In the future, we will have roving autonomous self-assembling bioreactors which will take in cellulosic matter, and convert it to natural gas and bio-available nutrients including complex amino acid chains. Some units will allow on-line collection of liquid food product, which can either be transported as-is or condensed into various solid, more easily stored forms, while other units will have to be deactivated and disassembled in order to yield edible matter.
In this way, we will be able to harvest the solar energy dumped on vast portions of the North American continent, currently growing useless native grasses, and instead have useful industrial feedstocks such as methane, butyric acid and long-chain hydrocarbon carboxylates.
They might even look a little like this:
Also we’ll have minature flying drone robots that collect plant matter, process it into sugar, and store it in custom-sized 3D-printed wrappers.
Bees.
My point: buzzwords make everything sound good.
But hey, if school kids are a) seeing knife wielding bullies and b) getting told to “not get involved” and quasi-punished for intervening, then well, maybe there’s more reasons to homeschool than I think.
Of course, this is Calgary.
Links via Gawker
Looks like some dimwit opened Flood Control Dam #3 again… Now we’ll see if flood management has improved since the 2002 floods. My prediction: no. Half the metro is already flooded, apparently.
Here’s the BBC article
Czech has ‘Äaj’, Japanese has ‘ãŠèŒ¶â€™ (o-cha where the ‘o’ is honorific, so ignore it).  But English has ‘tea’, French has ‘thé’, Finnish has ‘tee’.
WALS has a nice map of the differences between world languages.  The interesting cases are where there’s an isolated blue dot in a red field or vice-versa.  For example, Hebrew uses ‘te’ while surrounding languages have  ‘cha’; not too surprising considering the influence of European languages on modern Hebrew.  But Basque and Portuguese use ‘cha’ while all other Romance languages use ‘te’ – I understand that the Portuguese made independent contact with the Far East, but why the Basque?  And why does Lesser Antillean French Creole use ‘cha’ when French uses ‘te’?  Why do Polish and Lithuanian have their own words, not loan-words?  Must be some  interesting stories there…
I hate hypocrites. Well actually, I can tolerate a fair bit of hypocrisy in myself; it’s just other people being hypocrites that I can’t stand.
Don’t split tasks evenly, explains Noah Berlatsky, writing in Scientology puff-magazine the Atlantic:
 Housework isn’t a debt wives owe to husbands, nor one husbands owe to wives. It’s not a gift you give to make a slave. Rather, it’s the quotidian stuff of which the relationship is made. We’re married, so we help each other. And the helping isn’t to protect the marriage, or to keep the people in the marriage happy. The helping is the marriage itself.
Yeah, no kidding.
What if we tried to split all the tasks up equally? Â She’ll breastfeed half the time, and …… what? the other half of the time. Â I’ll hold the steering wheel, you shift the gears. Â You go to your office Monday, Wednesday and come to mine Tuesday, Thursday…
Or maybe: sure, go to medical school — but make sure you’re home on time every day to take care of your twelve hours of the parenting.
Shyeah, right.
Here’s how to handle problems with the const qualifier: remove it!
For example, if someone has declared a function to return a const object, and you want to use and modify that return value, just change the declared return value.
Example:
[cpp]
void myfunc( std::string s );
const std::string WToA( const std::wstring& w );
myfunc( WToA( w ) ); // will error unless you remove the const!
[/cpp]
Pro Tip:
[cpp]
#define const
[/cpp]
Arnold Kling, quoting John Holt on schooling:
Bryan’s view is benign compared with John Holt.
society demands of schools… that they be a place where… children or young people can be shut up and so got out of everyone else’s way…. They are a kind of day jail for kids. [elided much of this paragraph – Sam]
Apparently Kling was previously familiar with the work of Ivan Illich, who was a friend and colleague of Holt’s.
Since Illich and Holt were both more of the Left than the right (albeit, a liberty-celebrating Left that’s more like left-libertarianism than modern Progressives or even 1980’s liberal Democrats), I am curious to see how this influences Kling’s thinking.
I am now an ex-sysadmin.
That hit me pretty hard. I was surprised.
Yesterday I had a final meeting onsite with Client#1’s sysadmin; we talked over all the areas of responsibility, recapped all the services, talked about all the physical and virtual servers, discussed everything from low infrastructure (power, network wiring) to high hopes (finally outsourcing the mail server), and at the end, I said,
“OK – well, I’ll keep the root credentials for now, but I won’t be using them. At the end of the month I’ll want you to kill all my accounts, but leave the VPN account if I’m still part of the offsite backup plan then. Let me know when you’ve got that replaced and I’ll blow away my copy of all that data.”
.. and I suddenly felt a physical weight lifting off my shoulders and landing on his shoulders. I stood a little straighter and said, “OK, it’s all you.”
Then I went home and cried like a baby.
Microsoft helpfully “upgraded” office in 2007 and destroyed all the personal intellectual capital that people had created by learning the menu system. I took slight notice of this at the time because, hey, infant twins.
Recently I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming off of Office 2003 and started using Office 2007, so I’ve had to deal with this piece of junk myself.
Eventually I noticed that Excel 97/2000/2003 menu shortcut keys still work through a “magic compatibility mode”. But for the things that I used to use toolbars, I was screwed.
Right-clicking on a selection brings up a toolbar that contains almost all, but not quite all, of the least useful formatting commands.
Today I was trying to resize some rows and columns and it was so incredibly painful that I actually found a meta-solution: an add-in that lets you search for commands by name.  Found it via Debra Dalgeish’s blog Contextures, which looks to have lots of useful Excel stuff.
I hope someone doesn’t add a command-line interface to Excel next. I’d have to find something new to whine about.
