I subscribed to this guy's high frequency trading programming blog, but I have only mild curiosity about how it works.  Imagine that you did succeed in writing software that could purchase a security 10 microseconds before another guy: the time spent writing software to shave off microseconds could have gone to creating something beautiful or useful or entertaining for people.  And if the purpose of trading securities is to allocate capital to companies that make stuff society wants, it's hard to argue that a company would be harmed by getting its money 10 microseconds later.

You have to willfully not follow the logic to disbelieve evolution.

Good IRL UI

The telephone poles in the sidewalks on my run to the park in Fountain Valley are placed closer to the road than the wall.  It makes me choose the side furthest from the road to avoid the narrow width of sidewalk next to the street and so takes away the chance of a stumble onto the road as a car comes by.  I want to believe that someone planned this out on purpose.

An interesting question for people who don't support universal health care is at what cost they would support it.  If it was $10 per American per year to get universal coverage for everyone, I hope you'd have near 100% support.  Of course it gets trickier to decide this as the sums get higher, but I get the sense there are some that see having to pay for others as a moral issue.

Beautiful quote

"At some point, self-confidence turns into a learning disorder."
--Lamentations on Chemistry

One reason Tron Legacy was not a good movie was because the world didn't have consistent rules. You couldn't tell what the limits of the characters were and so it felt like the characters could pull arbitrary super powers out of their asses when they needed to move the story along (e.g. the old guy suddenly causing a tornado at the end).

I always felt cheated at the end of DragonLance and Stephen King books for the same reason.

It would be cool if our planet was at the outermost edge of the galaxy, and that galaxy was at the edge of the universe, so all we'd see is blackness on one side of the sky but stars on the other.