terrn's comments

I completely agree with your statement. I too have very little interest in hooking light bulbs up to Minecraft, or anything but a socket already there. I enjoy my job and find solving programming problems challenging and rewarding.

My own feeling is that there is no better or worse, and feeling bad questioning if we're good enough is ridiculous. If one wants to hack on light bulbs that's great! If they'd rather go for a bike ride, that's great too! There's a quote from Winnie the Pooh that speaks to this equivalency.

“When you wake up in the morning, Pooh," said Piglet at last, "what's the first thing you say to yourself?"

"What's for breakfast?" said Pooh. "What do you say, Piglet?"

"I say, I wonder what's going to happen exciting today?" said Piglet.

Pooh nodded thoughtfully. "It's the same thing," he said.”

Sigh...there are a lot of problems with your statement. The first is that you are reciting anecdotes from 1400 years ago; there is absolutely no proof of anything you said. Even if we accept that the Quran was given to Mohammed by God, we have to at least acknowledge the possibility that a lot of what you've learned has been added in by various persons over the course of many hundreds of years i.e. we cannot be so sure about anything that is written down, by anyone, at any time, especially from something as old as the Quran. And to be clear, that applies to all writing, the Bible, etc.

The second is that no, believing ANYBODY about ANYTHING, no matter how eloquently put, is foolish to say the least. It doesn't make a difference if they are my parent or not, never mind some professor or total stranger. The only person who can decide if something is right or not is YOU. Belief should not be based on how charismatic anyone is, that is irrelevant. Unfortunately, you have total responsibility for your actions and opinions and it is inexcusable to believe anyone or anything without first exploring your doubt. And even then it is up to you to walk the line of what should be believed and what should be questioned.

I think about my own death daily, as a reminder to not take for granted this incredible opportunity of being alive in the universe. But I am still unnerved by this graph! I'm 33, and I'm old enough to know that time passes very very quickly. If I want to die well it is better to start preparing myself now; it may take a long time to get square with the truth that absolutely everything dies. 10 years from now or 1000 years from now, what difference does it make if I can't accept that I will cease to be in this form at some point?

Any hearsay over some technology that might exist to expand our lifetimes completely misses the point. There will never be an absolute end to death. Even the Sun will eventually explode, and even beyond that the universe itself will probably die in heat death. Where will we be then? At what point do we think that we will have "lived enough"? Why do we assume that if we only live longer that we'll somehow be more cool with being dead some day? Is there anything in our experience that suggests we're more OK with death the older you get?

Why talk about tomorrow - we can eat right now!

Did you ever see Denis Pankratov do his underwater? Back in the day he was truly unbelievable!! It's too bad there are limits on the underwater portion, the cameras they have on the pools now are really great at capturing the underwaters and I don't think much would be lost unless you're not able to watch it on screen. But on freestyle there are no limits on anything except pushing off the bottom, so if you wanted to chance it I wonder if someone could try and win the 50 fr with a fish kick?

"Be flagrant in your pursuit of the powerful and the soon-to-be-powerful, and when you have their attention, praise them to the skies." - Isn't this one of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition?

Exactly! So logically if Grothendieck also fell when dropped he was a witch!

This is such a sad thing to think about. Truthfully almost all languages outside of English, Mandarin, and Spanish will eventually die out. But for me learning a second language has never been about practicality, if it was I already needn't bother knowing anything but English. I've been studying Japanese for 12 years now just for the way I can think about things completely differently, and for the way it sounds. I started with French in school and after I feel more solid in my Japanese I plan to go back to it (this could never happen, Japanese is fantastically difficult). As a language lover it is very disheartening to see the inevitability of the decline in human expression through language.