bolson

Took a workshop from and saw a performance of this acro pair yesterday. I find their musicality and gracefulness and danciness appealing. And a lot of the moves are really impressive in themselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=861ofvM5E8k (4:23)

"… the sort of shabby, battered goods that only folks who feared they couldn't get more would ever use, or save." -- Lois McMaster Bujold, Cryoburn

Huh, yeah. Nothing begets hoarding like scarcity. Thus, perhaps bounty is a good facilitator to simplicity. It's safe to have a few, good things if you are confident that you'll be able to get those good things and not have to hang onto or settle for lesser things. (Thinking of my local simplicity guru, flexigon)

Many (many!) months ago flexagon mentioned this thing she did on Wednesday nights called acroyoga. I had the majority of my Wednesday nights spoken for, but had a free one this week, so I went. We did a bunch of basic poses that I had done in the old gymnastics and partner acrobatics class I had been going to (also flexagon's recommendation) but this time I got to fly! We got into trios of roughly size matched people, and I was able to get up into all the poses. Yay!

I think I have sore spots just below my collar bones where someone's thumbs were digging in. Is that normal?

Sick of getting ungrammatical misspelled advances on the internet? Collegehumor has noticed this problem that women have with lame guys (music video, about 4 minutes)

Oh, hard workouts, I'd almost forgotten what they were like. Two one-hour/ten-mile bike rides on Monday (home to/from Waltham). Aerial Silks Tuesday. I have lots of unexpectedly sore and tired muscles today all over my legs, arms, hands, back. Uf.

Second welding class in and I made a thing! I obviously have improvement to do on my technique for efficiency and speed and niceness of result, but I did make a thing that is solidly welded and ought to take just about all the force a piece of steel that size ought to.

Oracle is having a chilling effect on Java. I don't think I could in good conscience start a project in Java right now given that Oracle might capriciously lock out parts of the Java world. I've been saying for a couple years than Java is my favorite language these days. Nice to use and fast run time. Boo. Maybe I'll go look at the Go language some more.

Just got a new linux box put together last night. Took me from about 7:30pm to 11pm to physically assemble the thing and install Ubuntu 10.10 and the nvidia driver to drive its four screens (still have 2 year old iMac too).

`make -j8` is my new friend thanks to the four-core eight-thread i7-950 cpu. Also, it's 750W power supply will warm my toes all winter.

[muscular butch dyke]: Hello Ladies. Look at your man, now look at me, now back to your man, now back. to. me.

Sadly, your man is a man.

...

I'm the woman your man should ______ like.

Reading about Haskell, I read that something "isn’t a real function and can return different values" (meaning something doing file input) and am struck by how steeped in a particular branch of mathy jargon this is. Common usage of "function" by 99% of programmers doesn't care about this obscure notion of a 'real function'. Strictly functional languages are a weird little world with weird little biases.

Another abstraction too far? `map` isn't "create a list with the results of applying a function to a source list", it's "given a function from type-A to type-B, return a function from list-of-A to list-of-B". This is a weird twist of interpretation, but I think I see that's how they make thinking about lazy evaluation work.

Reading through the chapter on Monads I got bored of the details of the hoops they jump through in order to pretend their computation is functional. I say pretend because after years of C programming and kernel hacking I am accustomed to and really want languages that let me know what I am doing and what is really going on inside the computer. What is really going on inside the computer has to do with instructions and registers and memory locations. The Functional abstraction is a long ways away from that. I want nice convenient ways of organizing operations I want to do in programs, and maybe it's application driven, but the Functional abstraction doesn't mesh with the data and operations I want to do. I guess I can see small domains where it would be useful, but pretty quickly I always get frustrated because memory is changing and to pretend otherwise confounds me.

If languages are application domain driven, then I think my applications and languages are data-processing and control driven - growing out of FORTRAN and numeric simulation; and LISP and functional languages are symbolic-manipulation driven and perhaps grew out of classical Artificial Intelligence.

I think one of the things that bugs me about functional programming is similar to how religions bug me, they can be pretty metaphors and poetic and sometimes handy simplifications, but at some point they're not true. I want Truth! But there's that last nettlesome bit about handy simplifications. We need those too, more and more.

There are definitely some useful techniques developed out of functional programming. Just recently based on reading a paper about Scala I figured out a nice new thing I could do in Python.

Still I keep being haunted by functional programming. I got on the wrong side of that religion at CMU. I keep hearing the programming languages theory weenies talk about how great they are. They still keep getting news buzz as something important and worth studying. They still keep being the wrong tools for my jobs. End rant.