noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.
Inevitably, if you are doing some kind of traditional Japanese martial arts, you will encounter the term te no uchi. In its narrowest context, it means how you grip your weapon. In a larger context, it means a kind of overall skill level for a craftsman.
~ Wayne Muromoto from, 75. Te No Uchi: Skill At Arms – The Classic Budoka
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An old Unix master came to Master Wq. “I am troubled, Wq. You teach the way of Vim. vi is holy but Vim is not; its code sprawls, its features crowd memory; its binaries are vast, its behavior inconsistent. This is not the way of Unix. I fear you mislead your students. What can be done?”
Master Wq nodded. “You are right,” he said. “Vim is broken. Let us fix it. Shall we begin?”
~ Tom Ryder from, Vim Kōans | Arabesque
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Money that Bank of America spends asking its janitors to hose down the sidewalk is money it can’t use to buy Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards for its employees who are top performers at defrauding mortgagees.
~ Ken White from, «http://www.popehat.com/2013/06/26/an-exercise-of-prosecutorial-discretion/»
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When we are unaware of our thoughts and urges, which arise in the back of our mind mostly unnoticed, they have a power over us. We are unable to change if these unbidden thoughts control us. But when we learn to observe them, we can then release their power over us.
Meditation is practice for observing those thoughts, for being more mindful of them throughout the day.
~ Leo Babauta from, Meditation: The Most Fundamental Habit – Zen Habits Website
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Meditation is literally the easiest thing you can add to your life — 5 minutes, 2 minutes, even 60 seconds will do you good. As I wrote elsewhere:
If you were handed a large bucket of sloshing and disturbed water and told to calm the water, you should simply set the bucket down and wait for the water to calm. You would definitely NOT shake the bucket in an attempt to convince the water to calm down.
Driving, texting, walking, rushing, typing, watching TV, playing games, talking, frenzied eating. Set the bucket down for a few minutes.
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For want of a static language the type checker was lost.
~ Dariusz Pasciak from, «http://blog.8thlight.com/dariusz-pasciak/2013/06/26/for-want-of-a-static-language.html»
I don’t write much j/s, but I write enough. Enough that I shouldn’t feel like I’m always struggling to remember how to use an array. An array for crying out loud. “Everything’s an object.” Great. Why?
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Maxim:
Dead last finish is greater than did not finish, which trumps did not start.
~ unknown
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Corollaries:
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
~ Plato
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Never throw in the towel. Use it to wipe the sweat from your brow. Then keep going.
~ unknown
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The hardest part of any journey is believing you are able to begin it.
~ unknown
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First use of phrase “legalistic argle-bargle” since 1824’s Gibbons v. Ogden
~ Kevin Underhill from, Top Ten Notable Facts About the Gay-Marriage Decisions – Lowering the Bar
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Why is this? How has the United States become so saturated in slaughter?
There are, of course, many reasons, but three stand out, one of which is deep and longstanding and the others of more recent vintage. The deep reason lies in our competitive individualism. … The second reason is the decline of our ability to control events in the world. … The third reason is economic.
~ Todd May from, Is American Nonviolence Possible? – The New York Times
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Nyuunanshin roughly translated means having a “flexible, pliant, generous spirit.” It’s having an attitude of being open to one’s feelings, environment, and situation, and trying to adapt instead of trying to be like an unmoving, solid block of wood. It’s sort of a contrast to the notion of fudoshin (being immovable, like the implacable god Fudo-Myoo); but fudoshin concerns a spirit of facing adversity. Nyuunanshin is not so much about a combative mind as it is about being able to grasp or accept concepts in a learning environment. It’s not about being a pushover; you do have convictions. But you are flexible enough to look at all sides and then make a conclusion.
~ Wayne Muromoto from, 77. Nyuunanshin: Being “open” to your feelings – The Classic Budoka
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Is there any way to make genuine debates — sustained back-and-forth exchanges, meeting high intellectual standards but still widely accessible — part of our political culture? (I leave to historians the question of whether there are historical precedents— like the Webster-Hayne or Lincoln-Douglas debates.) Can we put our politicians in a situation where they cannot ignore challenges, where they must genuinely engage with one another in responsible discussion and not just repeat talking points?
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The Listserve is an e-mail lottery. One person a day wins a chance to write to the growing list of subscribers. (23,000+ when last I looked at the web site statistics.) So every day, you get one REALLY random email via The Listserve from someone, somewhere around the globe.
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In fact it is so difficult to argue against simplicity that this post won’t even attempt to. Let’s state emphatically that software should always do only what you need it to do, with the fewest number of steps, and least potential for errors due to complex choices and options.
On the other hand, good luck with that.
~ Steven Sinofsky from, Designing for scale and the tyranny of choice | Learning by Shipping
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On 05/07/13 09:15, Michael Tiernan wrote:
> “What is the UDP three way handshake?” He said he was wondering how many people would catch the question’s trick.You send three UDP packets in three different directions, then shake the hand of the person next to you.
~ Robert Lanning from, «https://lists.lopsa.org/pipermail/discuss/2013-May/018116.html»
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What you’ve just said… is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.
~ “Decathalon Judge” from, Billy Madison – Wikipedia
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1. A calm morning ritual
2. Learn to watch your response
3. Don’t take things personally
4. Be grateful
5. Create stress coping habits
6. Single-task
7. Reduce noise~ Leo Babauta from, The 7 Habits of Calmness – Zen Habits Website
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We can see that PPUE for most regions peaked around 2000. The big exceptions being Canada in 1992 and Europe and Africa in the mid 2000s. What this means for the majority of the world is that in little over ten years the average number of barrels of oil a single rig produces has almost halved. Put another way oil companies have had to double the number of rigs in operation just to maintain oil production at 2000 levels. This is the very definition of drilling faster just to stay still.
~ Andrew McKay from, Drilling Faster Just To Stay Still: A Proposal To Use ‘Production Per Unit Effort’ (PPUE) As An Indicator Of Peak Oil
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One way to gauge the cost/effort of producing oil is via Production Per Unit Effort (PPUE).
“Peak oil” is not simply about the quantity of oil being produced; it is about the cost/effort of producing oil. For most of the history of petroleum production, the cost/effort was decreasing or steady. But now the cost/effort is increasing; That’s an inflection of the second derivative of the cost/effort versus production relationship.
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Everyone wants his parent’s, or friend’s, or partner’s undivided attention — even if many of us, especially children, are getting used to far less. Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” By this definition, our relationships to the world, and to one another, and to ourselves, are becoming increasingly miserly.
~ Jonathan Safran Foer from, Opinion | How Not to Be Alone – The New York Times
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The key is to use technology in ways that enrich your life, save you time, open new horizons or make new accomplishments possible; Not to simply distract yourself from your life. It’s that simple.
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I blog, therefore I am?
No, the initial impetus was to find a place to permanently – or as permanently as the Internet offers – publish my father’s eulogy: In Memoriam. I started piling on things I thought were interesting, fun, or poignant. I wrote some wall-of-text email messages – actual writing with references and original ideas – in response to Aikido questions, and the blog split into the Scree and Aikido tags. Later, I was toying with the idea of organizing a network and system administration group in the Lehigh Valley, wrote a few things about that, and the blog grew… “Feed me Seymore!” …and grew…
What I didn’t expect was that the blog would become a “read more…” link for my brain. Someone says, “that’s interesting,” or “where did you read/hear/learn that?” …and I go,
Yeah, uh… it was on that web site, the one with the words… Wait, just go to my blog and hit the search box . . .
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The Chaos
Dearest creature in creation
Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse.I will keep you, Susy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;
Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.Pray, console your loving poet,
Make my coat look new, dear, sew it!
Just compare heart, hear and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word.~ Gerard Nolst Trenité (1870-1946) from, The Chaos – Wikipedia
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The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.
~ Bruce Schneier from, Our Internet Surveillance State – Schneier on Security
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…and he wrote that essay before the Snowden/NSA revelation showed us we’ve gone far beyond it being only an Internet surveillance state. We have collectively delivered ourselves into the power of ideas we do not know we have accepted.
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