A tipping point is when a small change to input results in a large change in output. For example, when you arrive at the bus terminal at 9:31 and the next bus doesn’t leave until 10 – a change of one minute costs a half hour 🙂
Every time I begin to muster up an iota of hope for society, it goes and dashes my hopes to pieces again.
I have spent about 2 months trying to navigate the state’s red tape. Now I’m stuck because of their form for filing a certificate of incorporation, of all things, until I get clarification from the state, which, of course, has taken far longer than it should. I am about 24 hours away from incorporating in Delaware instead.
I’ve used Perl for about 6 years now and I’m still running across new tricks that make my code more concise. Here’s one I just recently discovered:
It’s well known that you can use the “or” operator (that is, the literal word “or”) to take actions such as “die” if a command fails or returns a “false” or undefined value. Well, you can use the “||” (logical “or”) operator to give an assignment a default value (presumably the return value of the evaluated code fragment). For example, we can define variables in the following way:
my $var = $var1 || $var2;
In C++, this would return a boolean value. In Perl, it’s going to evaluate $var1 and either assign that value if it’s a “true” value or assign the value of $var2 if it isn’t. This is handy, because otherwise we’d be writing it my $var = ($var1) ? $var1 : $var2;, which is just klutzy and harder to read, to boot.
Note that using this as a boolean value still works: if $var1 is a true value, $var will also be the same true value. If $var1 is false and $var2 is true, $var will be the (true) value of $var2. If both are false, $var is going to also have a false value (probably undef, perhaps the value of $var2; the result is the same either way). This corresponds to the truth table for “or”:
| V1 | V2 | V1 || V2 |
|---|---|---|
| T | T | T |
| T | F | T |
| F | T | T |
| F | F | F |
The problem with democracy is that it assumes that pleasing the people and governing well are the same thing. They are not. Take Bush’s tax cuts, for example: people love getting tax rebates. But that doesn’t change the fact that they have helped contribute to a huge budget deficit. Maybe they do stimulate the economy – but if they have, the change hasn’t been apparent, particularly as we head into what appears to be a rather deep recession.
I don’t know of any existing system that would perform better, however. I suppose it’s just the best we have until the next generation of political thinkers comes along. They won’t be in the US, though – these sorts of things are always the result – or cause – of a geographic shift in political power.
I always try to be nice to my clients when I do freelance work. However, I’m beginning to realize that this is essentially an engraved invitation to be taken advantage of – being asked to do more work (that was out-of-scope) in less time for less money. And that’s just not right.
For a while, I had pondered the same question that Hamming did: “What makes great scientists great?” What is interesting is that I arrived at almost all of the same conclusions.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
I still occasionally stop –
and think,
“what if I could study algorithms?”
But that has passed.
My mathematical talent
What if it found
a trainer to match?
But that too has passed.
Could I render music,
imagined, inchoate, flawless,
upon the canvas of reality?
I suppose I’ll never know.
Why is biology
so natural and intuitive,
even though I’ve never studied?
The biologists won’t tell me.
Society, for all its quirks,
follows a set of rules,
intuitively, I know some,
but how to write them up?
“It shows promise, it shows promise, it shows promise.”
And yet you leave it to wither!
Do you have any idea of the agony
of talent left untrained!?
Of vision divorced from realization?
Cut off, to goad, to promise,
and to crumble before reality –
over and over, illimitable!
This is the result
of forcing men to specialize –
we have unlimited potential,
but potential is not enough.
This one just popped into my head during my usual morning pondering of what I was going to do with the day:
“The frontiers of knowledge lie not at the edges of our thought, but at the edges of our imagination.”
Legal language is funny. Corporations require a registered agent to receive any “service of process”. The verb “serve” seems to be used in the same sense it is used by high schoolers: “You got served!”