Prediction

Outlawing gay marriage by voting yes on Prop 8 will be seen as absurd and indefensible in 30 years as supporting segregated black and white schools in the 50's does now.

Every society makes mistakes that are absolute crystal clear in retrospect, like slavery.

I really hate it when math book authors say that something is trivial or obvious. If it wasn't obvious to you, then it only serves to make you feel stupid. If it was obvious, then it only serves to make you feel superior for a brief moment (compared to a stupider imaginary person, I guess). (And if it was truly obvious, then why say it at all?)

I think this is rooted in a deep insecurity to always have an answer, to always appear like you're on your game. (Why did evolution give us this weakness? Acting this way must have been useful for some survival reason.)

Naughty games

I can't be the only one who sees the the application to doing a porn game with this tech. If I was more of a pure capitalist, I would think about working on something like that, but I am constrained by my Quaker upbringing, or more honestly, the fear of telling people what I did for a living.

Financial quote of the day

We refused to touch credit default swaps. It would be like buying insurance on the Titanic from someone on the Titanic.

-- Nassim Taleb

Letters from Norman Mailer

I don't know whether I'm fucking up sometimes or if I just keep going things will be beautiful, but I hear this man clearly:

I’m rather depressed these days. It’s been years since anything I’ve done has turned out successfully—with a few rare exceptions—and I’m falling into the thing which afflicted you a couple of years ago—a failure of the will, shall we say. My ambitions seem far beyond my talents, and light-years beyond the vicissitudes of my character, and I think of this enormous novel I’m now starting, which could well take ten years, and if done properly, it must be unpublishable except in green-backed French “dirty” editions, and I’ll be middle-aged when it’s done, and somehow I just don’t believe in myself the way I used to, and indeed, worst of all, it doesn’t even seem terribly important. I’m beginning to have the tolerance of the defeated—people I would have despised a few years ago now seem bearable—after all, I say to myself, I haven’t done very well with all the luck I had, and perhaps I do wrong to judge them. Naturally these states proliferate. The desire to work recedes, and as it recedes one welcomes the depression of not working which increases the difficulty to begin work again, and it gets to be a drag.

If you are not a very nice person in your every day life, but do great things, you will be forgiven by history. Einstein was not very good to the women he lived with, but that is not the popular memory of him. Shakespeare and Buddha both left their wife and child (whether that makes them selfishly bad or not I don't know).

Happy accidents

There are no happy accidents in programming like there are in art. When I'm doodling, I make a little thumbnail sketch with random lines and my imagination somehow sees a person standing there, in much more detail than I could bring out if I tried to draw it in a large size. In programming, if something is working correctly and you don't know why, you're about to experience something unpleasant.