Observation

I have found that the amount of discussion (and the heat, zealotry, and noise of that discussion) about a particular change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the proposed change.

 

If someone says something that makes everyone within earshot instantly dumber…
And if there are many people saying dumb things that make everyone within earshot instantly dumber…
And if there is a God…
And if God is always listening…

Then God must be really dumb.

Explains a lot.

Do you ever get false epiphanies?

The feeling that you have had a breakthrough thought that came in a flash, that sets your mind alight with fever and you can think of nothing else?

The problem I have with the people in this town is that they are neither pretty enough, glamourous enough, nor rich enough to be so utterly stupid.

When you are unemployed and need a job, your “job” is to find work.

If you spend less than eight hours a day, 40 hours a week looking for work and applying to companies then I can only conclude you will do a lousy job should I hire you.

From information comes knowledge.

From knowledge comes understanding.

From understanding comes wisdom.

The problem with computers is not that they are dumb but that people think the computer is smarter than they are.

The louder someone declares something, the less true it usually is.

Assume the universe is a big computer simulation.

A really good simulation.

If whoever created the simulation is mindful enough to prevent the intelligent and self-aware inhabitants of the simulation from realizing or even conjecturing that the universe is a simulation, then they cannot be sure that the intelligent inhabitants of the simulation are incapable of reasoning whether they live in a simulation. i.e. you cannot be sure that your simulation doesn’t realise it is a simulation.

This is a variation on the halting problem.

The universe (the one we live in) is the classic halting problem of computability.

Think about it.

The world is binary and holds two values, both of which are false.

There are only two types of people in the world.

Those that say all religions are false.

And those that say all other religions are false.

Curiousity makes cats of us all.

How did they know it was “The Last Supper?”

Surely that should have been a big clue?!?

You see something going on where they are calling “The Last Supper” in a film or a book, you’d be thinking to yourself “Hello! Major plot device!”

Sometimes your project is going to be late before you even start working on it.

The reason is that you decided when you needed to have the software done before you really knew what you were going to be building.

And rarely do the people who want what they want have any idea how much they can reasonably fit in the timeframe available.

Do you think that the battle between David and Goliath was the earliest historically recorded critical hit?

Definitely a case of someone rolling a natural 20 with a bunch of bonuses.

After four years of writing computer game software, and also designing pen & paper games and board games, I have come to believe that creating a working prototype is very important.

A prototype lets you work out the kinks in your design and your rules before you commit to writing even a single line of code.

Coding (figuring out the machine and how the machine works) is fun. But that “fun” should be reserved for a very distinct phase of development.

Even a simple paper prototype (even for an arcade game) is useful to determine how the player’s spaceship (or whatever) moves about on the screen. How enemies will move, and so forth.

I can prototype in a few hours with figurines or dice or pieces of origami and a large sheet of graph paper how a game will play and some of the fun to be derived.

Whereas I would spend days or even weeks determining if the game play actually works if I were writing out the assembly and converting to machine code.

Programming is immensely fun, but solving interesting problems with figuring out how the machine works should really be a separate development step than figuring out how the game should play.

You want to figure out who is most wrong in any altercation?

Look for the loudest one or the angriest one.

Anger and volume.

They are not always hand-in-hand.

But they are strong indicators that this is the person who is most in the wrong.

The one who fucked up.

The one who probably caused the accident.

If you think about it, the difference between fetish and deviance is that the fetishist uses the feather and the deviant uses the duck.

Companies are sociopathic vampires.

I am a strong believer that adding more people to your already late software project is a guaranteed way of making the delivery of it even later.

First it takes the new people time to get up to speed and figure out what needs to be done, but more importantly, how it needs to be done.

And secondly, the more people you have on a software project the harder you have to work as the project manager to divide up the tasks so that that they can be done in parallel.

Also, I need to let my boss know we’re behind schedule and need to hire more people.

If I write my dates backwards, year, month, day, and time (using the numbers 0 to 23 to represent the hours of the day), when I sort them, they sort from earliest date & time to latest date & time.

The amount of trapped air in an upside-down glass decreases the further you submerge the glass.

Is the pressure of the water causing this to happen?

The amount of water filling a glass that is tilted in the water goes down as the glass fills up. Must be because the glass becomes more upright.

The rate at which a glass moves from flat to upright as it fills up is dictated by the height of the glass.

A glass with a quantity of water in it set spinning in a bath will spin for a time from the amount of water in the glass and the size of the glass.

The size of a glass determines the amount of work to start spinning. Something to do with the glass touching the water slowing it down or making it sticky?

The size of a glass determines how quickly it will come to a rest after it has been set spinning given a fixed amount of liquid in the glass.

The amount of air inside an upside-down glass says how fast the glass will go up [raise] in the water.

The amount of water in an upside-down glass says how hard the glass is to lift out of the water.

The higher the water outside gets above the level of the water inside of an upside-down glass increases the amount of work required to lift the glass out of the water.

Have you ever noticed how the holes in a cat’s fur are always in the right place for them to look out of?