craft

The friend is rarely the one who is most able to help you; and in the end, skill and competence are far more important than friendly feelings.

His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has nothing to do with the contents of the safe. He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he's not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.

Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa argues that drafting by hand represents a link between the architect and the "physical materiality" of the object he is designing. By contrast, computer design exists in an "abstract immaterial world" where "false precision" can mislead the designer.

"He'll never be frightened," Mike said. "He knows too damned much." "He knew everything when he started. The others can't ever learn what he was born with."

I stayed up late and finished my letter to Ala by firelight. Which was a good way to do it; the seventh draft was short and simple. I just kept asking myself: if fate had it that we'd never see each other again, what would I need to say to her?

When asked, "How do you write?" I invariably answer, "One word at a time," and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That's all. One stone at a time. But I've read you can see that motherfucker from space without a telescope.

It was an inadequacy dream. It expressed that one simple overriding fear: What if you cant? What if you want to, but you can't? The terror of being unable to make the simple leap of faith which is the place where any artist—singer, writer, painter, musician—begins.

To play so as to be relaxed and refreshed for work is not to play, and no work is well and finely done unless it, too, is a form of play.

Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him—why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it's also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship.

Generally, all the best mechanistic games—those which can be played in any sense 'perfectly,' such as grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions—can be traced to civilizations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies. "The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attributes of the pieces, is inevitably to shackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value. As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time."

Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture's philosophy."

one does have to learn to look at art. But it's up to the artist to use language that can be understood. Most of these jokers don't want to use language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we 'fail' to see what they are driving at. If anything. Obscurity is the refuge of incompetence.

touch things with consideration and they will be yours; you will own them; they will move or stay still or move for you; they will lie back and part their legs and yield up their innermost seams to you. Teach you all their tricks. He knew what the Beats know and what the great tennis player knows, son: learn to do nothing, with your whole head and body, and everything will be done by what's around you.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

arrays are always mutable; lists are always immutable.

The telltale sign of a function with side effects is that its result type is Unit.

Tail-call optimization is limited to situations where a method or nested function calls itself directly as its last operation, without going through a function value or some other intermediary.

In principle it's possible to leave out all empty parentheses in Scala function calls. However, it's still recommended to write the empty parentheses when the invoked method represents more than a property of its receiver object. For instance, empty parentheses are appropriate if the method performs I/O, writes reassignable variables (vars), or reads vars other than the receiver's fields, either directly or indirectly by using mutable objects.

if the function you're calling performs an operation, use the parentheses. But if it merely provides access to a property, leave the parentheses off.

When you call a method on a class with mixins, the method in the trait furthest to the right is called first. If that method calls super, it invokes the method in the next trait to its left, and so on.

"You are speaking," Enoch said, "of the man whose brain was the first to be scanned using a fully modern procedure." Which of course Sophia knew perfectly well. So the same words could have come across as mansplaining. But Enoch managed to deliver them in a mild tone and with respectful, inquiring glances at Sophia, making it clear that he was in fact working with her to move the conversation forward.

Many have remarked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Product teams complain that they don't understand the big picture—they don't see how their work contributes to the larger goals, and they're struggling with what it means to be an empowered, autonomous team.

customers just aren't as excited about this idea as we are. So, they choose not to use it. Sometimes they want to use it and they try it out, but the product is so complicated that it's simply more trouble than it's worth, so users again choose not to use it.

at least half the ideas on your roadmap are not going to deliver what you hope. (By the way, the really good teams assume that at least three quarters of the ideas won't perform like they hope.)

projects are output and product is all about outcome.

In practice, of course, Taylor also tried to keep the proceedings as easy and as informal as possible, to the point of having the conference room furnished with beanbag chairs. He even let the speakers set the rules for how each meeting would proceed, much as a card dealer could call the game in Las Vegas; thus their nickname, Dealer Meetings. And when the arguments got heated, which they often did, the minister's son would do his best to convert a "class-one" disagreement—one in which the combatants were simply yelling at each other—into a "class two" disagreement, in which each side could explain the other side's position to the other side's satisfaction. You don't have to believe the other guy, he would tell them. You just have to give a fair account of what he's saying. And it worked. As one CSL member later explained it, Taylor's class one/class two exercise was amazingly effective at clarifying unspoken assumptions and ferreting out facts that one person knew and another didn't. "So by the time you get done," he said, "you all know the same set of things, and you end up concluding the same thing."

L'homme c'est rien—l'oeuvre c'est tout,'

If the calculated P is positive with either formula, the component actually absorbs power. But if P is negative, the component produces power--it is a source of electric energy.

For mesh analysis, the transformation of all current sources to voltage sources is usually preferable because there is no formula for the voltages across current sources. If, however, a current source is positioned at the exterior of a circuit such that only one mesh current flows through it, that current source can remain because the mesh current through it is known—it is the source current or the negative of it, depending on direction. KVL is not applied to this mesh.

The number of mesh equations equals the number of meshes minus the number of current sources, if there are any.

Don't dismiss simplicity. Simple means solid. The entire mansion of mathematics was erected on a foundation of this kind of irreducibly simple, yet logically rock-solid, axiom.

The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. The four twentieth-century writers whose work is most responsible for it are probably Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and the poet Dylan Thomas. They are the writers who largely formed our vision of an existential English-speaking wasteland where people have been cut off from one another and live in an atmosphere of emotional strangulation and despair. These concepts are very familiar to most alcoholics; the common reaction to them is amusement. Substance-abusing writers are just substance abusers—common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons. It doesn't matter if you're James Jones, John Cheever, or a stewbum snoozing in Penn Station; for an addict, the right to the drink or drug of choice must be preserved at all costs. Hemingway and Fitzgerald didn't drink because they were creative, alienated, or morally weak. They drank because it's what alkies are wired up to do. Creative people probably do run a greater risk of alcoholism and addiction than those in some other jobs, but so what? We all look pretty much the same when we're puking in the gutter.

the road to hell is paved with adverbs,

It seems to occur to few of the attendees that if you have a feeling you just can't describe, you might just be, I don't know, kind of like, my sense of it is, maybe in the wrong fucking class.

"Think of it this way," said Helmholtz. "Our aim is to make the world more beautiful than it was when we came into it. It can be done. You can do it." A small cry of despair came from Jim Donnini. It was meant to be private, but it pierced every ear with its poignancy. "How?" said Jim. "Love yourself," said Helmholtz, "and make your instrument sing about it. A-one, a-two, a-three." Down came his baton.

industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.

The invocation operator is a pair of parentheses that follow any expression that produces a function value. The parentheses can contain zero or more expressions, separated by commas. Each expression produces one argument value. Each of the argument values will be assigned to the function's parameter names. There is no runtime error when the number of arguments and the number of parameters do not match. If there are too many argument values, the extra argument values will be ignored. If there are too few argument values, the undefined value will be substituted for the missing values. There is no type checking on the argument values: any type of value can be passed to any parameter.

JavaScript does not have block scope even though its block syntax suggests that it does. This confusion can be a source of errors. JavaScript does have function scope. That means that the parameters and variables defined in a function are not visible outside of the function, and that a variable defined anywhere within a function is visible everywhere within the function.

I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all sides of a picture, forgiving all sins.

The hardest part about working with aliens and saving humanity from extinction is constantly having to come up with names for stuff.

Fast-forward merges are not reflected in the project history. This is the tangible distinction between fast-forward merges and 3-way merges.

"The prize never goes to the fastest guy," Chris replied. "It goes to the guy who slows down the least."

The grip of the right hand, since it is the hand that does the overlapping, is more complicated. If setting up a strong, correct left hand is one half of the job of establishing a one-unit grip, the other half is getting your right hand in a position to perform its share of the work but no more than its equal share. This means, in effect, subduing the natural tendency of the right forefinger and thumb to take charge. If they do, they'll ruin you. The "pincer fingers," the forefinger and thumb, are wonderful for performing countless tasks in daily living such as opening doors and picking up coffee cups, but they are no good at all in helping you to build a good grip and a good swing. The explanation behind this is that the muscles of the right forefinger and thumb connect with the very powerful set of muscles that run along the outside of the right arm and elbow to the right shoulder. If you work the tips of the thumb and forefinger together and apply any considerable amount of pressure, you automatically activate those muscles of the right arm and shoulder — and those are not the muscles you want to use in the golf swing. Using them is what breeds so many golfers who never swing with both hands working together, who lurch back and then lurch into the ball, all right arm and right shoulder and all wrong.