gmoes

I recall visiting the museum many years ago and seeing a demo where they heated a glass rod and pulled a fiber. This was probably when fiber optics was in its infancy. It was definitely a highlight for a young science nerd. I would love to go back some day.

Along those lines I highly recommend the episode of the show “How we Got to Now” about glass [0]. It tells the story of how clear glass was developed, something I always took for granted, but early glass was not clear and took a major effort to create. The show then goes into how Corning took it to a new level for fiber optics. The whole series is excellent and similar to James Burke’s excellent series “Connections”. [1]

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4160136/

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ&list=PLf02uWXhaG...

I wonder if Kodak's Ascorbic Acid-Based XTOL Developer was inspired by this idea.

I’ve made the same basic comment before, but we need to ban the residential use of herbicides and pesticides. I spoke to a beekeeper who had two hives wiped out by Mosquito Squad spraying on an adjacent property.

I recently came across a 1997 paper called: "Producing and Consuming Chemicals: The Moral Economy of the American Lawn". They cite a higher per hectare usage for residential over agriculture. We need to get rid of our lawns they are literally destroying the planet and they are greenhouse gas emitters when you factor in gas powered mowers and leaf blowers. Fertilizer emits nitrogen oxides that are potent greenhouse gases.

The paper is interesting as it talks about how lawns are marketed. Unfortunately lawns are a multibillion dollar industry. If we are going to fight climate change and environmental degradation, we need to seriously rethink letting business needs take priority over the environment and not just for lawns.

We need to allow people to have native plant yards. I've seen great results with insects. Unfortunately it's illegal where I live and probably most non-rural places. In order to allow this would mean changing state and local ordinances across the US. I honestly don’t think that will happen until it’s too late. By then lawns will be the last thing we will care about.

There’s some great comedy by the late Bill Hicks about his drug and alcohol use and that by rock and roll bands like the Rolling Stones and The Beatles and what music would sound like without drugs.

Not to disparage the author but I see he is selling a book called: Real Artists Don’t Starve.

I haven’t read the book, I have to ask myself what if that was the approach taken by Van Gogh? What would his art look like? My guess is probably pre-Impressionist Manet.

Carl Sagan was a famous pot head who said something like re-evaluate the ideas that you come up when you high after you’ve come down.

I find the ideas can flow when I drink. I have heard other people say that that doesn’t happen for them.

There’s a great quote on the floor of the Guggenheim in New York: LET EACH MAN EXERCISE THE ART HE KNOWS

I think it’s really, find what works for you.

Sorry to hear that. I guess in a sense I am lucky as the ordinances only restrict height not species. I suspected HOA's were worse. I'm with you. Hopefully this madness will end.

Every bag of the stuff says, "It is a violation of federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling." Sounds like regulation to me. You don't have to ask permission to put it on your lawn, but you've got plenty of rope to hang yourself with a warning label like that.

I meant in terms of application. I did try to find ordinances on this at the state and municipal level. They may exist, but even so is there any oversight?

Good point, compared to 40 million for lawns. Maybe proportional to usefulness. ;)

And water is a huge issue too. The native plants thrive in wet and dry conditions without attention.

I used aggressive native plants from my area. These included Jerusalem artichokes, Indian Hemp, Joe Pye Weed, etc. in the sunny areas. Virginia knot weed, etc. in the shady areas. They colonized my yard very well and even kept the English Ivy at bay.

I had no issues with erosion. The plants lived for years and established rhizomes and extensive root systesms.

I think the American suburban yard may be equally responsible with agriculture for a lot of this in the US. The use of herbicides and pesticides is completely unregulated. Additionally lawns are an unnecessary waste of time for most people and have a large carbon footprint. I had a small native plant yard that attracted hundreds of pollinators and arachnids. I was treated like and criminal forced to cut most of it down. I still get a fair amount of terrestrial arthropods but not as much.

It sickens me when I see workers with those sprayer packs or trucks that look like small chemical plants.

Before I decided to comment I submitted my write up, if you are interested you can read that you can read here:

http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-ya...

Edit: I did want to mention that I definitely seen a massive decline in butterflies and moths over the last 15 years.

Update: I quoted 40 million acres below, which is for turf grass which probably includes athletic fields. I am not against everyone having a lawn or athletic fields. I do think people should be able to cultivate their native environment on their suburban property and this should be encouraged and even incentivized. My neighbor’s kids play in their backyard, so they have a need for it. Of course a non herbicide non monoculture lawn should work ok too. That’s what I grew up with.

Also I think that gas powered devices need to be replaced with electric devices. I think something like 17 million gallons of fuel are spilled alone in relation to lawn maintenance.

The thing that scares me is the normality of spraying for mosquitoes. In my area it’s the invasive Aedes mosquito species, the native species are a lot less aggressive. Also with some of these other very scary invasive species like the marmorated stink bug, ash borer, lantern fly, that new Asian tick, etc. Are we going to end up using more and more insecticides and subsequently kill more and more of our native fauna?

They are if you get them fresh. They are almost like coconut meat.

First off I hate these types of analogies as I feel they cloud the issue. You can really think of this as two different semantic domains: the solution domain and the problem domain. You can break them down as (controllers, errors, storage, templates, validators) vs (posts, comments, users), respectively. His layout is pretty consistent with standard Java/Spring/Hibernate project structures. In my experience when you work on a project like this you are working on something in the problem domain like users and when you make a change you have to go hunt down each solution domain component in a separate package. It has always seemed to me that it is better to organize using the problem domain as it clusters functionality that you are likely to work on concurrently.

I have yet to replace my 19 year old low mileage car. I'd rather have a 1000 spiders and 1000 flower flies and a 1000 bees than another gallon of gasoline. Of course what organisms originally died to create that gallon of gasoline that you buy today?

Does the planet really need more gasoline?

Maybe it’s time we consider the opportunity to allow people to convert their private property into dense carbon sinks that support plant and terrestrial arthropod diversity.

http://www.elegantcoding.com/2018/03/reimagining-suburban-ya...

Maybe we should be considering every option we have to promote a healthy reduced CO2 environment.

He covered it from Bob Dylan.

So, two points:

First of all, clickbaity title as he says it might be "pointless".

Secondly he is talking about topology. I find it to be a very hard subject. If you pick up most topology books you will find an area of math that most people have never really been prepared for and the books themselves start with some concepts that are very abstract. Now depending on what you are interested in, Topology can provide many insights into the shapes and constructions of spaces. Things like metric topology tie into how vector spaces are constructed. Things like n-dimensional manifolds can be related to aspects of machine learning.

I recommend The Teaching Company’s Shape of Nature videos for learning some general ideas about topology.

Just a disclaimer, I am not a mathematician, so I might be off on some my perceptions. Also no pun intended on pointless.

I would agree that there is an artfulness, for lack of a better term, in engineering. However, there is a lot of science and math i.e. structural engineering that underlies building a structure that is safe and won’t fall down. Admittedly it still does happen from time to time due to mistakes or things that might have been misunderstood, e.g. the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

The field of software engineering is very nascent and is still in need of the underlying science and math foundations like you find in other engineering disciplines. Unfortunately methodologies like Agile and Waterfall seem to have become synonymous with software engineering.

I feel that there is some naiveté in this perspective, although the OP does touch on it somewhat. A novice most likely would write their code in a very monolithic fashion. That same approach fails significantly with larger code bases.

As a seasoned developer I have come to realize that one of the most important things to be a good developer is organizational skills. Unfortunately it seems that ways to organize code bases, including things like naming, mutable state, modularization, cohesion/coupling, etc., are not as well developed or understood in general in our industry as they should be.

While understanding and knowing the right algorithms is important. I sometimes wonder if our emphasis on the knowing algorithms off the top of your head interviewing process contributes to putting the emphasis on the wrong things in software development.

I have anecdotal experience with this. I used to have dense native plants in my yard. My local municipality made me cut them all down. The mosquitoes, specifically the invasive Aedes species seemed way worse without the lattice of tall native plants that provided both platforms for jumping spiders and infrastructure web based spiders. My tiny yard created so much spider-space for arachnid and other predators. Too bad I was punished by my local municipality for being so arrogant to want grow native plants. I have massive photographic evidence to this effect. See here: http://opilionesman.blogspot.ca/2017/05/i-wanted-to-share-so...

I know a guy who used to teach Haskell at a university who now runs a development shop at a startup that uses Go. From I recall his main reason for choosing it was to hire cheaper less experienced developers. I remember talking to him about Go and he remarked something like: If you want to clean modular code don’t use Go.

Not to disparage less experienced developers but I think teams of developers of any experience level need to have code governance and oversight regardless of the technologies and that a good team with good practices can create good code bases even with more complex and expressive languages. I know another colleague who did this with Scala and was able to properly mentor more junior developers by leading by example. I have not used Go. I have done and lot of Java and a bit of Scala and have many times leveraged generics to create a very high degree of reuse. Without them clearly you get a lot of boilerplate code which makes a codebase larger which leads to another type of complexity in my opinion. So the question is which scenario increases your codebase complexity and that probably boils down to what domain you are developing in. I explore some ideas relating to that tradeoff here [0]. Go has a specific use case that it targets which I believe is services and certain aspects of concurrency.

Clearly the Go language and environment have value in the industry, however, as a language it offers little for people who want to have an opportunity grow and learn about more advanced concepts wrt to PLT and CS in general. I have a friend who is a Go fanatic and I try to encourage her to push her limits, but she feels and she can bang out service level code very quickly and she can as she is quite talented. Of course you can do that with Spring Boot as well. Regardless of your language you should always be trying to grow as a developer otherwise you risk becoming obsolete.

To put it bluntly and I may get downvoted for this I feel Go is the “Rise of the Expert Beginner Language”. [1]

[0] http://www.elegantcoding.com/2012/02/software-reuse-complexi...

[1] https://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-o...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13907696

Pretty much what I went through, except actually less than ten miles from the Whitehouse.

I can attest to lawns being the enemy. For many years I grew a dense native plant yard and literally have tens of thousands of pictures of terrestrial arthropods ok a lot of dupes of individuals but also amazing biodiversity and multispecies and social phenomena like ant symbiosis which I wrote about here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-storie... and opiliones social behavior. It was amazing. They only problem is that it is illegal and I was forced to destroy all of my native plants by my local municipality. As a result the insects disappeared.

If you are interested in this topic I would highly recommend The Ants by E.O. Wilson Bert Holldobler. I was lucky enough to observe ant symbiosis in my yard. Their book helped me understand what I saw. I did a write up of it here: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2016/05/my-ant-symbiosis-storie...

I watched this NASA "tweetup" a few years back. It's a bit long, but has some very interesting discussions about the science and engineering of the project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iWgZ_TmL0M

I did a post a while back on this topic, which might be of interest: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2014/08/a-brief-and-incomplete-...

I think there are multiple types of GRBs and some can be spherical. Two that I have read about are neutron stars colliding and large solar mass > 100 exploding and leaving no remnant. I've read that these types of bursts can blow the atmosphere off of a planet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernova

Here's a post I did on free math resources, including a list of resources on various topics:

http://www.elegantcoding.com/2011/06/free-math-resources-you...

There's some really great stuff listed there, I use it all the time.

I agree, naming is important and often overlooked, check out this quote by Josh Bloch: http://www.elegantcoding.com/2011/07/software-frameworks-res...