Courage

A note to conservatives...

We know you're scared s***less of any kind of human progress. If it hasn't been done before, it must be "... lies straight from the pit of hell."

We try to explain that things will be better with improvements in the human condition. But your fears just won't let you go there. We understand.

The survival of the human race depends on overcoming our fears of the unknown... "to boldly go where no one has gone before."

That famous line was a metaphor by-the-way. While fictionally "exploring strange new worlds," the story-tellers were really exploring the human condition. How we treat each other. How we react to change. How we overcome our beliefs in what is possible on encountering the "impossible". And how we embrace it a grow as a result.

We know your fears for they are ours too. We've chosen to let our rational minds hold our fears at bay, for there is no way out of fear but through change.

The only way to remove a threat is to learn. We either learn to understand that it is not really a threat, or we learn how to mitigate or overcome it. We'll keep trying.

The Evolution Of Cancer

Labelled diagram of a cell undergoing
apoptosis.  18 Dec 2006 by Emma Farmer 

... updated 2014-03-07

This is speculation. Pure speculation. I am not a doctor, researcher, academic or politician. I just read a lot.

Is cancer piecemeal evolution?

We know that cancer is uncontrolled cell growth. The process that causes cells to die naturally gets turned off. This natural process is called apoptosis. From Wikipedia: Apoptosis...

Excessive apoptosis causes atrophy, whereas an insufficient amount results in uncontrolled cell proliferation, such as cancer.

As we eat better (verses starvation), have fewer predators and accidents and cure diseases, we live longer than our ancestors. But that evolution is never uniform. Parts of us live longer with little or no change to other parts. The more uniform and advantageous the changes though, the longer we live and thus the more we reproduce and pass on the traits to our offspring. The longer we live, the more knowledge and perspective we accumulate that can be passed on to others.

Docker Software

Docker open source software packages applications and all their dependencies into LXC virtual containers that run on any Linux distribution.

The Docker command line interface (CLI) makes it a building-block tool that can virtually eliminate "dependency hell." Docker may do for application packaging what Git has done for source code management.

Holding a Program In One's Head

Girl with a Book by José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior

If you want to understand a programmer, read...

In August 2007, Paul Graham wrote...

"A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. At its best programming is the same. You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will."

LA building's lights interfere with cellular network, FCC says

LA building's lights interfere with cellular network, FCC says

That's not all ...

Many types of electronic equipment found in homes and offices emit electromagnetic radiation, and clashes with outside radio signals once were more common. For example, when cellular add-on cards for laptops first came out, emissions from the CPU sometimes kept the radios from working, Marshall said. In addition, there used to be laptops that put off enough radiation to interfere with onboard navigation systems on planes, said analyst Craig Mathias of Farpoint Group.

In Bash, when to alias, when to script, and when to write a function?

When to write a script ...

• Scripts assemble software components (aka. tools, commands, processes, executables, programs) into more complex components, which may themselves be assembled into still more complex components.
• Scripts are usually made executable so they can be called by name. When called, a new subprocess is spawned for the script to run in. Copies of any exported variables and/or functions are passed by value to the script. Changes to those variables do not propagate back to the parent script.
• Scripts may also be loaded(sourced) as if they were part of the calling script. This is analogous to what some other languages call "import" or "include". When sourced, they execute within the existing process. No subprocess is spawned.

When to write a function ...

Ezra Klein... the future of journalism

(Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos/New York Magazine)

What is the extraordinary Ezra Klein up to? Here, Let Ezra Explain

There are a lot of us... even old-timers like me, who can see that what  Ezra is doing is the future of journalism.

Mr. Klein grew up with The Internet. It's as familiar and natural to him as television is to the generation before him (mine). What makes him special, is that he has consciously chosen to mine "traditional" journalism for lessons that can be applied to the new medium. Why? It seems, Mr. Klein is never satisfied to accept that things "just are."

Ezra Klein appears to eternally ask, "Why are they?"

Economics 101: Creating Money

Banks create money. That's their main purpose. When a bank loans you $100,000 to buy a house, they don't actually have $100,000 sitting in a vault somewhere. In fact, at most, they have about $10,000 because the "liquidity ratio" in the U.S. is between 0 and 10% [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_requirement#United_States]]. (Watch Bailey try to explain this next Christmas while you're watching It's A Wonderful Life for umpteenth time) The other $90,000 is, effectively, a kind of credit... a promise to pay in the future. Yes, they will cut a check for $100,000 but they're only allowed by the government to do that as long as they have deposited no more than 10% of that amount with the Federal Reserve. Every dollar the government prints, is either in the bank or a promise to pay in the future... a bank or someone holding government bonds (i.e. Treasury bills, Savings Bonds, etc.). Thus, about 90% of the "wealth" in the U.S. is in these promises-to-pay. The more common name is "credit."

2014-01-24

This paper effectively refutes the accepted explanation of "fractional reserved banking" the "money multiplier"
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Money,+credit+and+bank+behaviour%3A+need+for+a+new+approach.-a0250677146 and makes the case that it was this reversal of cause and effect that caused the actions taken in response to the 2008 financial crisis to be largely ineffective.

Patching Java is Futile

Roger Grimes, InfoWorld's resident security expert, says in his latest column... "Patching has failed, so it's time for Java to go".

I couldn't agree more!

Having programmed in a lot of languages, I've studied and tried to use Java, but have just never warmed up to it.

At the end of the day, there were always more productive ways to implement the functionality with greater reliability than Java.

Java may be the kind of environment that's useful for very large projects with many developers the way COBOL and Ada are, but it has high development overhead (lots of coding to accomplish little) and resistance to maintainability (updates usually break the dependant applications).

Roger notes that the latest versions have greatly improved things.

But I can't imagine anyone running mission-critical systems would risk upgrading their Java engine without management commitment to extensive testing and allocation of major dollars for the almost guaranteed application upgrades and changes that will be required.

It's just not worth it.

Let's move on.

NASA's "back in harness"

NASA's new "test harness" for its next generation of interplanetary flight systems gets "first light" this month. -- DocSalvage

Test engineer James Peckham runs an avionics flight simulation to see how SLS will perform during launch.

.@NASA_SLS hardware, software, operating systems integrated & powered up for inaugural run: http://t.co/iw6VJ6yumH pic.twitter.com/uMoVPTS0JX
— NASA (@NASA) January 13, 2014

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