Substrate

Optics can be thought of as a generalization of functions. A Lens is kinda like a function from A to B, and similarly for Prism.

Long enough to make me wonder, am I even an athlete anymore? ​ At its core, I think being an athlete is about commitment to pursuing what your body and mind are capable of.

It is my hope that this will turn out to be a massive success and will lead to closure of other cross streets like 23rd, 34th, 42nd, 57th, 79th, 86th, and 96th.

Lately I’ve had to call on words for little shots of strength. Some use tequila; I use poems short enough to memorize. Their lines float around in my head, counteracting the insidious words t…

And the cat went back to being our pet. ​ and cats and books were my best friends when I was growing up. ​ These questions—along with that of how the cat beat us home—are still unanswered. Another memory of my father is this: ​ I should explain a little about my father’s background. ​ Things he never could have written in his letters, or they wouldn’t have made it past the censors, he put into the form of haiku—expressing himself in a symbolic code, as it were—where he was able to honestly bare his true feelings. ​ Yet he must have felt a compelling need to relate the story to his son, his own flesh and blood, even if this meant that it would remain an open wound for both of us. ​ is breathe the air of the period we live in, ​ I understand all the more now why he closed his eyes and devoutly recited the sutras every morning of his life. ​ Still, that solitary raindrop has its own emotions, its own history, its own duty to carry on that history. Even if it loses its individual integrity and is absorbed into a collective something. Or maybe precisely because it’s absorbed into a larger, collective entity.

A story about the distances technology fails to bridge.

It’s not a political movement. It’s not even some coordinated, nicely branded “techlash.” It’s just regular people, watching inaction and outcomes, who are fed up. ​ I know Zuck’s persona of nerdy programmer has long disappeared, but the level of NFL Wide Receiver cockiness is still jarring to hear. but the anger is not the problem to solve, it’s the lung cancer.

Oh, also, one guy said he kept “a single tampon that I put in there for my wife like 7 months ago,” and I think that is just so sweet.

When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book — to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves. ​ Her purpose in this project is to bring to the attention of the whole community, art that exists in its own context, ​ The artist creates a structure — whether that’s a map or a cordoned-off area — that holds open a contemplative space against the pressures of habit and familiarity that constantly threaten to close it. ​ Actually, I’ve always found it weird that it’s called birdwatching, because half if not more of birdwatching is actually birdlistening. I personally think they should just rename it birdnoticing. ​ That ended up being two years. I recently asked him how he spent that time, and his answer was that he read a lot, rode his bike, studied math ​ In nature, things that grow unchecked are often parasitic or cancerous. And yet, we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Indeed our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.

Advice from Kurt Vonnegut’s uncle.

I thought about all the ways in which I had lived in New York, and all the ways I will keep living in New York. ​ And then again fifteen years later, a similar feeling, but with a different person, and without the drinking, but still with that desire to never stop talking, even though the thing was being said, over and over and over again.

Being silent in conversation, to let your friend fill the space and share more. ​ But it’s meta-considerate to not smile until they’ve said something,

Introduction “No two rainbows are the same. Neither are two packs of Skittles. Enjoy an odd mix.” – Skittles label Analyzing packs of Skittles (or sometimes M&Ms) seems to be …

In some sense, that’s all programming really is, modeling a domain in a way that can be leveraged by a digital computer. ​ and without being willing to invest the time and money into education, smart, diligent people will still fail to grasp the concepts, and they will likely be wholly uninterested in them. ​ programming, like any other field, is not always about what comes easiest: sometimes it’s important to sit down and study for a while to grok a particularly complicated concept, and other times, it’s simply important to learn by trying, failing, and asking questions.

Instead, I think what’s strange is the massive capacity we now have for holding onto our pasts. ​ But it also means that we carry more and more of our past selves with us, quite literally, in our laptop bags.

I want it to be the case that, when readers go to Wikipedia to see who did what in these areas, the names that they see include a representative sample of women, and that those readers can go to articles on those women to find out more about what they went through to do what they did.

I was used to solving problems, but now I didn’t know what problem to solve. ​ I look back and see the hundreds, if not thousands, of things I tweeted. They were funny, maybe, but besides inflate my ego and follower count, I’m not sure what impact they had.

Praising up doing mathematics as a work of “genius” alienates people.

So, I wrote the bulk of this blog post over a month and a half ago now, but I let it sit. I wanted to be sure that what I had written in the moment was still true to my heart. That you are reading these words is validation that it is.

I co-wrote a book I’m quite proud of and from what I hear it has helped many people learn what they wanted to learn and get started writing Haskell

The Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska has solved the centuries-old sphere-packing problem in dimensions eight and 24.

The 1’s add no information. And so it’s more convenient to exclude 1 from the list of prime numbers. That’s what allows us to say that each number has a unique prime factorization.

It seemed as though he’d lived the entirety of his childhood and adolescence on autopilot, so busy living out the life expected of him that he never questioned whether he actually wanted it. ​ In his own mind, he was worth caring about only because of his achievements. ​ The burnt-out case of today belongs to a culture without an off switch. ​ She would fantasise in our sessions about going home and sleeping, waking only for stretches of blissfully catatonic inactivity over uninterrupted, featureless weeks. ​ This belief, she had come to realise, had taken a suffocating hold on her life: “the longer I live in wait for this magical event, the more I’m not living this life,

So by the time you hear the news that I’ve died, the full story—the book of my life—will be ready to read.

and pay more attention to consolidation, exposition and preservation of the knowledge we already have. more room for quiet study and reflection.