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| Apollo 11 crew |
50 years ago men were walking on the moon, and I was watching. I was seven years old, and space was my favorite thing.
Subtraction? Not interested.
Instead give me space a lots of it.
Can you name all the planets of the solar system in order and relevant facts about each. I could (still can) at the age of seven. And yet, I had not mastered subtraction.
I have a deep and abiding interest in the space program fostered at a young age. It's this historical event that probably led to my interest in science fiction. That event and that my Dad read it, also.
So, today, some content commemorating the Apollo 11 space mission and a bunch of other stuff, in keeping with the gallimaufry of hodge podge and a myriad of other stuff. It's the weekly stew.
I tried to keep the jambalaya weekly stew shorter this time, but the extra Harry Potter content made it longer.
There's some good news items, including one following up on my OOP and Functional programming debate.
There's good stuff here. If you actually check out my blog, leave a comment and enjoy.
See our 50 favorite photos from Apollo 11
Feel the excitement the mission stirred at home and abroad in our gallery of archival images celebrating the moon landing's 50th anniversary.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/07/our-50-favorite-apollo-11-pictures/
ON JULY 20, 1969, the world held its breath as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin made the first steps on the moon. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of this landmark moment, we’ve curated a gallery of 50 archival photographs that offer a rare and intimate glimpse at the mission and the global excitement it stirred.
This article has been adapted for various platforms. You can find a richer digital experience of this story here.
BUT NOW A PUPPY..........
STATE OF THE HATE NATION AND ANOTHER PUPPY
Trump falsely tells auditorium full of teens the Constitution gives him "the right to do whatever I want" https://t.co/X9HXP1m76S— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) July 23, 2019
I am borrowing content from my wife here. All the following through the "sky raisins" are her finds.
'As Muslim legislators we are constantly being asked to waste our time speaking to issues that other people are not asked to speak to.' — Watch Rep. Ilhan Omar shut down this 'appalling' question
https://www.facebook.com/NowThisPolitics/videos/2403120809907442/?t=0
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-mueller-testimony-tweets-862775/
AND THIS.........OH MY
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Donald_Trump
EMBEDDED:
IN CASE EMBEDDED FAILS IN THE FUTURE:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/573986/jk-rowling-regrets-ron-hermione-relationship
In 2011, following the theatrical release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, many Potterheads found themselves at the end of an era in their lives. Fans were saddened by the fact that the series had come to an end—and even today, eight years later, it's still a sore subject for many longtime readers. But the pain has been somewhat alleviated thanks to Pottermore, new books such as Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and even insightful tweets from J.K. Rowling herself.
Did you really think the Potterverse would just be forgotten overnight? No, of course not. In fact, it only seems to keep growing with time as new readers and viewers come to the books and movies, thanks in large part to Rowling’s openness to sharing pieces of non-canon trivia.
One surprising admission Rowling shared following the conclusion of the series is that she had some misgivings about pairing up Ron and Hermione. In an interview conducted by Emma Watson in 2014, the author told the actress that she put Ron and Hermione together because she wanted to see them together, but that in many ways Harry and Hermione would have been the better fit.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/07/19/1517224/tech-unemployment-hits-19-year-low
Tech Unemployment Hits 19-Year Low (dice.com)
Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.New submitter SpaceForceCommander writes:Tech unemployment hasn't been this low since the turn of the century, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data crunched by CompTIA. As of May, tech's unemployment rate sat at 1.3 percent. "There is now the very real prospect of tech worker shortages affecting industry growth," Tim Herbert, executive vice president for research and market intelligence at CompTIA, wrote in a statement accompanying the data. "Firms seeking to expand into new areas such as the Internet of Things, robotic process automation or artificial intelligence may be inhibited by a lack of workers with these advanced skills, not to mention shortages in the complementary areas of technology infrastructure and cybersecurity."
Tech's unemployment rate previously hit 1.4 percent, in April 2007 and March 2018. (The BLS began measuring occupation-level employment data in January 2000.) However, not all segments within tech are adding jobs at the same rate; although custom software development and computer systems design gained 8,400 new positions in May, for example, both information services and telecommunications saw modest losses. Meanwhile, new data from PayScale suggests that wages within the tech industry grew 2.3 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2019. That's an indicator that the low unemployment rate is forcing employers to pay more in order to secure the talent they nee
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/19/07/22/0426201/is-object-oriented-programming-a-trillion-dollar-disaster
Is Object-Oriented Programming a Trillion Dollar Disaster? (medium.com)
Posted by EditorDavid from the OOPs dept.Senior full-stack engineer Ilya Suzdalnitski recently published a lively 6,000-word essay calling object-oriented programming "a trillion dollar disaster."Precious time and brainpower are being spent thinking about "abstractions" and "design patterns" instead of solving real-world problems... Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) has been created with one goal in mind -- to manage the complexity of procedural codebases. In other words, it was supposed to improve code organization. There's no objective and open evidence that OOP is better than plain procedural programming... Instead of reducing complexity, it encourages promiscuous sharing of mutable state and introduces additional complexity with its numerous design patterns. OOP makes common development practices, like refactoring and testing, needlessly hard...
Using OOP is seemingly innocent in the short-term, especially on greenfield projects. But what are the long-term consequences of using OOP? OOP is a time bomb, set to explode sometime in the future when the codebase gets big enough. Projects get delayed, deadlines get missed, developers get burned-out, adding in new features becomes next to impossible. The organization labels the codebase as the "legacy codebase", and the development team plans a rewrite.... OOP provides developers too many tools and choices, without imposing the right kinds of limitations. Even though OOP promises to address modularity and improve reusability, it fails to deliver on its promises...
I'm not criticizing Alan Kay's OOP -- he is a genius. I wish OOP was implemented the way he designed it. I'm criticizing the modern Java/C# approach to OOP... I think that it is plain wrong that OOP is considered the de-facto standard for code organization by many people, including those in very senior technical positions. It is also wrong that many mainstream languages don't offer any other alternatives to code organization other than OOP.
The essay ultimately blames Java for the popularity of OOP, citing Alan Kay's comment that Java "is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS." It also quotes Linus Torvalds's observation that "limiting your project to C means that people don't screw things up with any idiotic 'object model'."
And it ultimately suggests Functional Programming as a superior alternative, making the following assertions about OOP:
- "OOP code encourages the use of shared mutable state, which has been proven to be unsafe time and time again... [E]ncapsulation, in fact, is glorified global state."
- "OOP typically requires a lot of boilerplate code (low signal-to-noise ratio)."
- "Some might disagree, but OOP code is notoriously difficult to unit test... [R]efactoring OOP code is really hard without dedicated tools like Resharper."
- "It is impossible to write good and maintainable Object-Oriented code."
https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/19/07/22/1847207/avengers-surpasses-avatar-as-highest-grossing-film-of-all-time
'Avengers' Surpasses 'Avatar' as Highest-Grossing Film of All Time (axios.com)
Posted by msmash from the whatever-it-took dept.Disney's presentation of Marvel's "Avengers: Endgame" has officially surpassed "Avatar" to become the world's highest-grossing film of all time, several months after the film obliterated opening weekend records. From a report:The feat underscores Disney's position as the king of the box office. Disney has had the top grossing movie every year since 2012 and been the top grossing studio since 2016. Disney has reported an estimated $2,790.2 million in revenue through Sunday for "Avengers: Endgame," per Comscore. James Cameron's 2009 science fiction film "Avatar" had previously held the top spot of the highest grossing global release of all time with $2,789.7 million. Disney's success can largely be attributed to the three franchises that it has cultivated or acquired over the past few years: Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/07/the-atlas-of-moons/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/06/apollo-8-commander-frank-borman-reflects-sights-sounds-space-age/
WATCHMEN HBO TV SHOW UPDATE
https://ew.com/tv/2019/07/24/damon-lindelof-watchmen-hbo-series-alan-moore-tca-2019/
Lindelof did promise, however, that the original source material isn’t being retconned or rewritten in his HBO version. “We reexplore the past but it’s canon,” he says. “Everything that happened in those 12 issues could not be messed with. We were married to it. There is no rebooting it.”
And while fans may be wary of another Watchmen adaptation without Moore’s seal of approval, Lindelof explains that he’s a fan of the original as well.
“All I can say is I love the source material,” Lindelof says. “I went through a very intense period of terror of f—ing it up. I’m not entirely sure I’m out of that tunnel. But I have a tremendous amount of respect for this. I had to separate myself a little bit from this incredible reverence to take risks.”
Watchmen debuts in October on HBO.
Ashish Nathani, M.D. Medicine, ETSU Quillen College of Medicine (2021)
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-biggest-plothole-in-Harry-Potter
Let me preface by saying while JK Rowling is an incredibly talented and creative woman with great command over imagery and story structure, she seems to lack the requisite skills to build a cohesive universe. In that, she is surpassed by peers such as Tolkien and Lewis. She often fumbles about in her books not seeming to know where she is going. HP is an incredible series but it is VERY flawed. Now, let’s dive in:
1. Time turners- we are told that they are not allowed to be used to alter major events. But this is clearly false as that is the core premise of “Cursed Child”. Now granted the Ministry destroyed them, before this happened, no one even tried using them? Well that’s just idiotic. To insinuate no one could realize the utility of time travel.
Edit: It was brought to my attention that Cursed Child is not considered canon. However, upon further research, Rowling has admitted the introduction of the device created problems for her, which is why she soon after their introduction had all of the time turners destroyed/rendered useless. It does not, however, resolve the implications of their existence prior to this event and its use as we have seen in the series has still violated Bootstrap paradox. Thus it remains a plot hole, one which Rowling has all but affirmed.
2. The Elder Wand- Let me start by saying the hallows would have been a cool idea but were very rushed and simply served as a plot device in the final book. You have this Elder Wand that’s supposed to be bada** and OP. You’re telling me that Grindelwald, one of the greatest dark wizards of all time, couldn’t beat Dumbledore in a duel EVEN WHEN he had this supposedly extraordinarily powerful Elder Wand? And yes the wand could have switched its allegiance during the duel but Dumbledore claimed to be only a “shade” better than Grindlewald. And Dumbledore couldn’t even remotely overpower Voldemort when he was fighting him with this OP Elder Wand at the Ministry? Then what the hell is the Elder Wand supposed to do? Clearly it doesnt frickin’ matter if it does legitimately nothing to help its user! It’s been useless in every instance we’ve seen it used! Now another thing about the Elder Wand is that Voldemort knows you don’t need to kill the previous owner to gain its allegiance as he knows Dumbledore got it from Grindelwald without killing him. So why did he kill Snape? Oh right, because he’s stupid. (Edit: It is fair to say Voldemort could have just killed Snape because he didn’t care about him and didn’t want to take chances. Still seems inconsistent since we haven’t seen him kill loyal subjects simply for convenience before)
3. Veritaserum- no long-term side effects and unequivocally brings out the truth? You’re telling me after the fall of Voldemort when you’ve got all these death eaters claiming they were under the Imperius curse and you have a foolproof way to tell if they are lying and are actually a mass murderer that you’re not going to use it? Hell, i guess i could get out of ANY crime by claiming the Imperius curse. Broke the speed limit on my broomstick? Imperius curse. Killed a man with avada kedavra? Imperius curse. But then you’ve got Sirius Black, an innocent man, sentenced to 13 years in Azkaban for mass murder and the dude didnt even do it. You’re telling me even when an innocent person CONSENTS to prove unequivocally that they are not lying and are in fact innocent, that nah, let’s just send the dude to jail instead. It’s morally right to send an innocent man to jail but amoral to find out the truth in a consenting procedure?
Edit: Occlumency can be used to resist its effects. However, it’s worth noting that even Slughorn, a master of Occlumency, carried an antidote for veritaserum around. So it is unlikely your lay person would be trained well enough to resist its effects, and after the fall of Voldemort, its use would have certainly helped capture many of the Death Eaters who could not resist its effects. And if even one death eater succumbed, it could be used to rat out the others or simply to FIND the definitive proof that they were in league with the Dark Lord. It’s an incredibly powerful potion that has many implications yet hardly shows up, like Felix Felicis
4. The Unbreakable Vow- Rowling loves to bring up little things like this throughout the series and they’re cool and imaginative but she never considers the implication the introduction of this new device she just thought up would have on the rest of the series. Aka Voldemort could have had ALL his death eaters take this unbreakable vow! That is consistent with his character. Then Snape would never have betrayed him and Narcissa wouldn’t have been able to lie to him in the final book and say Harry was dead when really he was alive.
Edit: Even if Voldemort didn’t use it with his Death Eaters to not feel that he relied on anyone (even though he would’ve won if he had used it), James could have used it with Peter after making him the secret keeper. It could have been used in aforementioned veritaserum cases to tell if someone is lying. Of course the phrasing would have to be very precise but someone like Sirius would have nothing to fear. Again, a device brought up simply to serve Rowling’s narrative purpose without regards to its implication on the rest of the established history
5. The Fidelius Charm- James Potter makes his living soul the secret keeper of the fidelius charm so Voldemort can never find them. Simple as that. But instead, they made it Pettigrew? I mean, we see with Bill and his cottage that you can make yourself the secret keeper of the fidelius charm so why James didnt do this is beyond idiotic. Dumbledore even went so far as to tell him there was a traitor in their midst!!! And he’s still like, “Hmm… lemme make Peter the secret keeper rather than myself or Lily”
6. The Trace- Detecting underaged wizarding magic without actually being able to tell if an underaged wizard used it. LOL! This is the most ridiculous concept and led to Harry being blamed for Dobby’s magic (though a couple drops of veritaserum would’ve cleared all that up but nahhhhh). The Trace only seems to be an issue when it’s convenient for Rowling. Bc that means anytime Mrs. Weasley does magic around Ron, Ginny, Fred, or George when they are underage and home for the summer, the Ministry should be pinging off that magic was used in/around an underage wizard. Dunno if it was the underage wizard who used it but hey, that’s the Trace for ya. So the wizarding family kids can use magic and get away with it because the Ministry assumes the parents will take care of it, making it pretty discriminatory towards muggle borns like Hermione. But how about when Tonks, Moody, Hagrid (who isn’t even supposed to have a wand), Dumbledore, etc. use magic around Harry in the Dursely’s house? Those all just go unregistered by the Ministry? But when it’s convenient to the plot, like when Dobby does it around Harry, whelp they’re all over it. Now speaking of the Trace, let’s relate this back to Voldemort. When Tom Riddle, an underaged wizard, kills his muggle father and Morfin gets blamed for it, why didn’t the Ministry register that Tom was there? The Trace was still on him! Or at least it would’ve been relevant if it were more than just a convenient plot device. (There are a LOT of issues with the Trace that I haven’t gone into here)
7. Multiple Wands=More Powerful Spell?- Remember that time Harry used 3 wands to cast a larger, more powerful spell? Yeah, that happened. So why isn’t every wizard packing 10 extra wands? Turn every one of your “stupefy”s into a shotgun blast of magic! Because apparently that’s how it works… But nah, no one ever does it except Harry that one time. Even though it’s apparently more powerful than the Elder Wand…
8. Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration- in Deathly Hallows, SOOOOOO much time is spent by harry, ron, and hermione trying to find food. They’re absolutely starving! Ron even leaves the group with his irritable mood in part secondary to hunger. But we know, by Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration, that a wizard is able to multiply their current supply of food without violation. They can’t conjure it out of nothing but they are able to multiply it. Soooo how stupid are these three? They’re like, “I’m hungry. Let’s eat all our food and not multiply any of it so we have nothing for later.” Legitimately could have just multiplied their food and never been hungry… but that’s too easy I guess.
9. Marauder’s Map- For YEARS, Fred and George have had this thing and they seriously never ONCE noticed that there’s this dude named Peter always with their little brother, Ron? Even when Ron’s alone in his room, on the map it would show this Peter guy standing right next to him! Personally, if my brother were being stalked by an invisible man his entire life, I would take notice of that. And eventually you can connect the dots that “hey, maybe his rat is actually a middle-aged man”
Edit: Even if Fred and George weren’t interested in Ron, Percy had Scabbers before him and Harry used the map himself many times. It’s very implausible that absolutely no one noticed Peter Pettigrew. Especially since there are only about 600 students at Hogwarts, a 7 year school. Even if you don’t know everyone in every house, you’re gonna at least know the names of the 150 or so people in Gryffindor. If you see Peter Pettigrew in the Gryffindor common room, even if you’re Fred and George, you’ll realize this dude isn’t a Gryffindor and a red flag will go off. They’re not idiots.
Honorable Mentions:
-Harry’s Glasses- honestly if Voldemort wanted to beat Harry, all he needs to do is “Accio glasses”. Harry is SO useless without his glasses! Also, you can grow bones but you can’t fix eyesight? C’mon wizarding world!
-Mad-Eye Moody- why do they all act like they know this guy so well? All that fourth year was actually Barty Crouch Jr. in disguise so why do they all act like they know Moody after that? In fact, he’s a complete stranger to them…
-When are these kids learning basic arithmetic? We assume this happens but it’s never part of their schooling. They may not need calculus but even wizards need to know how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide
-A unicorn hair costs 10 galleons but a wand that contains a unicorn hair costs 7? This is where that basic arithmetic class would’ve come in handy. Seems to me Ollivander has simply been selling his wands at a loss all this time
Believe me, I could go on and on. I have a list with many more on it. But these are the ones that annoy me the most. I love Rowling’s creativity and narrative structure but she is not thorough and is very inconsistent. A fantastic writer, no doubt, but there are more plot holes in Harry Potter than there are spells.
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Reflect and connect.
Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.
I miss you so very much, Mom.
Talk to you soon, Mom.
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- Days ago = 1482 days ago
- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1907.25 - 10:10
NEW (written 1708.27 and 1907.04) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom. Dropped "Talk to you tomorrow, Mom" in the sign off on 1907.04. Should have done it sooner as this feature is no longer daily.
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