Catherine Berry

One of my favorite jokes from my wonderfully clever coworkers: "A lot of people *think* they understand the Dunning-Kruger effect." 😁

One of my favorite jokes from my wonderfully clever coworkers: "A lot of people *think* they understand the Dunning-Kruger effect." 😁

You beat me to it. That poem and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" have been on my mind a lot lately. You know, for some reason. 🙄

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43588/...

Oh no. OH NO. This is worse than when my partner puts big spoons in the little spoon holder. 😳

A saying from the similar world of aviation: "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." 🙂

Of course, the first three centuries of Christianity consisted mostly of flamewars over the nature of Jesus's life, death, and (maybe) resurrection. It got pretty wild.

I've had some of my most interesting conversations by choosing not to correct someone's assumptions about my religious views.

"Politics is a primitive mammalian form of adaptation. People should not be allowed to talk politics except on all fours."

- Timothy Leary

My dad defined an expert as someone who knows enough about a field to be terrified. I see his point more clearly with each passing year.

Side by side with Túrin Turambar.

I've seen a couple of cars wrecked by objects falling or thrown from the beds of trucks ahead of them. I can't process how anyone could drive on any road, much less a freeway, without properly securing cargo. Then again, I can't process a lot of things people do all the time.

When I was a child in San Jose CA USA in the mid 1960s, my mom would sometimes take me to a small park with a playground specially designed for blind and low-vision kids. I loved it, and so did a lot of kids with normal vision; the equipment was amazing. Accessibility is often a win all around.

"Many of you will suffer because of this pointless war, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

Amen! I will stop learning when I reach room temperature. Maybe. 🙂

Rodrigo y Gabriela 'ORION' (LIVE) YouTube video by Irish Independent

Periodic Metallica bursts help cleanse your psyche. Even better, check out this insanely hot cover.

youtu.be/9zq4MrctxZM?...

ARPANET - Wikipedia

I was on the Internet before it was the Internet. Usenet on ARPANET (circa 1981) remains the best social media experience I've ever had.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET...

It can be. It isn't always.

😁

Of course, what do you expect from someone named "Iris"? 🙂🌺

There seems to be rising demand for protest folk music right now for some unfathomable reason, so I'm reposting this from last summer. Wells has only become more amazing since then. Give him a listen.

Chiang Kai-shek is also proof that a third outcome is possible when you play the game of thrones.

You're welcome! 🙂

Neither is the US Army, but my vet brother tells me that variants of the same phenomenon are universal there. It seems to be an instinctive group dynamic. Nobody has to decide to do it; it happens spontaneously. (Though a bad manager can discourage it, and thereby lose its benefits.)

Oh, sure. Trade argot seldom lands well with outsiders.

I have spent my life convincing programmers that we write code for other people far more than for computers. The computer only has to understand it once. Humans need to understand it over and over, including at 3 AM when their oncall alert wakes them from a sound sleep.

Exactly. It's an acknowledgement that we've all had the experience of being on the third day of a 15 minute task, or of making a quick "trivial" config change that crashes a server. Joking about anxiety helps us manage anxiety.

In the software engineering world I inhabit, "trivial" is often used descriptively, but with a self-conscious nuance of humorously acknowledged hubris. Its use in a meeting will often trigger joking responses like "Great -- I'll quote that in the postmortem."

Revanchism - Wikipedia

Political labels tend to drift from their original meanings. Originally, "conservatism" meant support for active maintenance of the status quo. Now, it more often means what is properly called "revanchism".

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revanch...

"Radical" simply means "from the root". The image is of pulling up the whole plant rather than just trimming it. Radicalism is any position advocating the removal or deep transformation of a system rather than trying to reform it incrementally.

The plan is chaos, and it seems to be working pretty well.