happiness -- is the most unique of human traits as it facilitates our rising above our mammalian tendencies (literally, from a brain structure standpoint) to segregate and wage war upon others of any perceived difference, be it physical (ethnic) or ideological (form of religion, neighborhood, country, sexual orientation or identity, etc.).
Only by accepting the primacy of our free wills upon this Earth and the necessity of our training our minds to differentiate good from evil and then choosing the former can we stop the devastation of the Earth and its less fortunate individuals.
Until then, the vast majority of human beings will remain, as Wisdom states, "like the animals, only worse".