- Training is learning the rules, experience is learning the exceptions.
- Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
- All bleeding stops... eventually.
- I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
- The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.
- The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet.
- Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
- A test for artificial intelligence suggested by the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The gist of it is that a computer can be considered intelligent when it can hold a sustained conversation with a computer scientist without him being able to distinguish that he is talking with a computer rather than a human being. Some critics suggest this is unreasonably difficult since most human beings are incapable of holding a sustained conversation with a computer scientist. After a moments thought they usually add that most computer scientists aren't capable of distinguishing humans from computers anyway.
- Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
- Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
NLclothing:
PROTIP: The key to happiness is doing whatever makes you happy, it will never be the same for everybody.
pawz68:
It's that easy.....really. I suppose the difficult part is that some people have a difficult time deciding what really makes them happy.
HaveSomeVictoryGin:
That and the fact that so many people confuse what makes other people happy with what makes themselves happy.
The concept of a paradox is entirely a human concept - in other words, it's in the eye of the observer. The universe wouldn't "classify" you going back in time and killing your great-grandparents before you were born as a paradox, simply because the universe is not an observer. It would happen - so what - "It is what it is". That would just be part and parcel of the way the universe works in that particular case.
Attempting to say that this would result in a paradox as far as the universe is concerned is anthropomorphizing the universe to an absolutely unforgivable degree. Sure, it makes for a good time travel story, but the universe won't lose any sleep over it, any more than it does for me writing "The next phrase is false." "The previous phrase is true." "Both the previous phrases are true" "The previous phrase is true" There's no paradox. The universe doesn't suddenly go wonky, and cats mate with dogs, etc.
-- http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1731658&cid=33022950
Yesterdays SMBC had a good point:
You can not have any motivation or objective if you are going to travel otherwise the act of time travel is a paradox. SMBC put it thusly: if you are travelling to change some outcome, and you succeeded, you would not have had the motivation to time travel to make that change.
SMBC's conclusion was that only nitwits have the capacity to time travel and the fact that there seem to be so many confirms that time travel must be going on right now.
But another way to say this is, you can only choose objectives that either already happened in your past or are inevitable no matter what you do.
For example, You could however travel with the objective of sinking the Titanic, but not the objective of preventing the sinking. If you saved the titanic, it would never occur to you to try to save the titanic.
For example, If your objective was to save Abe Lincoln and you succeeded, then it never would have occurred to your pre-travel self that you needed to go back and save abe lincoln.
What all this adds up to I think is that time travel is still forbidden but observational time travel-- gathering information-- is not forbidden.
There is an interesting proof regarding the computability of any proposition by David Wolpert that shows time travel is forbidden unless the information you gain by doing so is probabilistic or faulty. That is he proves rigorously that it is not possible to answer any arbitrary true/false question about the past with perfect fidelity. Thus time travel that preserves information with fidelity is forbidden. Error prone time travel is however allowed.
-- http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1731658&cid=33023080
It's been a long time I have not updated my blog.
So I'm going to turn 23 next August, which is surprisingly unsurprising. Being older, and having insomnia is the root of all evil.
So that one night I was thinking about how my life progressed. Most of my childhood was spent in a small village near Hanoi. My family was poor at the time. Being poor is not exactly the best for my curiosity that the time, what it means was toys are the last thing one is gonna have, and birthdays are overly overrated. Luckily I had my own happiness digging through the old toy stack of my auntie who was trading old toys in bulk at the time. My older brother and I would spend the whole day opening old toys, harvesting batteries, sound chips, light bulbs, speakers, capacitors, motors and tied them together to make them work. We were toy-destroyers. We harvested to the point that when her husband wanted to get one random toy, he couldn't find a single one that worked. I remembered when I was 10, I teared up one of the rare toy that my Dad gave me: A cute digital alarm clock that can announce date and time. I managed to assembled the clock back, it worked fine after that, I think. But not for a very long time.
It is wonderful how the expose to circuit boards back when I was 6 shaped my path. I always wanted to know things to the very inner workings of them. So eventually I came to software and open source. Open source is great: You don't have to pay for money to have them, and you can see how software works. You can see how and why it works to the bare metal. Understandings of the inner workings of things are the fuel that empowered me, and without accessible materials like the little toys and open-source software, I wouldn't have known what I know today.
Now I think I was always a lucky kid. I was lucky to have the old toys, I was lucky to go with software instead of hardware, because with software, one does not need money to access the materials. Unfortunately, not everything is freely accessible. Toys aren't free. Circuit boards, speakers, motors,... everything else needs money.
I think electric ICs and boards can change the life of many other people, too. So I have a little idea, a project: giving out circuit development kits for high-school and college students who are curious but too poor to afford one every year. Circuits for the Curious. I'm pushing the project forward and I'm glad that there are many people who think that is great and supported my idea. So this year, I decided instead of spending money on my birthday, I would make my birthday someone else's birthday, by initially seeding 23 TI development boards to Vietnam. I estimated this would set me back about $200 each year -- it looks like no more birthday for me. But that's fine, I can bear with it.
I'm asking you for change. I believe that together we can change the lives of talented kids in Vietnam.
If you like to discuss, contribute, and support the project, feel free to contact me.
I decided to roll back to Movable Type 4. MT5 is too painful to switch.
The new blog still breaks, but I can fix it. But I can't fix MT5.
Continue reading Mary GrandPre.
Years ago in the night
there were words in the sound of the wind,
words in the sound of the sea.
I would wake in the night and know
that they spoke to me.
Now in the night the words
cry in the sound of the wind,
cry in the sound of the sea.
I wake and know they speak
but not to me.
-- Archibald MacLeish
Summer is coming to the Midwest and Truman! It's hard to keep yourself from going outside when the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming and the birds are singing. However, you can still be entertained and connected while studying. It's wonderful to see how the digital revolution has given us more freedom to get outside. More on Detours.
I seriously wonder why pay a lot of money to get Crapple products. Paying money for Crapple is just like paying money to put a finger up to your ass.
With me, Microsoft is the borderline, don't love it too much, but I don't hate it. Crapple is more of the other side.
And I honestly don't mean this as a troll, but anyone who buys an Apple product NOT expecting it to be locked down tighter than Ann Coulter's vagina deserves to be disappointed. Buying an Apple and expecting freedom is like buying something from Sony and being shocked when it only supports some bullshit propriety storage or media format than only Sony makes. Apple is about doing what Steve tells you to do, or at least says is okay for you to do. If Apple could get away with locking down their Macbooks and other PC's so that you could only download their approved software, they probably would. Apple keeps it simple: Here's what this does. It's elegant and does what it does very well. We don't want you screwing that up by messing around with it without our approval. If you want open and free, go somewhere else and take your chances. -- Slashdot
Wonder how free software affected my thinking.
I've switched board from a Sony reader to a Nook.
In general, Sony's products are good for a couple of reasons:
1, The battery life is stellar. Their products usually have extremely low power consumption.
2, Build quality is great. Sony's design are of the grown-ups: You can close your eyes to use their products.
3, They are stable. You don't find nasty bugs with their products.
4, Their products are durable and last long.
However, they have limitations:
1, They ain't cheap. You pay for what you get.
2, They have too many things to take care of. So they're not going to upgrade, add features to their products.
3, If you're delusional about their use of Linux (it's interesting to know that most of their products actually use Linux): Yes they do but they don't contribute back. And their products are not hackable. And nobody cares to hack Sony's.
4, They won't die if one of their products sucks. So they're not pushing anything hard, and they're just not the best choice in anything. It's like a man working for a job because his kids are starving and a man working for his leisure. The one that works harder is the one whose kids will die if he lose the job. Sony ain't the man.
PS: You don't need to hack the Nook to get Native Vietnamese support, it's built-in.