In response to this story about a possible impending Helium shortage, someone suggested on Hacker News that perhaps someday we can use nuclear fusion to produce helium.
As it happens I'd idly chatted with my wife about that a few weeks ago, but that wasn't enough motivation to run the numbers. This was. Could we produce enough helium to satisfy our commercial production of it through fusion, if we just assume we have fusion?
Browsing through some old entries, I see in late 2007 I predicted:
One of the milestones I've been watching for is the first entirely DVD-based TV-style series. It's going to happen sooner or later, and will mark a major shift in how TV is produced, once it becomes possible to make it without advertising or subsidy, the only two models that currently work.
I'm going to give myself only half-a-point. True television-style "seasons" of shows have indeed now been produced without ever being "aired", but they didn't go straight-to-DVD. They went straight-to-streaming. I believe it was either Lilyhammer or House of Cards, depending on how picky you're being about not showing up on TV at all before being available via streaming. (Lilyhammer's first episode premiered on a Norwegian television channel, though this was clearly a publicity stunt rather than an attempt to "air on TV".)
Dear Meijer Corporation:
I love you guys. You guys are great. I know it's tradition for Internet "open letters" to be extended complaints, but nah, you're great.
But you know, I do want to air just one tiny grievance. 'Cause this is the Internet and all, and that's what we do here. But rest assured, it's just a tiny little thing. Hardly worthy of note. But I thought I should point it out anyhow.
An article about why virtual worlds died reminded me of a pet theory, by virtue of not mentioning it as one of the possibilities. I call it the BOAC Fallacy, which stands for "... but on a computer!"
Yes, complete with the ellipses and italics. There's a recurring pattern I've seen in technology prognostication best shown by example.
I surrender.
Many years ago, I set myself a simple task. I would create a blog layout for myself, and it would have some sort of color in it. It would not simply be a white background.
After all, the best way to learn something is to force yourself to do it, right?
Unfortunately, I failed. The resulting design could be charitably described as "quirky" and accurately described as "ugly". What's more, the design you may have seen was the best of at least a dozen or so attempts! It turns out I can take a very sensible and aesthetic design from a standard template site, and in three small changes, utterly destroy it.
Human words are a great deal fuzzier than the concepts they hope to cover. For instance, consider the word "love"; it means anything from stalker-level obsession to a moderate preferance ("I love pizza!"). In order to talk about anything precisely it is often necessary to specify what a given word refers to in some specific context.
Every writer has the right to choose what definitions they are using in a particular bit of text. If they say that they have chosen a particular definition of "love", that is not a point that can be usefully debated. Definitions are neither right nor wrong. They are only useful or not useful. What can be debated is statement the word is used to make.
When I was younger, I thought leadership was oversold, and what really mattered were the people on the team.
I have recanted this belief.
I still don't entirely understand why leadership is so important, but the experience I've collected over the years is pretty clear on the matter. My best guesses are that it is some combination of the following:
I do agree that it's important not to fetishize leadership and never to forget the team gets credit too, but over the years my estimation of the importance of true leadership has been going consistently up, not down.
It's time for gas stations to drop that nine tenths of a cent off their signs.
No Starch Press asked me to write a review of the new Haskell book, Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!. I started to write a section about myself and my view of Haskell for context, and realized that it really needed to be its own post as it grew to a length where it was self-indulgent to make it part of the review. But it fits as its own post nicely.
Every decade around this time, we get pedants who point out that since there was no Year 0, decades/centuries/millenniums start on 1.
I observe that the Gregorian Calendar we use started in 1582, so not only was there no year 0, there was no year 1, year 2, year 3, ..., or year 1581. Therefore, true pendants should be insisting that decades start on twos, and centuries start on 82s, and millennia start on 582s!