On Terrorism and Politics

Regardless of who sets the stage, it takes a conscious decision to play the part.

[After the latest round of terrorist bombings in Paris, people are alternately blaming Presidents Obama and Bush for setting the stage for the attacks.  ISIL may have been created as a response to the invasion of Iraq, and ISIL declared their responsibility for the Paris bombings, but the core of every atrocity committed in the name of ISIL is an act perpetrated by a thinking individual that could choose a different path — but didn’t.]

There are 10 types of people…

There are 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary, those who don’t, and those who didn’t expect this joke to be in base 3.

There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who know binary, those who don’t, those who didn’t expect this joke to be in base 3, those who didn’t expect this joke to be in base 4, … , and those who didn’t expect this joke to be in base n.

There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who know ternary, those who don’t, and those who mistake it by binary.

There are 10 types of people in the world. One who knows binary, and nine who can’t tell a joke right.

There are two kind of people, the ones that can extrapolate information with incomplete data

There are 1 kinds of people in the world: those who start their arrays at 0 and those who don’t.

There are two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

Welcome to New England

It snowed today.

Well, they were really flurries but still, it snowed today.  I believe that this is the earliest snow I have ever seen in southern New England.

I have a hypothesis that the earlier the snow and cold come, the milder the winter will be.  I’m hoping this rings true this year.  I’m no fan of global warming, but I’m also not into paying huge heating bills either.

Fortune

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”

— quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling, and redacted from a US Supreme Court document by the Ashcroft Justice Department in the name of national security.