DavidV

Sophie learned how to remove the keys from my MacBook today. In other news, I now know how to re-attach the keys on Apple keyboard. This is bound to turn into an arms race.

Although the Obamacare website has been a very typical government IT disaster, given the State's unlimited ability to rob the public to pay for his mistakes, it will surely be fixed eventually. That is when the real fun will begin. Given the State's ability to redirect an unlimited ability of the people's wealth into healthcare, surely the total amount of medical services provided can be increased, in the same way that the amount of educational services have increased by increasing the shar...

I updated my NuGet packages, which upgraded me to MVC5, breaking SimpleMembership. I installed the new Visual Studio 2013 to try to understand the new Microsoft .NET Identity API, which seems to subtly break SimpleMembership. VS2013 was a buggy piece of junk (trying to create a new project crashed it), so I uninstalled it and did a massive Git revert. Then, found out that my SQL Server 2008 database diagram support is broken in SQL 2008. Repairing SQL Server 2008 did not fix it. So I ha...

Each additional person in a group photo increases the probability of a bad shot by x%, with x varying depending on factors such as lighting and distance. When adding children, multiply x by 13-age (ie, a 3 year old is 10 times as hard to get right in a group photo on the first shot.)

1000+ of my favorite quotes.

I discovered something today about the way babies play. Sophie had been playing by herself for some time and I found that her head was soaking wet, with water dripping down her face. She was periodically wiping her eyes. Turns out she was engaged in an exhausting workout, just playing with her blocks and crawling around. She picked out a few of the toys we put out and organized a pattern of manipulation for multi-sensory (holding, hitting, tasting) physical interaction. We provided h...

“The biggest enemy to learning is the talking teacher.” ― John Holt

“The idea of painless, nonthreatening coercion is an illusion. Fear is the inseparable companion of coercion, and its inescapable consequence. If you think it your duty to make children do what you want, whether they will or not, then it follows inexorably that you must make them afraid of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want. You can do this in the old-fashioned way, openly and avowedly, with the threat of harsh words, infringement of liberty, or physical punishment. Or yo...

Alouette, gentille Alouette Alouette je te plumerai Alouette, gentille Alouette Alouette je te plumerai Je te plumerai la tête Je te plumerai la tête Et la tête, et la tête Alouette, Alouette O-o-o-o-oh Alouette, gentille Alouette Alouette je te plumerai

In order to become a Medical Doctor licensed to practice medicine, you must first get a four-year bachelors degree, which often need not have anything to do with medicine. Furthermore, the four years of medical school need not teach you anything at all about the specialty you intend to practice, as that is learned during the residency and fellowship. Basically, the medical certification system wastes eight of the most productive years of a young person's life before they are allowed to work...

If corruption is the pursuit of money and power for personal gain by political means, then it is a mistake to see corruption as a deviation from some imagined ideal political system. Corruption IS the political process, as it is the only activity which politics incentivizes is the pursuit of political authority and rent seeking behaviors. There is no non-corrupt, non-arbitrary rational method to allocate stolen loot outside of the market price system. The intention of political actors is...

I went for a walk today. During my walk, I took just under 600 raw photos. It used my most of my camera battery, but only 8GB, or 1/4th of my memory card. It should take me under 1 hour to review and edit the photos. I will probably share 1 to 3 of the photos I took. Can you imagine how this would have worked in the old days? It would be impossible for all but an elite few professionals, with their own labs and a team of assistants.

Social network survey #2 regarding Intellectual Property - "like" if you agree: 1: The need for property rights arises from the possibility of conflict over scarce resources. Non-scare resources such as ideas not scare, since sharing an idea does not take it away from any other holder of that idea. Treating ideas as property by granting intellectual monopolies creates scarcity where it had not existed before. "Intellectual property" is a redistribution of the rights of tangible property o...

Quick survey of my social network: A tax is an involuntary, coercive confiscation of property, and therefore is theft and a violation of property rights. All forms of taxation should be abolished entirely, immediately, and permanently. Services currently paid by taxation should be instead be funded by the voluntary consent of individual consumers. "Like" if you agree.

The FAA requires that China submit to TSA regulations for it to allow planes from China to land in the USA. So when we left China, the *asked* us "are you carrying any bottles of water?" None of that nonsense of remove clothes, laptops, shoes, etc. When we got to the USA, we had to go through security again. The conveyor belt dropped Sarah's Vaio laptop and cracked the case. The moral of the story: buy Apple laptops if you fly in the USA.

I have a have a stock of laptop and old desktop memory, so if you want free/cheap (I have 1, 2, 4, 8 GB of DDR1,2,3 SIMM and DIMM) upgrade for your laptop or really old computer and live in San Antonio, Austin, or Dallas, please comment within 12 hours and I will bring it with me.

I was mobbed by old ladies in the store today (as usual). They kept asking me if Sophie is really three months old, as she is very advanced for her age. My Chinese is crap, but I understood when they asked 吃奶妈妈 ("Does she eat mom's milk?") Few women breastfeed in China, especially among those who can afford Western formula, but it seems some still recognize its advantages.

I remember watching a news program on TBN, a Christian broadcasting network. If I remember correctly, the format was that the news anchors would present some story from world or national news. Then Jerry Falwell, a famous televangelist would give his opinion on it. At the time, I thought it must be a dream job -- basically, he got paid to rant about whatever he wanted every night, while other people did all the research work and (supposedly) factual reporting. Whatever the topic, he alway...

Advice to photographers and videographers: Unless you are taking photos for legal evidence, or to hand them off for processing to someone else, you are an artist, and should treat your work accordingly. Even if your goal is only to document an event, to take a photo, you must choose the subject, time, and composition of every shot. That means you are choosing the message you wish to convey, regardless of how the viewer may interpret it. Don't shirk your responsibility as artist by dumping...

I went for a walk in Lujiazui today on my way home....

Re. my earlier post on restriction of copiers in Soviet Russia: "Senator Leland Yee wants 3d printers to be regulated, licensed, and the owners background checked" http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/05/08/sen-leland-yee-proposes-regulations-on-3-d-printers-after-gun-test/

I had a technical issue I could not figure out. Normally I use Google to find either product documentation or people with similar issues. When the direct approach failed, so I tried the brute-force method: keep restating the problem in different ways. Some searches provided me with additional keywords to try. After about 20-30 searches, I found someone a close enough description of the issue, and the solution.

"Observe the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man." - Ayn Rand

FYI: I'll be in the USA - May 29 to June 12.

"The task of weaning various people and groups from the national nipple will not be easy. The sound of whines, bawls, screams and invective will fill the air as the agony of withdrawal pangs finds voice." --Linda Bowles