“Bril­liant … but what made Dr. K’s tech­nique most insid­i­ously evil and genius was, dur­ing the most tech­ni­cally dif­fi­cult lec­ture of the entire quar­ter, there was no lie. At the end of the lec­ture in which he was not called on any lie, he offered the same chal­lenge to work through the notes; on the fol­low­ing Mon­day, he fielded our the­o­ries for what the false­hood might be (and shoot­ing them down “no, in fact that is true – look at “) for almost ten min­utes before he finally revealed: “Do you remem­ber the first lec­ture – how I said that ‘every lec­ture has a lie?’””

“Keep­ing tabs on the the­matic redun­dancy with which the United States gov­ern­ment has mar­keted its calls for regime change over the years would appear to be a respon­si­ble activ­ity for Amer­i­can cit­i­zens, given the fact that our nation has its impe­r­ial ten­ta­cles wrapped all over the planet. But I have never seen a “Remem­ber Panama” sign at a protest, and, as I have con­fessed, until a few weeks ago, I would not have known what such a sign meant. When­ever Panama is dis­cussed in the media, it is in order to advise Amer­i­cans to go there and spoil their unspoiled beaches (hence, my ini­tial inter­est in the country).”

““g” is a new library that pro­vides a global “g” method that you can use to inspect objects much in the same way as Kernel#p. The dif­fer­ence is that the out­put goes to Growl, a pop­u­lar OS X global noti­fi­ca­tions tool. It’s tech­ni­cally an easy gem install and go, but if you have prob­lems with it not find­ing Growl, this blog post about get­ting ruby-​​growl work­ing should salve your distress.”

“Sci­ence doesn’t work despite sci­en­tists being asses. Sci­ence works, to at least some extent, because sci­en­tists are asses. Bick­er­ing and back­stab­bing are essen­tial ele­ments of the process. Haven’t any of these guys ever heard of “peer review”?
There’s this myth in wide cir­cu­la­tion: ratio­nal, emo­tion­less Vul­cans in white coats, plumb­ing the secrets of the uni­verse, their Sci­en­tific Meth­ods unsul­lied by bias or emo­tion­al­ism. Most peo­ple know it’s a myth, of course; they sub­scribe to a more nuanced view in which sci­en­tists are as petty and vain and human as any­one (and as ego­tis­ti­cal as any ther­a­pist or financier), peo­ple who use sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy to tamp down their human imper­fec­tions and man­age some approx­i­ma­tion of objectivity.”

“ggplot2 is a plot­ting sys­tem for R, based on the gram­mar of graph­ics, which tries to take the good parts of base and lat­tice graph­ics and none of the bad parts. It takes care of many of the fid­dly details that make plot­ting a has­sle (like draw­ing leg­ends) as well as pro­vid­ing a pow­er­ful model of graph­ics that makes it easy to pro­duce com­plex multi-​​layered graphics.”

“Because the first pri­or­ity of the Fed is the health of the bank­ing sys­tem itself, and not the national econ­omy and the avail­abil­ity of credit to non-​​banking insti­tu­tions. They are seek­ing to drive com­mer­cial enti­ties out of secure sav­ings to risk invest­ment again, but pro­vid­ing a safe har­bor for the banks while they are doing it, while attempt­ing to main­tain the appear­ance of finan­cial sys­tem solvency. ”

“Super­Col­lider is an envi­ron­ment and pro­gram­ming lan­guage for real time audio syn­the­sis and algo­rith­mic com­po­si­tion. It pro­vides an inter­preted object-​​oriented lan­guage which func­tions as a net­work client to a state of the art, real­time sound syn­the­sis server.

Super­Col­lider was writ­ten by James McCart­ney over a period of many years, and is now an open source (GPL) project main­tained and devel­oped by var­i­ous peo­ple. It is used by musi­cians, sci­en­tists, and artists work­ing with sound. For some back­ground, see Super­Col­lider described by Wikipedia.”

“A frame­work to allow Ruby appli­ca­tions to gen­er­ate file/​folder stubs (like the rails com­mand does for Ruby on Rails, and the ‘script/​generate’ com­mand within a Rails appli­ca­tion dur­ing development).”

“It’s only nat­ural that you’re ask­ing how the hell we wound up in this mess. Why did a bub­ble inflate in com­mer­cial real estate? Why are smaller banks so dis­pro­por­tion­ately exposed? What caused this catastrophe?

For­tu­nately, we fig­ured it out for you.”

I would like to sug­gest a Workan­tile Exchange Face­ball league.

“It’s Thanks­giv­ing, and we’re very thank­ful for the con­tin­u­ing kind words and ter­rific sup­port you all have shown us this year.

We know it’s been a tough year for a lot of folks out there. So we’d like to help. Before the mad­ness of retail’s Black Fri­day hits, with all kind of crazy “get up at 4am to get in line” sales, we have a much sim­pler alter­na­tive for you.

40% off all our titles. Now through Wed Nov 25. Just use the coupon code PRAGTHANKS40 when check­ing out. Please note that orders placed on or after Tues­day may not get shipped until Mon­day, Novem­ber 30, as our ship­ping facil­i­ties will be closed for the hol­i­day. So order now, and stock up for some dyna­mite hol­i­day read­ing. Feel free to use the coupon as many times as you need to before it expires, and pass it on to your friends and relatives.”

“How to cre­ate your first Per­sonal Kan­ban and visu­al­ize your work.”

“PR is about man­ag­ing media and ana­lyst rela­tions. A good PR com­pany helps man­age mes­sag­ing and posi­tion­ing tar­geted at the media. PR should gen­er­ate inter­est from rel­e­vant trade mag­a­zines, blogs, edi­tors, award bod­ies, ana­lysts, etc. The goal is increase knowl­edge of your com­pany and prod­ucts among cus­tomers, indus­try experts, investors, etc. Spe­cific PR cam­paigns should have more con­crete objectives.”

“Mar­ket­ing feels daunt­ing because you are being shown a dozen yel­low brick roads that weave off glo­ri­ously into the col­or­ful hori­zon. That and the promise that the cho­sen path is flow­er­ing with ROI pop­pies. Walk for­ward in your customer’s shoes from before pur­chase; from pre-​​realization. How do you get to you?”