When I was a child, I wanted to be like Spock. For those few who do not know whom I mean, Spock was the science officer on the star ship Enterprise in the famous 1960's sci-fi television show Star Trek. His claim to fame was being half-human and half-Vulcan. Vulcans were an alien race who are so naturally violent that they felt themselves forced to renounce their emotions and turn to a life of pure logic, lest they extinguish themselves in endless war. A common misconception is that Vulcans have no emotions; they do, but they rigidly suppress them.

Spock's major character arc involved a conflict between his "human side" and his "Vulcan side", between "emotions" and "logic". During the television series, he had chosen to attempt being pure Vulcan/logical, but he met with less success than he would have liked. Something never made clear was whether this was purely a personal issue or if perhaps being only half-Vulcan made it somehow biologically more difficult to live with the Vulcan philosophies and disciplines. (Most likely even the writers themselves were conflicted over their interpretation of this.)

Spock's initial choice reflects a common view of emotions, that they are intrinsically opposed to logic, unpredictable and uncontrollable, that you are forced to choose either the cold, cruel world of logic, or the squishy, utterly irrational world of emotion and feeling, but that ne'er the twain shall meet. This is view can be seen in our most ancient literature, where the fiery passions of somebody's loins are routinely contrasted with their cold, austere logical mind.

What absolute garbage!

Perhaps I need new friends, or must ignore their judgments, either way, as we age there’s the assumption we should know better than to do things we’re bad at. If you’re 15 and dance like a hapless idiot, that’s one thing, but when you’re 35, it’s a different story. In my thirties now I find people my age take life so much more seriously than a decade ago and I don’t fit in so well. I’m still crazy. And struggle as I might, my peers have more influence on me that I care to admit. - Why You Should Be Bad At Something

Perhaps my Mozilla suggestions are not as unlikely as I feared. No causal relationship, of course.

The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Good luck to the Mozilla project.

And with this, the Nobel Peace Prize completes its transition. Not into irrelevancy, like you might expect me to say, but into fully-blown misnomer.

Since Yassar Arafat at least won the prize, it's been a joke, but now it has clearly completed the transition to the Nobel Darling-Of-The-Left Prize. Preventing Global Warming could be the most important thing ever, but it's not about Peace. There's an obvious argument that global warming changes might encourage peace, but the same argument trivially converts to an argument it will cause more war. (Sustainability as painted by Gore involves using fewer resources, which can lead to a fight over the reduced resources. I disagree that's the solution, but nobody gives prizes for principled centrist positions.) "I can make an argument that it involves Peace" is a weak standard, opening the field to anybody, anywhere. If that's the desired nature of the Prize, there's nothing wrong with that, but calling it a Peace Prize is then a misnomer.

I had to declare email bankruptcy today. What did me in was not spam alone, but a combination of spam and high-volume mailing lists that might as well have been spam. I've unsubscribed from numerous email lists and I'm returning to my email being just for communicating with me, personally.

I recently changed the website over to use FreeSans. I don't know how it looks on Windows or Mac, but it looks really nice on Linux.

My ol' Why Not Mozilla? page recently wandered onto programming.reddit.com, though I wouldn't go clicking through for the comments.

Some specific criticisms are out of date, but the gist still seems true.

On the off chance any Mozilla people ever read this, the feedback has uniformly been positive about the piece. If any of you still harbor delusions of platform-ness, it's not going to happen. The developer community has been burned. I don't think we'll ever trust the Mozilla team to promise us a platform again.

When we make a judgment, we are saying that one thing has a larger value than another. We have a value function in our brains that takes two arguments and returns whether the first is less than, equal to, or greater than the other. As cruel or as crazy as it may sound, that function can take any two things and compare them; we have to make decisions like Value(CoolJob, CloseToFamily) all the time.

A novice in the ways of the Web came upon a Master, and implored him, "Sir, will you please teach me the ways of the Web and take me on as a student? For I am much in need of the knowledge the Web contains."

The Master agreed, and the novice began his training.

Within hours, he came upon a website containing thousands of strange cat pictures. The novice called over the Master and said, "Look, this is funny!" The Master thwacked the novice with a stick, and told him to ponder upon his transgression.

Many fans of Science Fiction refuse to acknowledge any Dune books not written by Frank Herbert, despite this ending the series on a massive cliffhanger. They choose to follow Muad'Dib's philosophy, instead: "Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife -- chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.'" - DisContinuity, TVTropes Wiki

What is programming?

When you first start programming, the answer is painfully obvious: Programming is making the computer do what you want.

Duh, right?

However, if you have any aptitude for it at all, you will rapidly get to the point where making the computer do what you want really isn't that hard. Oh, you may be betrayed by your environment, your libraries, even your hardware sometimes, and you never get to the point where you are immune to the multi-day debugging sessions, but in general, getting the computer to do what you want ceases to be a challenge.