""Remember as a developer, you are a stakeholder. You have a stake in the software that you need to safeguard. That's part of your role, and part of your duty. And it's a big part of why you were hired" - #[4] Clean Architecture #teams #agile #foodforthought

Pro-Life Laws DID NOT KILL Amber Thurman | Kristan Hawkins

Yeah, I know it’s two hours long, but just listen to the first 10 minutes. I dare you to turn it off after that. This was spectacular! DHH Is Right About Everything

I saw "Am I Racist" yesterday. It was pretty funny.

You _know_ you're going to have to learn Clojure, don't you? It's inevitable. So you might as well get started now. Here are two resources that will help you. They're both easy, and fun. For those who like to read:

A Little Clojure

And for those who like to watch: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2PP9uiaifw4QGXYQBiHICr_bn6nStjq

Hey! I’ve got a really great idea. Get this. First, let’s demoralize and defund the police nationwide reducing their numbers to the point of being ineffective. Then let’s throw the southern border wide open so that Venezuelan gangs and Islamic terrorists can pour, unimpeded, into the country. Then, let’s make sure the cities elect radical prosecutors who will refuse to charge and hold criminals; making sure that those gang members and terrorists stay on the streets. Oh yeah, and then let’s make sure the city legislators declare their cities to be sanctuaries that refuse to turn criminal illegal immigrants over to ICE for deportation. Sound like a plan?

What would possess an American politician to decide that America should not be energy independent?

This is rich. https://x.com/unclebobmartin/status/1832015574139859278

Twenty three hundred years ago Aristotle described the universe as a series of concentric spheres made of a crystalline material called "Quintessence" (The Fifth Element). The Sun, Moon, planets, and stars were all embedded into their own individual spheres which rotated around the Earth at different rates. Four hundred years later, the Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy could not reconcile his observations with the circular motions implied by Aristotle. But circles were perfect, and the heavens must also be perfect, so he invented "epicycles". He said that the heavenly bodies each moved in small circles around a point, and that point moved in a circle around the Earth. Over the centuries, as observations improved, Ptolemy's epicycles weren't enough. So more were added. Wheels within wheels. And even they were not enough so other contrivances of speed and angle were added. In the middle of the sixteenth century Copernicus, who believed that God lived in the Sun, moved the Sun to the center and found he could eliminate some of the epicycles and other contrivances used to match observations. But many still remained. In the early part of the following century Johannes Kepler showed that the shapes of the orbits of the planets were not circles, but were ellipses, with the Sun at one focus of the ellipse. Just a few decades later Isaac Newton collapsed all the previous centuries of observation and reasoning down to one simple formula. F=Mm/r^2. A century later, Einstein, stimulated by the work of Maxwell, Michaelson, and Morley showed us that Newton's formula was an approximation of a rather more complicated rule having to do with time, space, and the speed of light. He called it his general theory of relativity. Two decades later, using the best theories of gravity at his disposal, and Hubble's distance laws for galaxies, Fritz Zwicky noticed that the galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving too quickly for gravity to hold them together. He proposed that there must be more material in the cluster than was visible. He called that material, Dark Matter -- a term first coined by Henri Poincaré to describe a different phenomenon. By the 1960s there were many observations that galaxies rotated too quickly to hold themselves together. The speed of the stars at the outskirts of the galaxy move well beyond the escape velocity of the visible matter. Today we conclude that the universe is full of something we call Dark Matter. It forms the seeds of galaxy clusters, and it's shape outlines the webs of those clusters that are woven through space. We think that this dark matter outweighs visible matter by a factor of nearly six to one. And we have not the slightest clue what this stuff might be.

They kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, and after 300 days they finally shot those innocent jews in the back of the head.   They are Nazis.  And like their spiritual forebears they must be destroyed, utterly.

This!

Free speech isn't guaranteed to be forever

History is full of long stretches of dominance by noble ideas and despots, times of prosperity and of dark ages. Each of which must have seemed lik...

In the late 90s a team of researchers studied a large number of these events, reaching extreme distances, and therefore extremely far back in time.  By measuring the red-shift of the spectra of those events they calculated how fast they were being carried away from us by the expanding universe -- and they discovered something very strange. We expected that the mutual gravity of all the galaxies, and all the matter in the universe should be slowing the expansion of the universe down.  After all it takes energy to climb against a gravitational field; and that energy loss must be slowing things down. What the researchers found, instead, is that the expansion of the universe is speeding up.  This means some kind of energy is being pumped into the universe that opposes the inward tug of gravity and pushes the galaxies away from each other ever faster and faster as time goes by. We call that new energy "Dark Energy" -- and we have no idea what it is or where it comes from.

I wrote a book about how to effectively combine procedural, OO, and Functional programming.  The title is "Functional Design"

This is fun!… Where does punctuation come from?! via #[1]

Getting ruby to work is a gigantic pain.  I think the whole Ruby module management system went off the rails a long, long, time ago.  (No pun intended.)

Neutrons in isolation are unstable. They will energetically decay, becoming a proton, electron, and an anti-electron-neutrino with a half-life of about 10 minutes. This is called ß-decay. This reaction is reversible through a process known as electron capture. If a proton and an electron are forced into near proximity, they can combine to form a neutron, emitting a normal electron-neutrino. In the collapsing iron core of a high mass star, in the last microsecond before it blows itself to kingdom come as a type 2 supernova, the electrons and protons within the iron are forced together and undergo this inverse ß-decay becoming neutrons and emitting an overwhelming barrage of neutrinos. The newly formed neutrons rapidly sort themselves out into energy shells. Neutrons are fermions. Identical fermions cannot co-exist together in the same system. Thus the neutrons in the collapsed core separate into a vast number of different energy shells. Low energy neutrons are deeper in, higher energy neutrons are farther out. There is no way for the higher energy neutrons to lose energy since all the lower shells are full. All those neutrons are in a constant state of vibration and collision. Higher energy neutrons vibrate and collide faster than lower energy neutrons. All that vibration and collision creates an outward pressure that holds back the inward crush of gravity. So the object, now only a few miles in diameter, settles into a stable state called degenerate matter. This object is often called a neutron star; and the degenerate matter within it is sometimes referred to as neutronium. A teaspoon of neutronium would weigh several billion tons. Much of the angular momentum of the original star remains within the neutron star. However, since the radius has shrunk by three or four orders of magnitude, the angular velocity has increased by a corresponding factor. These objects can spin at thousands of RPM. Moreover, much of the original star's magnetic field is trapped within the neutron star, and has likewise been compressed by several orders of magnitude. Thus, the neutron star is a very powerful spinning magnet. When you spin a magnet you create an electric field. The electric field across a newly formed neutron star is enormous. That field accelerates vast numbers of charged particles to stream outwards from the magnetic poles. However, the powerful magnetic field lines force those particles to move in a spirals as they stream outwards. When charged particles move in spirals they induce electromagnetic waves -- light. And those light waves travel in straight beams emitted from the magnetic poles of the neutron star. Those beams of light carry away some the rotational energy of the Neutron star. This creates a drag on its rotation. But given that the star contains a solar mass of neutronium spinning at thousands of RPM, it has plenty of kinetic energy to spare and so the reduction in rotational velocity is very gradual. If the magnetic poles of the neutron star are not perfectly in line with its spin axis, then those beams of light swing around through space like a lighthouse beacon. If they happen to be in line with the Earth, we see the object emitting pulses of light as the beams pass by. We call these pulsating stars Pulsars.

The collapsing iron core of a massive star that has exhausted its fuel will quickly reach densities at which electrons and protons can no longer remain separate. They combine to form neutrons in an extremely violent reaction that tears the rest of the star apart and blasts it's contents all over the sky as a type 2 Supernova. At the time of the explosion the structure of the star looks like an onion. There is an outer shell of Hydrogen gas, then a shell of Hydrogen fusing into Helium. Below that is a shell of Helium fusing into Carbon and Oxygen. Deeper still is a shell fusing Carbon into Neon, Magnesium, Sodium, and Aluminum. Deeper still is a shell fusing Neon into Oxygen and Magnesium. Still deeper the Oxygen fuses into Silicon, Argon, Sulfur, and Calcium. And finally a shell that fuses Silicon into an isotope of Nickel that decays into Iron. All this material is blown to smithereens when the barrage of outrushing neutrinos produced by the core's transmutation into neutrons collides with those shells. The over-pressures cerated in that collision stimulate even more fusion. The environment of the explosion is rich with free high energy neutrons, and alpha-particles (Helium nuclei). These particles are absorbed by the elements within the explosion, transmuting them further into the vast majority of the elements on the periodic table up to element 36. All these nuclei are scattered amidst the rapidly expanding cloud of debris and eventually mix with the interstellar medium, polluting the existing clouds of neutral hydrogen and, if close enough, stimulating them to collapse into planetary systems. The Oxygen and Nitrogen in our atmosphere. The Carbon and Calcium in our bodies and bones. The Sodium in our seas, and the Iron and Aluminum in our buildings, originated from this process. Those elements all came from stars that blew their guts up all over the sky, and seeded future stars with the elements of life and civilization.