Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.
– Michel de Montaigne, as quoted by Thomas JeffersonTo The States
To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
afterward resumes its liberty.
- Walt Whitman
If the State could once get back to the real sight of its essential function, and with religious resolution begin doing that, and putting away its multifarious imaginary functions, and indignantly casting out these as mere dung and insalubrious horror and abomination (which they are), what a promise of reform were there!
– Thomas Carlyle (1850)The Institute of Physics on Climatology after Climategate
“The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.”
Institute of Physics report. (It’s short and worth reading)
The Institute of Physics “is the UK and Ireland’s main professional body for physicists. It was founded as the Physical Society in 1874 and it now has over 36,000 members worldwide.”
What sort of reformers and workers are you, that work only on the rotten material? That never think of meddling with the material while it continues sound; that stress it and strain it with new rates and assessments, till once it has given way and declared itself rotten; whereupon you snatch greedily at it, and say, Now let us try to do some good upon it!
– Carlyle, Latter-Day Pamphlets
A riddle from about 960 AD
Swings by his thigh, a thing most magical!
Below the belt, beneath the folds
Of his clothes it hangs, a hole in its front end,
stiff-set and stout, it swivels about.
Levelling the head of this hanging tool,
its wielder hoists his hem above his knee;
it is his will to fill a well-known hole
that it fits fully when at full length
He’s oft filled it before. Now he fills it again.
From the Exeter Book, probably written by Monks
ʎǝʞ ɐ :ɹǝʍsuɐ
grep ack rak grin
Searching for a string over Android’s source code:
grin (python)
real 1m3.039s
user 0m54.023s
sys 0m8.983s
rak (ruby)
real 1m19.087s
user 1m11.303s
sys 0m4.863s
ack (perl)
real 1m28.422s
user 0m17.359s
sys 0m7.343s
grep
real 4m23.916s
user 0m4.029s
sys 0m10.108s
Grin is fastest, but doesn’t format results as nicely as rak and ack. Grep, using the default options (grep -r myString ./) produces a ton of useless “No such file or directory” lines making the results almost impossible to read.
I ran these on an 8 core Mac Pro.
About Me
Upon which many were tumbled.
