mbillard

"Scar Tissues Make Relationships Wear Out"

04/26/2103. From a lecture by Professor John Ousterhout at Stanford, class CS142.

This is my most touchy-feely thought for the weekend. Here’s the basic idea: It’s really hard to build relationships that last for a long time. If you haven’t discovered this, you will discover this sooner or later. And it's hard both for personal relationships and for business relationships. And to me, it's pretty amazing that two people can stay married for 25 years without killing each other.

[Laughter]

> But honestly, most professional relationships don't last anywhere near that long. The best bands always seem to break up after 2 or 3 years. And business partnerships fall apart, and there's all these problems in these relationships that just don't last. So, why is that? Well, in my view, it’s relationships don't fail because there some single catastrophic event to destroy them, although often there is a single catastrophic event around the the end of the relation

mbillard

- `0` is `true`
- Everything is an object, even `nil`
- `===`
  - different behavior depending on classes, only use/define for `case...when` blocks
- private class methods (http://domon.cc/2013/12/25/private-class-methods-in-ruby/)
- `and` and `or` vs `&&` and `||`
- constants are not constants unless you freeze them
- `5 / 2 # => 2` transform your integers to floats before doing operations

More:

mbillard

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov © 1956


The last question was asked for the first time, half in jest, on May 21, 2061, at a time when humanity first stepped into the light. The question came about as a result of a five dollar bet over highballs, and it happened this way:
Alexander Adell and Bertram Lupov were two of the faithful attendants of Multivac. As well as any human beings could, they knew what lay behind the cold, clicking, flashing face -- miles and miles of face -- of that giant computer. They had at least a vague notion of the general plan of relays and circuits that had long since grown past the point where any single human could possibly have a firm grasp of the whole.

Multivac was self-adjusting and self-correcting. It had to be, for nothing human could adjust and correct it quickly enough or even adequately enough -- so Adell and Lupov attended the monstrous giant only lightly and superficially, yet as well as any men could. They fed it data, adjusted questions to its needs and translated t

mbillard

Vowel qualities in English words

The following is a list of the most common one-syllable words in English, grouped according to what vowels they contain. You will need to memorize the pronunciation of all these words for the final exam. Luckily, in most cases the spelling will help you. I suggest that you create a guide for yourself noting how particular letter combinations are usually pronounced, and which words are exceptions. The words have been arranged in groups according to spelling. (This list is a slightly modified version of one created by John Myhill.)

I have used the following substitutes for phonetic characters (see your handout from the IPA Handbook): [E] for the vowel in 'bed', [I] 'bid', [U] 'good', [A] 'bad', [^] 'bud', [O] 'bought', [3] RP 'bird', [@] for schwa.

Lists

Words pronounced with the near-high near-front vowel [I]:

mbillard

                                 old            new
# score > 0
_hot(1, 0, 1262304000)           2850.0         2850.0
_hot(1, 0, 1353107345)           4868.0         4868.0
_hot(1000, 500, 1262304000)      2852.69897     2852.69897
_hot(1000, 500, 1353107345)      4870.69897     4870.69897

# score < 0
_hot(0, 1, 1262304000)          -2851.0         2850.0
_hot(0, 1, 1353107345)          -4869.0         4868.0

mbillard

a
abandon
abandons
abattoir
abattoirs
abbe
abbes
abbesses
abdication
abdications

mbillard

~ tilde
• •
· ·
— em dash
- en dash
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